 Ingersoll's Lecture on Orthodoxy Part 2. Of course I have not time to recount the enemies of the Church. Every fact is an enemy of superstition. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever happened testified against the supernatural. I have only spoken of a few of the blows that shattered the shield and shivered the lands of superstition. Here is another one, the doctrine of Charles Darwin. This century will be called Darwin's century, one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin there on the one hand, and the name of every theologian that ever lived there on the other hand, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of the species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of Orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature, that the Bible is a book written by ignorance, by the instigation of fear. Think of the man who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no parson to ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin, and the more ignorant he was, the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and the contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and the doctrine of evolution is now an accepted fact. His light has broken in on some of the early clergy, and the greatest man who today occupies the pulpit is a believer in the evolution theory of Charles Darwin, and that is Henry Ward Beecher, a man of more brains than the entire clergy of that entire church put together, and yet we are told in this little creed that Orthodox religion is about to conquer the world. It will be driven to the wilds of Africa, it must go to some savage country, it has lost its hold upon civilization, and I tell you it is unfortunate to have a religion that cannot be accepted by the intellect of a nation. It is unfortunate to have a religion against which every good and noble heart protests. Let us have a good one or none. Oh, my pity has been excited by seeing these ministers endeavor to warp and twist the passages of scripture to fit some demonstration in science. These pious evasions, these solemn pretenses. When they are caught in one way they give a different meaning to the words and say the world was not made in seven days, they say good wilds, epochs, and in this same confession here of faith and creeds they believe the Lord's day is holy every seventh day. Suppose you live near the North Pole where the day is three months long. Then which day will you keep? Suppose you could get to the North Pole, you could prevent Sunday from ever overtake you, you could walk around the other way faster than the world could revolve. How would you keep Sunday then? Suppose we ever invent anything that can go one thousand miles an hour. We can just chase Sunday clear around the globe. Is there anything that can be more perfectly absurd than that a space of time can be holy? You might as well talk about a pious vacuum, these pious evasions. I heard the other night of an old man, he was not very well educated you know, and he got into the notion that he must have reading of the Bible and have family worship, and there was a bad boy in the family, a pretty smart boy, and they were reading the Bible by course, and in the fifteenth chapter of Corinthians is this passage. Behold brethren, I show you a mystery. We shall not all die, but we shall be changed. And this boy rubbed out the sea in changed. So next night the old man got on his specs and got down his Bible and said, Behold brethren, I show you a mystery. We shall not all die, but we shall be hanged. The old lady said, Father I don't think it reads that way. He says, Who is reading this? Yes, Mother, it says be hanged, and more than that I see the sense of it. Pride is the besetting sin of the human heart, and if there is anything calculated to take the pride out of a man, it is hanging. I keep going back to this book, I keep going back to the miracles, to the prophecies, to the fables, and people ask me if I take away the Bible, what are we going to do? How can we get along without the revelation that no one understands? What are we going to do if we have no Bible to quarrel about? What are we to do without hell? What are we going to do with our enemies? What are we going to do with the people we love but don't like? They tell me that there never would have been any civilization if it had not been for this Bible. The Jews had a Bible, the Romans had not, which had the greater and the grander government, let us be honest, which of those nations produced the greatest poets, the greatest soldiers, the greatest orators, the greatest statesmen, the greatest sculptors. Rome had no Bible, God cared nothing for the Roman Empire, He let the men come up by chance. His time was taken up by the Jewish people, and yet Rome conquered the world and even conquered God's chosen people, the people that had the Bible were defeated by the people who had not. How was it possible for Lucretius to get along without the Bible? How did the great and glorious of that empire, and what shall we say of Greece? No Bible. Compare Athens with Jerusalem. From Athens comes the beauty and intellectual grace of the world. Compare the mythology of Greece with the mythology of Judea. One covering the earth with beauty and the other filling heaven with hatred and injustice. The Hindus had no Bible, they had been forsaken by the Creator, and yet they became the greatest metaphysicians of the world. Egypt had no Bible. Compare even Egypt with Judea. What are we to do without the Bible? What became of the Jews who had the Bible? Their temple was destroyed and their city was taken, and as I said before, they never found real prosperity until their God deserted them. Do without the Bible. Now I come again to the New Testament. There are a few things in there. I give you my word. I cannot believe. I cannot. I cannot believe in the miraculous origin of Jesus Christ. I believe he was the son of Joseph and Mary, that Joseph and Mary had been duly and legally married, that he was a legitimate offspring of that marriage, and nobody ever believed the contrary until he had been dead a hundred and fifty years. Neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke ever dreamed that he was of divine origin. He did not say to either Matthew, Mark, or Luke, or to anyone in their hearing that he was the son of God, or that he was miraculously conceived. He did not say it. The angel Gabriel, who they say brought the news, never wrote a word upon the subject. His mother never wrote a word upon the subject. His father never wrote a word upon the subject. We are lacking in the matter of witnesses. I would not believe it now. I cannot believe it then. I would not believe people I know, much less would I believe people I don't know. I say that at that time Matthew, Mark, and Luke believed that he was the son of Joseph and Mary. And why? They say he descended from the blood of David, and in order to show that he was of the blood of David they gave the genealogy of Joseph. And if Joseph was not his father, why not give the genealogy of Pontius Pilate or Herod? Could they, by giving the genealogy of Joseph, show that he was of the blood of David, if Joseph was in no way related to David? And yet that is the position into which the Christian world is now driven. It says the son of Joseph and then interpolated the words as was supposed. Why then do they give a supposed genealogy? It will not do, and that is a thing that cannot in any way by any human testimony be established. And if it is important for us to know that he was the son of God, I say then that it devolves upon God to give us evidence. Let him write it across the face of the heavens in every language of mankind. If it is necessary for us to believe it, let it grow on every leaf next year. No man should be damned for not believing unless the evidence is overwhelming. And he ought not to be made to depend upon say so. He should have it directly for himself. A man says God told him so and so, and he tells me, and I haven't any one's word but that, fellows. He may have been deceived. If God has a message for me, he ought to tell it to me, and not somebody that has been dead four thousand or five thousand years, and in another language. God may have changed his mind on many things. He has on slavery, at least, and polygamy, and yet his church now wants to go out here and destroy polygamy in Utah with a sword. Why don't they send missionaries there with copies of the Old Testament? By reading the lives of Abraham and Isaac and Lot, and a few other fellows that ought to have been in the penitentiary, they can soften their hearts. Now there is another miracle I do not believe. I want to speak about it as we would about any ordinary transaction in the world. In the first place, I do not believe that any miracle was ever performed, and if there was, you can't prove it. Why? Because it is altogether more reasonable that the people lied about it than that it happened. And why? Because according to human experience, we know that people will not always tell the truth, and we never saw a miracle. And we have got to be governed by our experience, and if we go by our experience, it is in favor that the thing never happened, that the man is mistaken. Now I want you to remember it. Here is a man that comes into Jerusalem, and the first thing he does, he cures the blind. He lets the light of day visit the darkness of blindness. The eyes are opened, and the whole world is again pictured upon the brain. Another man is clothed with leprosy. He touches him, and the disease falls from him, and he stands pure and clean and whole. Another man is deformed, wrinkled, bent. He touches him, and throws upon him again the garment of youth. A man is in his grave, and he says, come forth, and he again walks in life, feeling his heart throb and beat, and his blood going joyously through his veins. They say that happened. I don't know. There is one wonderful thing about the dead people that were raised. We don't hear of them any more. What became of them? Why, if there was a man in this town that had been raised from the dead, I would go to see him tonight, and I would say, where were you when you got to notice to come back? What kind of country is it? What kind of opening there for a young man? How did you like it? But nobody ever paid the slightest attention to them there. They didn't even excite interest when they died the second time. Nobody said why. That man isn't afraid. He has been there. Not a word. They pass away quietly. You see, I don't believe it. There is something wrong somewhere about that business, and then there is another trouble in my mind. Now you know I may suffer eternal punishment for all this. Here is a man that does all these things, and thereupon they crucify him. Now then let us be honest. Suppose a man came into Chicago, and he should meet a funeral procession, and he should say who was dead. And they should say the son of a widow, her only support, and he should say to the procession, Halt! Until the undertaker take out that coffin, unscrew that lid. Young man, I say unto thee, Arise! And the latter should step from the coffin, and in one moment after hold his mother in his arms. Suppose he should go to your cemetery, and should find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell upon a new-made grave, and he should say to her, Who lies buried here? And she should reply, My husband. And he should say, I say unto thee, O grave, Give up thy dead, and the husband should rise, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife's, and the little children with their arms around his neck. Suppose that it is so. Do you think that the people of Chicago would kill him? Do you think anyone would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that every one who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him, and implore him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death? Let me tell you tonight, if there shall ever appear on this earth the master, the monarch of death, all human knees will touch the earth. He will not be crucified. He will not be touched. All the living who fear death, all the living who have lost a loved one will stand and cling to him. And yet we are told that this worker of miracles, this worker of wonders, this man who could clothe the dead in the throbbing flesh of life, was crucified by the Jewish people. It was never dreamed that he did a miracle until one hundred years after he was dead. There is another miracle I do not believe. I cannot believe it, and that is the resurrection. And why, if it was the fact, if the dead got out of the grave, why did he not show himself to his enemies? Why did he not again visit Pontius Pilate? Why did he not call upon Caiaphas the High Priest? Why did he not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Why did he not again enter the temple and dispute with the doctors? Why didn't he say to the multitude, Here are the wounds in my feet, and in my hands, and in my side? I am the one you endeavored to kill, but death is my slave. Why didn't he? Simply because the thing never happened. I cannot believe it. But recollect, it makes no difference with its teachings. They are exactly as good whether he wrought miracles or not. Twice two are four, that needs no miracle. Twice two are five, a miracle would not help that. Christ's teaching are worth their effect upon the human race. It makes no difference about miracle or about wonder, but you must remember in that day everyone believed in miracles. Nobody had any standing as a teacher, a philosopher, a governor or a king, about whom there was not a something miraculous. The earth was then covered with the sons and daughters of the gods and goddesses, that was believed in Greece, in Rome, in Egypt, in Hindustan, everybody, nearly, believed in such things. Then there is another miracle that I cannot believe in, and that is the ascension, the bodily ascension of Jesus Christ. Where was he going? Since the telescope has been pointed at the stars, where was he going? The new Jerusalem is not there. The abode of the gods is not there. Where was he going? Which way did he go? That depends upon the time of day that he left. If he left in the night, he went exactly the opposite way from what he would in the day. Who saw this miracle? They say, the disciples, let us see what they say about it. Matthew did not think it was worth mentioning. He doesn't speak of it at all. On the contrary, he says that the last words of Christ were, Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. That is what he says. Mark, he saw it. So then, after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven and sat on the right hand of God. That is all he has to say about the most wonderful thing that ever blessed human vision about a miracle great enough to have stuffed credulity to bursting. And yet we have one poor little meager verse. So then, after he had quit speaking, he was caught up and sat on the right hand of God. How does he know it was on the right hand? Did he see him after he had sat down? Luke says, and it came to pass while he blessed them, he was parted from them and was carried up into heaven. But John does not mention it. He gives as his last words this address to Peter, follow thou me. Of course he did not say that as he ascended. In the Acts we have another account. A conversation is given not spoken of in any of the others. And we find there two men clad in white apparel who said, men of Galilee, why stand ye here gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus that was taken up into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go up into heaven. Matthew didn't see that. Mark forgot it. Luke didn't think it was worth mentioning. And John didn't believe it. Yet upon that evidence we are led to believe at the most miraculous of all miracles actually occurred. I cannot believe it. I may be mistaken, but the church is now trying to parry and when they come to the little miracles of the New Testament all they say is, Christ didn't cast out devils, these men had fits. He cured fits. Then I read in another place about the fits talking. Christ held a dialogue with the fits and the fits told him his name and the fits at that time were in a crazy man and the fits made a contract that they would go out of the man provided they would be permitted to go into swine. How can fits that attack a man take up a residence in swine? The church must not give up the devil. He is the right bower. No devil, no hell, no hell, no preacher, no fire, no insurance. I read another miracle that this devil took Christ and put him on the pinnacle of a temple. Was that fits too? Why is not that theological world honest? Why do they not come up and admit what they know the book means? They have not the courage. Now the next doctrine is the absolute necessity of belief. That depends upon this. Can a man believe as he wants to? Can you? Can anybody? Does belief depend at all upon the evidence? I think it does somewhat in some cases. How is it that when a jury is sworn to try a case, hearing all the evidence, hearing both sides, hearing the charge of the judge, hearing the law and upon their oats are equally divided, six for the plaintiff and six for the defendant. It is because evidence does not have the same effect upon all people. Why? Our brains are not alike, not the same shape. We have not the same intelligence or the same experience, the same sense. And yet I am held accountable for my belief. I must believe in the trinity. Three times one is one. Once one is three. And my soul is to be eternally damned for failing to guess an arithmetical conundrum. And that is the poison part of Christianity. That salvation depends upon belief. That is the poison part. And until that dogma is discarded, religion will be nothing but superstition. No man can control his belief. If I hear certain evidence, I will believe a certain thing. If I fail to hear it, I may never believe it. If it is adapted to my mind, I may accept it. If it is not, I reject it. And what am I to go by? My brain. That is the only light I have from nature. And if there be a God, it is the only torch that this God has given me by which to find my way through the darkness and the night called life. I do not depend upon hearsay for that. I do not have to take the word of any other man nor get upon my knees before a book. Here, in the temple of the mind, I go and consult the God. That is to say, my reason. And the oracle speaks to me and I obey the oracle. What should I obey, another man's oracle? Shall I take another man's word and not what he thinks but what God said to him? I would not know a God if I should see one. I have said before and I say again the brain thinks in spite of me and I am not responsible for my thought. No more can I control the beating of my heart, the expansion and contraction of my lungs for a moment. No more can I stop the blood that flows through the rivers of the veins and yet I am held responsible for my belief. Then why does not the God give me the evidence? They say he has, in what? In an inspired book. But I do not understand it as they do. Must I be false to my understanding? They say when you come to die you will be sorry you did not. Will I be sorry when I come to die that I did not live a hypocrite? Will I be sorry I did not say I was a Christian when I was not? Will the fact that I was honest put a thorn in the pillow of death? God cannot forgive me for that. They say when he was in Jerusalem he forgave his murderers. Now he won't forgive an honest man for differing with him on the subject of the Trinity. They say that God says to me forgive your enemies. I say all right, I do. But he says I will damn mine. God should be consistent. If he wants me to forgive my enemies he should forgive his. I am asked to forgive enemies who can hurt me. God is only asked to forgive enemies who cannot hurt him. He certainly ought to be as generous as he asks us to be. And I want no God to forgive me unless I do forgive others. All I ask if that be true is that this God should live according to his own doctrine. If I am to forgive my enemies I ask him to forgive his. That is justice, that is right. Here are these millions today who say we ought to be saved by belief, by faith. But what are we to believe? In St. Louis last Saturday I read an interview with a Christian minister, one who is now holding a revival. They call him the boy preacher, a name that he has borne for fifty or sixty years. The question was whether in these revivals when they were trying to rescue souls from eternal torture they would allow colored people to occupy seats with white people. And that revivalist preaching the unsearchable richness of Christ said he would not allow the colored people to sit with white people. They must go to the back of the church. The same people go and sit right next to them in heaven, swap harps with them, and yet this man believing as he says he does that if he did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ he would eternally perish was not willing that the colored man should sit by a white man while he heard the gospel of everlasting peace. He was not willing that the colored man should get into the lifeboat of Christ although those white men might be totally depraved and if they had just as done them according to his doctrine would be eternally damned. And yet he has the impudence to put on airs although he ought to be eternally damned and go and sit by the colored man. His doctrine of religion, the color line, has not my respect. I believe in the religion of humanity and it is far better to love our fellow men than to love God because we can help them and we cannot help him. You had better do what you can than to be always pretending to do what you cannot. Now I come to the last part of the Bible, this creed and that is eternal punishment and I have concluded and I have said I will never deliver a lecture that I do not give the full benefit of its name. That part of the congregational creed would disgrace the lowest savage that crouches and crawls in the jungles of Africa. The man who now in the 19th century preaches the doctrine of eternal punishment, the doctrine of eternal hell has lived in vain. Think of that doctrine, the eternity of punishment. Why I find in that same creed that Christ is finally going to triumph in this world and establish his kingdom, but if their doctrine is true, he will never triumph in the other world. He will have billions in hell forever. In this world we never will be perfectly civilized as long as a gallows casts its shadow upon the earth. As long as there is a penitentiary behind the walls of which a human being is immured, we are not a civilized people. We will never be perfectly civilized until we do away with crime and criminals. And yet according to this Christian religion, God is to have an eternal penitentiary. He is to be an everlasting jailer, an everlasting turnkey, a warden of an infinite dungeon. And he is going to keep prisoners there not for the purpose of reforming them because they are never going to get any better, only getting worse, just for the purpose of punishing them. And what for? For something they did in this world, born in ignorance, educated it may be in poverty, and yet responsible through the countless ages of eternity. No man can think of a greater horror. No man can think of a greater absurdity. For the growth of that doctrine, ignorance was soil and fear was rain. That doctrine came from the fanged mouths of wild beasts. And yet it is the glad tidings of great joy. God so loved the world. He is going to damn most everybody. And if this Christian religion be true, some of the greatest and grandest and best who ever lived upon this earth are suffering its torment tonight. It don't appear to make much difference, however, with this church. They go right on enjoying themselves as well as ever. If their doctrine is true, Benjamin Franklin, one of the wisest and best of men who did so much to give us here a free government is suffering the tyranny of God tonight while he endeavored to establish freedom among men. If the churches were honest, their preachers would tell their hearts, Benjamin Franklin is in hell. And we warn any and all the youth not to imitate Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence with itself evident truths has been damned these many years. That is what all the ministers ought to have the courage to say. Talk as you believe, stand by your creed or change it. I want to impress it upon your mind because the thing I wish to do in this world is to put out the fires of hell. I want to keep at it just as long as there is one little coal red in the bottomless pit. As long as the ashes are warm, I shall denounce this infamous doctrine. I want you to know that the men who founded this great and glorious government are there. The most of the men who fought in the Revolutionary War and rested from the clutch of Great Britain this continent have been rewarded by the eternal wrath of God. The old Revolutionary soldiers are in hell by the thousands, yet the preachers have the courage to say so. The men who fought in 1812 and gave to the United States the freedom of the seas, nearly all of them have been damned since 1815, all that were killed. The greatest of heroes, they are there. The greatest of poets, the greatest scientists, the men who have made the world beautiful and grand, they are all I tell you among the damned if this creed is true. Humboldt who shed light and who added to the intellectual wealth of mankind, Goethe and Schiller and Lessing, who almost created the German language, all gone, all suffering the wrath of God tonight. And every time an angel thinks of one of those men, he gives his harp an extra twang. Laplace, who read the heaven like an open book, he is there. Robert burns the poet of human love, he is there because he wrote the prayer of holy willy, because he fastened upon the cross the Crespeterian creed and made a lingering crucifixion. And yet that man added to the tenderness of the human heart. Dickens who put a shield of pity before the flesh of childhood, God is getting even with him. Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he had a thousand opportunities to hear Methodist clergymen scorned the means of grace, and the Holy Ghost is delighted that he is in hell tonight. Longfellow refined hundreds and thousands of homes, but he did not believe in the miraculous origin of the Saviour. No, sir, he doubted the report of Gabriel. He loved his fellow men. He did what he could to free the slaves. He did what he could to make mankind happy. But God was just waiting for him. He had his constable right there. Thomas Paine, the author of the Rights of Man, offering his life in both hemispheres for the freedom of the human race and one of the founders of the Republic, is often seemed to me that if we could get God's attention long enough to point him to the American flag, he would let him out. Comte, the author of the positive philosophy who loved his fellow men to that degree that he made of humanity a God, who wrote his great work in poverty with his face covered with tears, they are getting their revenge on him now. Voltaire, who abolished torture in France, who did more for human liberty than any other man living or dead, who was the assassin of superstition and whose dagger still rusts in the heart of Catholicism, all the priests who have been translated have their happiness increased by looking at Voltaire. Glorious country where the principal occupation is watching the miseries of the lost. Giordani Bruno, Benedict Spinoza, Diderot, the encyclopedist who endeavored to get all knowledge in a small compass so that he could put the peasant on an equality with the prince intellectually, the man who wished to sow all over the world the seeds of knowledge who loved to labor for mankind while the priests wanted to burn, he did all he could to put out the fire. He has been lost long, long ago. His cry for water has become so common that his voice is now recognized through all the realms of hell. And they say to one another, that is Diderot. David Hume, the philosopher, he is there with the rest. Beethoven, the Shakespeare of music, he has been lost. And Wagner, the master of melody, who has made the heir of this world rich forever, he is there. And they have better music in hell than in heaven. Shelley, whose soul, like his own skylock, was a winged joy. He has been damned for many, many years. And Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race who has done more to elevate mankind than all the priests who ever lived and died, he is there. And all the founders of inquisitions, the builders of dungeons, the makers of chains, the inventors of instruments of torture, terrors and burners and branders of human flesh, stealers of babes and sellers of husbands and wives and children, the drawers of the sword of persecution. And they who kept the horizon lured with a faggot's flame for a thousand years, they are in heaven tonight. Well, I wish heaven joy of such company. And that is the doctrine with which we are polluting the souls of children. That is the doctrine that puts a fiend by their dying bed and a prophecy of hell over every cradle. That is glad tidings of great joy. Only a little while ago when the great flood came upon the Ohio sent by him who was ruling in the world and paying particular attention to the affairs of nations. Just in the gray of the morning they saw a house floating down and on its top a human being. And a few men went out to the rescue in a little boat and they found there a mother, a woman, and they wanted to rescue her and she said, no, I am going to stay where I am. I have three dead babes in this house. Think of a love so limitless, stronger and deeper than despair and death. And yet the Christian religion says that if that woman did not happen to believe in their creed, God would send that mother's soul to eternal fire. If there is another world and if in heaven they wear hats when such a woman climbs up the opposite bank of the Jordan Christ should lift his to her. That is the trouble I had with this Christian religion. It's infinite heartlessness. And I cannot tell them too often that during our last war Christians who knew that if they were shot they would go right to heaven, went and hired wicked men to take their places, perfectly willing the men should go to hell provided they could stay at home. You see, they are not honest in it. They do not believe it. Or as the people say, they don't sense it. They have not religion enough to conceive what it is they believe and what a terrific falsehood they assert. And I beg of everyone who hears me tonight. I beg, I implore, I beseech you, never give another dollar to build a church in which that lie is preached. Never give another sin to send a missionary with his mouth stuffed with that falsehood to a foreign land. Why they say that he them will go to heaven anyway if you let them alone? What is the use of sending them to hell by enlightening them? Let them alone. The idea of going and telling a man a thing that if he does not believe he will be damned when the chances are 10 to one that he won't believe it, don't tell him. And as quick as he gets to the other world and finds it necessary to believe, he will say yes, give him a chance. My objection to the Christian religion is that it destroys human love and tells you and me that the love of your dear ones is not necessary in this world to make a heaven in the next. No matter about your wife, your children, your brother, your sister, no matter about all the affections of the human heart, when you get there you will be alone with the angels. I don't know whether I would like the angels. I don't know whether the angels would like me. I would rather stand by the folks who have loved me and whom I know and I can conceive of no heaven without the love of this earth. That is to trouble with the Christian religion. Leave your father, leave your mother, leave your wife, leave your children, leave everything and follow Jesus Christ. I will not. I will stay with the folks. I will not sacrifice on the altar of a selfish fear all the grandest and noblest promptings of my heart. You do away with human love and what are we without it? What would we be in another world and what would we be here without it? Can anyone conceive of music without human love? Human love builds every home. Human love is the author of all the beauty in this world. Love paints every picture and chisels every statue. Love, I tell you, builds every fireside. What would heaven be without love? And yet that is what we are promised. A heaven with your wife lost, your mother lost some of your children gone and you expect to be made happy by falling in with some angel. Such a religion is demoralizing. And how are you to get there on the efforts of another? You are to be perpetually a heavenly pauper and you will have to admit through all eternity that you never would have got here if you hadn't got frightened. I am here, you will say. I have these wings. I have this musical instrument because I was scared. What a glorious world and then think of it. No reformation in the next world, not the slightest. If you die in Arkansas, that is the end of you. At the end you will be told that being born in Arkansas, you had a fair chance. Think of telling a boy in the next world who lived and died in Delaware that he had a fair show. Can anything be more infamous? All on inequality, the rich and the poor, those with parents loving them, those with every opportunity for education, on inequality with the poor, the abject and the ignorant. And the little ray called life, this little moment with a shadow and a tear, this little space between your mother's arms and the grave that balances an entire eternity. And God can do nothing for you when you get there. A little Methodist preacher can do no more for the soul here than its creator can when you get there. The soul goes to heaven where there is nothing but good society, no bad examples. And they are all there, father, son, and holy ghost. And yet they can do nothing for that poor unfortunate except to damn him. Is there any sense in that? Why should this be a period of probation? It says in the Bible, I believe, now is the accepted time. When does that mean? That means whenever the passage is pronounced. Now is the accepted time. It will be the same tomorrow, won't it? And just as appropriate then as today, and if appropriate at any time, appropriate through all eternity. What I say is this, there is no world, there can be no world in which every human being will not have an opportunity of doing right. That is my objection to this Christian religion and if the love of earth is not the love of heaven, if those who love us here are to be separated there, then I want eternal sleep. Give me a good cold grave rather than the furnace of Jehovah's wrath. Gabriel, don't blow, let me alone. If when the grave bursts, I am not to meet faces that have been my sunshine in this life. Let me sleep on. Rather than that the doctrine of endless punishment should be tried, I would like to see the fabric of our civilization crumble and fall to unmeaning chaos and to formless dust where oblivion broods and where even memory forgets. I would rather a Samson of some unprisoned force released by chance should so wreck and strain the mighty world that man in stress and strain of want and fear should shudderingly crawl back to savage and barbaric night. I would rather that every planet would in its orbit wheel a barren star rather than that the Christian religion should be true. I think it is better to love your children and to love God a thousand times better because you can help them. And I am inclined to think that God can get along without you. I believe in the religion of the family. I believe that the roof tree is sacred from the smallest fiber held in the soft moist clasp of the earth to the little blossom on the topmost bow that gives its fragrance to the happy air. The family where virtue dwells with love is like a lily with a heart of fire the fairest flower in all this world. And I tell you God cannot afford to damn a man in the next world who has made a happy family in this. God cannot afford to cast over the battlements of heaven the man who has built a happy home here. God cannot afford to be unpitying to a human heart capable of pity. God cannot clothe with fire the man who has clothed the naked here. And God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep the company of such a God. They tell me the next terrible thing I do is to take away the hope of immortality. I do not, I would not, I could not. Immortality was first dreamed of by human love and yet the church is going to take human love out of immortality. We love it, therefore we wish to love. A loved one dies and we wish to meet again. And from the affection of the human heart grew the great oak of the hope of immortality. And around that oak has climbed the poisonous vine superstition. Theologians, pretenders, soothsayers, Parsons, priests, popes, bishops have taken all that hope and they have had the impudence to stand by the grave and prophesy a future of pain. They have erected their toll gates on the highway to the other world and have collected money from the poor people on the way and they have collected it from their fear. The church did not give us the idea of immortality. The Bible did not give us the idea of immortality. Let me tell you now that the Old Testament tells you how you lost immortality. It does not say another word about another world from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse in Malachi. There is not in the Old Testament one burial service. No man in the Old Testament stands by the bed and says, I will meet them again. Not one word. From the top of Sinai came no hope of another world. And when we get to the New Testament, what we find there, have thy heart counted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection of the dead as though some would be counted unworthy to obtain the resurrection of the dead. And in another place seek for honor, glory, immortality. If you have got it, why seek for it? And in another place, God who alone hath immortality. And yet they tell us that we get our ideas of immortality from the Bible. I deny it. If Christ was in fact God, why didn't he plainly say that there was another life? Why didn't he tell us something about it? Why didn't he turn the tear-stained hope of immortality into the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he go dumbly to his death and leave the world in darkness and in doubt? Why? Because he was a man and didn't know. I would not destroy the smallest star of human hope, but I deny that we got our idea of immortality from the Bible. It existed long before Moses existed. We find it symbolized through all Egypt, through all India, wherever man has lived his religion has made another world in which to meet the lost. It is not born of the Bible. The idea of immortality, like the great sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the rocks and sands of fate and time. It was not born of the Bible. It was born of the human heart, and it will continue to eb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. We do not know. We do not prophesy a life of pain. We leave the dead with nature, the mother of us all, under a seven-hued bow of hope. Under the seven-hued arch let the dead sleep. Ah, but you take the consolation of religion. What consolation has religion for the widow of the unbeliever? The widow of a good, brave, kind man who lies dead. What can the Orthodox ministers say to relieve the bursting heart of that woman? What can the Orthodox ministers say to relieve the aching hearts of the little orphans as they kneel by the grave of that father if that father didn't happen to be an Orthodox Christian? What consolation have they? I find that when a Christian loses a friend, the tears spring from his eyes as quickly as from the eyes of others. Their tears are as bitter as ours. Why? The echo of the promises spoken 1,800 years ago is so low and the sound of the clods upon the coffin so loud. The promises are so far away and the dead are so near. That is the reason. And they find no consolation there. I say honestly, we do not know. We cannot say, we cannot say whether death is a wall or a door, the beginning or end of a day, the spreading of pinions to soar or the folding forever of wings, whether it is the rising or the setting of sun or an endless life that brings rapture and love to everyone. We do not know, we cannot say. There is an old fable of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice had been captured and taken to the infernal regions. And Orpheus went after her, taking with him his harp and playing as he went. And when he came to the infernal regions, he began to play and Sisyphus sat down upon the stone that he had been heaving upon the side of the mountain so many years and which continually rolled back upon him. Ixion paused upon his wheel of fire. Tantalus ceased in his vain efforts for water. The daughters of the Deniedae left off trying to fill their siths with water. Pluto smiled and for the first time in the history of hell, the cheeks of the furies were wet with tears. Monsters relented and they said, Eurydice may go with you, but you must not look back. So he again threaded the caverns, playing as he went. And as he again reached the light, he failed to hear the footsteps of Eurydice. And he looked back and in a moment she was gone. This old fable gives to us the idea of the perpetual effort to rescue truth from the churches of monsters. Some time Orpheus will not look back. Someday Eurydice will reach the blessed light. And at some time there will fade from the memory of men the superstition of religion. End of Ingersoll's Lecture on Orthodoxy. This is a LibriVox recording recorded for you by Ted Delorm in Fort Mill, South Carolina over Christmas weekend, 2008. Ingersoll's Lecture on Blasphemy. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Ingersoll's Lecture on Blasphemy from the book, Lectures of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, Volume 2, recorded by Ted Delorm. Ladies and gentlemen, there is an old story of a missionary trying to convert an Indian. The Indian made a little circle in the sand and said, this is what the Indian knows. Then he made another circle a little larger and said, that is what missionary knows. But outside there the Indian knows just as much as missionary. I am going to talk mostly outside that circle tonight. First, what is the origin of the crime known as Blasphemy? It is the belief in a God who is cruel, revengeful, quick-tempered, and capricious. A God who punishes the innocent for the guilty. A God who listens with delight to the shrieks of the tortured and gazes enraptured on their spirting blood. You must hold this belief before you can believe in the doctrine of Blasphemy. You must believe that this God loves ceremonies, that this God knows certain men to whom he has told all his will. It then follows that if this God loves ceremonies and has certain men to teach his will and perform these ceremonies, these men must have a place to live in. This place was called a temple and it was sacred. And the pots and pans and kettles and all in it were sacred too. No one but the priests must touch them. Then the God wrote a book in which he told his covenants to men and gave this book to priests to interpret. While it was sacrilege to touch with the hands, the pots and pans of the temple, it was Blasphemy to doubt or question anything in the book. And then the right to think was gone and the right to use the brain that God had given was taken away and religion was entrenched behind that citadel called Blasphemy. God was a kind of juggler. He did not wish man to be impudent or curious about how he did things. You must sit in audience and watch the tricks and ask no questions. In front of every fact, he has hung the impenetrable curtain of Blasphemy. Now then all the little reason that poor man had is useless to say anything against the priest was Blasphemy and to say anything against God was Blasphemy. To ask a question was Blasphemy. Finally we sank to the level of fetishism. We began to worship inanimate things. If you will read your Bible, you will find that the Jews had a sacred box. In it were the rod of Aaron and a piece of manor and the tables of stone. To touch this box was a crime. You remember that one time when a careless Jew thought the box was going to tip, he held it. God killed him. What a warning to baggage smashes of the present day. We find also that God concocted a hair oil and threatened death to anyone who imitated it. And we see that he also made a certain perfume and it was death to make anything that smelt like it. It seems to me this is carrying protection too far. It always has been Blasphemy to say I do not know whether God exists or not. In all Catholic countries, it is Blasphemy to doubt the Bible, to doubt the sacredness of the relics. It always has been Blasphemy to laugh at a priest, to ask questions, to investigate the Trinity. In a world of superstition, reason is Blasphemy. In a world of ignorance, facts are Blasphemy. In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime. And in a world of lies, truth is Blasphemy. Who are the real Blasphemers? Webster offers the definition, Blasphemy is an insult offered to God by attributing to him a nature and qualities differing from his real nature and qualities and dishonoring him. A very good definition if you only know what his nature and qualities are. But that is not revealed for studying him through the medium of the Bible. We find him illimitably contradictory. He commands us not to work on the Sabbath day because it is holy. Yet God works himself on the Sabbath day. The sun, moon, and stars swing round in their orbits and all the creation attributed to this God goes on as on other days. He says honor thy father and mother and yet this God in the person of Christ offered honors and glory and happiness a hundredfold to any who would desert their father and mother for him. Thou shalt not kill. Yet God killed the firstborn of Egypt and he commanded Joshua to kill all his enemies not sparing old or young, man, woman, or child even an unborn child. Thou shalt not commit adultery, he says and yet this God gave the wives of defeated enemies to his soldiers of Joshua's army. Then again he says thou shalt not steal. By this command he protected the inanimate property and the cattle of one man against the hand of another and yet this God who said thou shalt not steal established human slavery. The products of industry were not to be interfered with but the producer might be stolen as often as possible. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor and yet the God who said this said also I have sent lying spirits unto Ahab. The only commandment he really kept was thou shalt have none other gods but me. Is it blasphemous to describe this God as malicious? You know that laughter is a good index of the character of a man. You like and rejoice with the man whose laugh is free and joyous and full of goodwill. You fear and dislike him of the sneering laugh. How does God laugh? He says I will laugh at their calamity and mock at their misfortune speaking of some who have sinned. Think of the malice and malignity of that in an infinite God when speaking of the sufferings he is going to impose upon his children. You know that it is said of a Roman emperor that he wrote laws very finely and posted them so high on the walls that no one could read them and then he punished the people who disobeyed the laws. That is the acme of tyranny to provide a punishment for breach of laws the existence of which were unknown. Now we all know that there is sin against the holy ghost which will not be forgiven in this world nor in the world to come. Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven to the lunatic asylum by the thought that they had committed this unpardonable sin. Every educated minister knows that that part of the Bible is an interpolation but they all preach it. What that sin against the holy ghost is is not specified. I say oh but my good God tell me what this sin is and he answers maybe now asking is the crime. Keep quiet. So I keep quiet and go about tortured with the fear that I have committed that sin. Is it blasphemy to describe God as needing assistance from the legislature? Calling for the aid of a mob to enforce his will here? Compare that God with the man even with Henry Berg see what Mr. Berg has done to awaken pity in our people and call sympathy to the rescue of suffering animals. And yet our God was a torturer of dumb brutes. Is it blasphemy to say that our God sent the famine and dried the mother's breast from her infant's withered lips? Is it blasphemy to say that he is the author of the pestilence that he ordered some of his children to consume others with fire and sword? Is it blasphemy to believe what we read in the 109th Psalm? If these things are not blasphemy then there is no blasphemy. If there be a God I desire him to write in the book of judgment opposite my name that I denied these lies for him. Let us take another step. Let us examine the Presbyterian confession of faith. If it be possible to commit blasphemy then I contend that the Presbyterian creed is most blasphemous. For according to that God is a cruel, unrelenting, revengeful, malignant and utterly unreasonable tyrant. I propose now to pay a little attention to the creed. First it confesses that there is such a thing as a light of nature. It is sufficient to make man inexcusable but not sufficient for salvation. Just light enough to lead man to hell. Now imagine a man who will put a false light on a hilltop to lure a ship to destruction. What would we say of that man? What can we say of a God who gives this false light of nature which, if its lessons are followed, results in hell? That is the Presbyterian God. I don't like him. Now it occurred to God that the light of nature was somewhat weak and he thought he might light another burner. Therefore he made his book and gave it to his servants, the priests, that they might give it to men. It was to be accepted not on the authority of Moses or any other writer, but because it was the Word of God. How do you know it's the Word of God? You're not to take the Word of Moses or David or Jeremiah or Isaiah or any other man because the authenticity of their work has nothing to do with the matter. This creed expressly lets them out. How are you to know that it is God's Word? Because it is God's Word. Why is it God's Word? What proof have we that it is God's Word? Because it is God's Word. Now then I find that the next thing in this wonderful confession of faith of the Presbyterians is a decree of predestination. I am pleased to assure you that it is not necessary to understand this. You have only to believe it. You see that by the decree of God some men and angels are predestined to heaven and others to eternal hell, and you observe that their number is so certain and definite that it can neither be changed nor altered. You are asked to believe that billions of years ago this God knew the names of all the men and women whom he was going to save, had them in his book, that being the only thing except himself that then existed. He had chosen the names by the aid of the secret council. The reason they called it secret was because they knew all about it. In making his choice God was not at all bigoted. He did not choose John Smith because he foresaw that Smith was to be a Presbyterian and was to possess a loving nature, was to be honest and true and noble in all his ways, doing good himself and encouraging others in the same. Oh no, he was quite as likely to pick Brown in spite of the fact that he knew long before that Brown would be a wicked wretch. You see he was just as apt to send Smith to the devil and take Brown to heaven and all for his glory. This God also blinds and hardens. He is a peculiar God. If sinners persevere, he will blind and harden and give them over at last to their own wickedness instead of trying to reclaim and save them. Now we come to the comforting doctrine of the total depravity of man and this leads us to consider how we came that way. Can any person read the first chapters of Genesis and believe them unless his logic was assassinated in the cradle? We read that our first parents were placed in a pleasant garden, that they were given the full run of the place and only forbidden to meddle with the orchard, that they were tempted as God knew they were to be tempted, that they fell as God knew they would fall and that for this fall which he knew would happen before he made them, he fixed the curse of original sin upon them to be continued to all their children. Why didn't he stop right there? Why didn't he kill Adam and Eve and make another pair who didn't like apples? Then when he brought his flood, why did he rescue eight people if their descendants were to be so totally depraved and wicked? Why didn't he have his flood first and then drown the devil? That would have solved the problem and he could have then tried experiments unmolested. The Presbyterian Confession says this corruption was in all men. It was born with them. It lived through their life and after death survived in the children. Well, can't man help himself? No, I'll show you. God's got him. Listen to this. So a natural man is not only dead in sin and unable to accomplish salvation, but he is also incapable of preparing himself therefore. Absolutely incapable of taking a trick. He is saved, if at all, completely by the mercy of God. If that's the case, then why doesn't he convert us all? Oh, he doesn't. He wishes to sin the most of us to hell, to show his justice. Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerate, so also are all persons incapable of unbelief. That includes insane persons and idiots because an idiot is incapable of unbelief. Idiots are the only fellows who've got the dead wood on God. Then according to this, the man who has lived according to the light of nature, doing the best he knew how to make this earth happy, will be damned by God because he never heard of his son. Whose fault is it that an infinite God does not advertise? Something wrong about that. I am inclined to think that the Presbyterian church is wrong. I find here how utterly unpardonable sin is. There is no sin so small, but it is punished with hell. And away you go, straight to the deepest burning pit, unless your heart has been purified by this confession of faith, unless this snake has crawled in there and made itself a nest. Why should we help religion? I would like people to ask themselves that question. An infinite God, by practicing a reasonable economy, can get along without assistance. Loudly this confession proclaims that salvation comes from Christ alone. What then becomes of the savage who having never known the name of Christ has lived according to the light of nature, kind and heroic and generous and possessed of and cultivating all the natural virtues? He goes to hell. God you see loves us. If he had not loved us, what would he have done? The light of nature then shows that God is good and therefore to be feared on account of his goodness, to be served and honored without ceasing. And yet this creed says that on the last day God will damn anyone who has walked according to this light. It's blasphemy to walk by the light of nature. The next great doctrine is on the preservation of the saints. Now there are peculiarities about saints. They are saints without their own knowledge or free will. They may even be down on saints, but it's no good. God has got a rolling hitch on them and they have to come into the kingdom sooner or later. It all depends on whether they have been elected or not. God could have made me a saint just as easy as not, but he passed me by. Now you know the Presbyterians say I trample on holy things. They believe in hell and I come and say there is no hell. I hurt their hearts, they say, and they add that I am going to hell myself. I thank them for that, but now let's see what these tender Presbyterians say of other churches. Here it is. This confession of faith calls the pope of Rome anti-Christ and a son of perdition. Now there are 40 Roman Catholics to one Presbyterian on this earth. Do not the Presbyterians rather trample on the things that are holy to the Roman Catholics and do they respect their feelings? But the Presbyterians have a pope themselves composed of the Presbyters and preachers. This confession attributes to them the keys of heaven and hell and the power to forgive sins. Therefore these men must be infallible for God would never be so foolish as to entrust fallible men with the keys of heaven and hell. I care nothing for their keys, nor for any world these keys would open or lock. I prefer the country. We are told by this faith that at the last day all the men and women and children who have ever lived on the earth will appear in the self-same bodies they have had when on earth. Everyone who knows anything knows the constant exchange which is going on between the vegetable and the animal kingdom. The millions of atoms which compose one of our bodies have all come from animals and vegetables and they in their turn drew them from animals and vegetables which preceded them. The same atoms which are now in our bodies have previously been in the bodies of our ancestors. The negro from Central Africa has many times been mahogany and the mahogany has many times been negro. A missionary goes to the cannibal islands and a cannibal eats him and dies. The atoms which compose the missionary's body now compose in great part the cannibal's body. To whom will these atoms belong on the morning of the resurrection? How did the devil who had always lived in heaven among the best society ever happened to become bad if a man surrounded by angels could become bad? Why cannot a man surrounded by devils become good? Here's the last Presbyterian joy. At the day of judgment the righteous shall be caught up to heaven and shall stand at the right hand of Christ and share with him in judging the wicked. Then the Presbyterian husband may have the ineffable pleasure of judging his wife and condemning her to eternal hell. And the boy will say to his mother echoing the command of God, depart thou accursed into everlasting torment. Here will come a man who has not believed in God. He was a soldier who took up arms to free the slaves and who rotted to death in Andersonville prison rather than accept the offer of his captors to fight against freedom. He loved his wife and his children and his home and his native country and all mankind and did all the good he knew. God will say to the Presbyterians, what shall we do to this man? And they will answer, throw him into hell. Last night there was a fire in Philadelphia and at a window 50 feet above the ground, Mr. King stood amid flame and smoke and pressed his children to his breast one after the other, kissed them and threw them to the rescuers with a prayer. That was man. At the last day God takes his children with a curse and hurls them into eternal fire. That's your God, as the Presbyterians describe him. Do you believe that God, if there is one, will ever damn me for thinking him better than he is? If this creed be true, God is the insane keeper of a madhouse. We have in this city a clergyman who contends that this creed gives a correct picture of God and furthermore says that God has the right to do with us as he pleases because he made us. If I could change this lamp into a human being that would not give me the right to torture him. And if I did torture him and he cried out, why torturous thou me? And I replied, because I made you. He would be right in replying, you made me therefore you are responsible for my happiness. No God has a right to add to the sum of human misery. And yet this minister believes an honest thought blasphemy. No doubt he is perfectly honest, otherwise he would have too much intellectual pride to take the position he does. He says that the Bible offers the only restraint to the savage passions of man in lands where there has been no Bible. There have been mild and beneficent philosophers like Buddha and Confucius. Is it possible that the Bible is the only restraint and yet the nations among whom these men lived have been as moral as we? In Brooklyn and New York, you have the Bible, yet do you find that the restraint is a great success? Is there a city on the globe which lacks more in certain directions than some in Christendom or even the United States? What are the natural virtues of man? Honesty, hospitality, mercy in the hour of victory, generosity, do we not find these virtues among some savages? Do we find them among all Christians? I am also told by these gentlemen that the time will come when the infidel will be silenced by society. While that time came long ago, society gave the hymnlock to Socrates. Society in Jerusalem cried out for Barabbas and crucified Jesus. In every Christian country, society has endeavored to crush the infidel. Blasphemy is a padlock which hypocrisy tries to put on the lips of all honest men. At one time Christianity succeeded in silencing the infidel and then came the dark ages when all rule was ecclesiastical, when the air was filled with devils and spooks, when birth was a misfortune, life a prolonged misery of fear and torment and death a horrible nightmare. They crushed the infidels Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus wherever a ray of light appeared in the ecclesiastical darkness. But I want to tell this minister tonight and all others like him that that day is past. All the churches in the United States cannot even crush me. The day for that has gone, never to return. If they think they can crush free thought in this country, let them try it. What must this minister think of you and the citizens of this republic when he says, take the fear of hell out of men's hearts and a majority of them will become ungovernably wicked? Oh, think of an angel in heaven having to allow that he was scared there. This minister calls for my arrest. He thinks his God needs help and would like to see the police crush the infidel. I would advise Mr. Talmadge to furnish his God with a rattle so that when he is in danger again he can summon the police immediately. I'll tell you what is blasphemy. It is blasphemy to live on the fruits of other men's labor, to prevent the growth of the human mind, to persecute for opinions' sake, to abuse your wife and children, to increase in any manner the sum of human misery. I'll tell you what is sacred. Our bodies are sacred. Our rights are sacred. Justice and liberty are sacred. I'll tell you what is the true Bible. It is the sum of all actual knowledge of man and every man who discovers a new fact adds a new verse to this Bible. It is different from the other Bible because that is the sum of all that its writers and readers do not know. End of Ingersoll's lecture on blasphemy, recorded for you by Ted DeLorm in March 2009 in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Ingersoll's lecture entitled Some Reasons Why. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Ingersoll's lecture entitled Some Reasons Why, section eight of the book, lectures of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, volume two. Ladies and gentlemen, the history of the world shows that religion has made enemies instead of friends. That one word, religion, paints the horizon of the past with every form of agony and torture. And when one pronounces the name of religion, we think of 1500 years of persecution, of 6000 years of hatred, slander, and vituperation. Strange but true that those who have loved God most have loved men least. Strange that in countries where there has been the most religion, there has been the most agony. And that is one reason why I am opposed to what is known as religion. By religion I mean the duties that men are supposed to owe to God. By religion I mean not what man owes to man, but what we owe to some invisible, infinite, and supreme being. The question arises, can any relation exist between finite man and infinite being? An infinite being is absolutely conditional. An infinite being cannot walk, cannot receive, and a finite being cannot give to the infinite. Can I increase his happiness or decrease his misery? Does he need my strength or my life? What can I do for him? I say nothing. For one, I do not believe there is any God who gives rain or sunshine for praying. For one, I do not believe there is any being who helps man simply because he kneels. I may be mistaken, but that is my doctrine, that the finite cannot by any possibility help the infinite, or the infinite be indebted to the finite. That the finite cannot by any possibility assist a being who is all in all. What can we do? We can help man. We can help clothe the naked, feed the hungry. We can help break the chains of the slave. We can help weave a garment of joy that will finally cover this world. That is all that man can do. Wherever he has endeavored to do more, he has simply increased the misery of his fellows. I can find out nothing of these things myself by my unaided reasoning. If there is an infinite God and I have not reason enough to comprehend his universe, whose fault is it? I am told that we have the inspired will of God. I do not know exactly what they mean by inspired. Not two sects agree on that word. Some tell me that every great work is inspired, that Shakespeare is inspired. I would be less apt to dispute that than a similar remark about any other book on this earth. If Jehovah had wanted to have a book written, the inspiration of which should not be disputed, he should have waited until Shakespeare lived. Whatever they mean by inspiration, they at least mean that it is true. If it is true, it does not need to be inspired. The truth will take care of itself. Nothing except a falsehood needs inspiration. What is inspiration? A man looks at the sea and the sea says something to him. Another man looks at the same sea and the sea tells another story to him. The sea cannot tell the same story to any two human beings. There is not a thing in nature from a pebble to a constellation that tells the same story to any two human beings. It depends upon the man's experience, his intellectual development and what cord of memory it touches. One looks upon the sea and is filled with grief. Another looks upon it and laughs. Last year, riding in the cars from Boston to Portsmouth, sat opposite me, a lady and gentleman. As we reached the latter place, the woman for the first time in her life caught a burst of the sea and she looked and said to her husband, isn't that beautiful? And he looked and said, I bet you can dig clams right there. Another illustration, a little while ago a gentleman was walking with another in South Carolina at Charleston, one who had been upon the other side. Said the northerner to the southerner, did you ever see such a night as this? Did you ever in your life see such a moon? Oh my God, said he, you ought to have seen that moon before the war. I simply say these things to convince you that everything in nature has a different story to tell every human being. So the Bible tells a different story to every man that reads it. History proves what I say. Why so many sects? Why so much persecution? Simply because two people couldn't understand it exactly alike. You may reply that God intended it should be so understood and that is the real revelation that God intended. For instance, I write a letter to Smith. I want to convey to him certain thoughts. If I am honest, I will use the words which will convey to him my thoughts, but not being infinite, I don't know exactly how Smith will understand my words. But if I were infinite, I would be bound to use the words that I know Smith would get my exact idea from. If God intended to make a revelation to me, he has to make it to me through my brain and my reasoning. He cannot make a revelation to another man for me. That other man will have God's word for it, but I will only have that man's word for it. As that man has been dead for several thousand years, and as I don't know what his reputation was for truth and veracity in the neighborhood in which he lived, I will wait for the Lord to speak again. Suppose when I read it, the revelation to me through the Bible is that it is not true and God knew that I would know that when I read it and knew if I did not say it, I would be dishonest. Is it possible that he would damn me for being honest and give me wings if I would play the hypocrite? The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it. Yet they tell me this book was written by the creator of every shining star. Now let us see. I want to be honest and candid. I have just as much at stake in the way of soul as any doctor of divinity that ever lived, and more than some I have met. According to this book, the first attempt at peopling this world was a failure. God had to destroy all but eight. He saved some of the same kind to start again, which I think was a mistake. After that, the people still getting worse, he selected from the wide world a few of the tribe of Abraham. He had no time to waste with everybody. He had no time to throw away on Egypt. It had at that time a vast and splendid civilization in which there were free schools, in which the one man married the one wife, where there were courts of law, where there were codes of laws. Neither could he give attention to India that had at that time a literature as splendid almost as ours, a language as perfect that had produced poets, philosophers, statesmen. He had no time to waste with them, but took a few of the tribe of Abraham and he did his best to civilize these people. He was their governor, their executive, their supreme court. He established a despotism and from Mount Sinai he proclaimed his laws. They didn't pay much attention to them. He wrote thousands of miracles to convince them that he was God. Isn't it perfectly wonderful that the priest of one religion never believes the miracles told by the priest of another? Is it possible that they know each other? I heard a story the other day. A gentleman was telling a very remarkable circumstance that happened to himself and all the listeners except one said, is it possible? Did you ever hear such a wonderful thing in all your life? They noticed that this one man didn't appear to take a vivid interest in the story. So one said to him, you don't express much astonishment at the story. No, says he. I am a liar myself. I find by reading this book that a worse government was never established than that established by Jehovah, that the Jews were the most unfortunate people who lived upon the globe. Let us compare this book in all civilized countries. It is not only admitted, but passionately asserted that slavery is an infamous crime, that a war of extermination is murder, that polygamy in slaves' woman degrades man and destroys home, that nothing is more infamous than the slaughter of decrepit men and helpless women and of prattling babes, that the captured maiden should not be given to her captors, that wives should not be stoned to death for differing in religion from their husbands. We know there was a time in the history of most nations when all these crimes were regarded as divine institutions. Nations entertaining these views today are called savage. And with the exception of the Fiji Islanders, some tribes in central Africa and a few citizens of Delaware, no human being can be found degraded enough to agree upon those subjects with Jehovah. Today, the fact that a nation has abolished and abandoned those things is the only evidence that it can offer to show that it is not still barbarous. But a believer in the inspiration of the Bible is compelled to say there was a time when slavery was right, when polygamy was the highest form of virtue, when wars of extermination were waged with the sword of mercy, and when the creator of the whole world commanded the soldier to sheath the dagger of murder in the dimpled breast of infancy. The believer of inspiration of the Bible is compelled to say there was a time when it was right for a husband to murder his wife because they differed upon subjects of religion. I deny that such a time ever was. If I knew the real God said it, I would still deny it. 4,000 years ago, if the Bible is true, God was in favor of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination and religious persecution. Now we are told the devil is in favor of all those things and God is opposed to them. In other words, the devil stands now where God stood 4,000 years ago. Yet they tell me God is just as good now as he was then, and the devil just as bad now as God was then. Other nations believed in slavery, polygamy and war and persecution without ever having received one ray of light from heaven. That shows that a special revelation is not necessary to teach a man to do wrong. Other nations did no worse without the Bible than the Jews did with it. Suppose the devil had inspired a book. In what respect would he have differed from God on the subject of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination and religious persecution? Suppose we knew that after God had finished his book, the devil had gotten possession of it and written a few passages to suit himself. Which passages, oh Christian, would you pick out now as having probably been written by the devil? Which of these two? Love thy neighbor as thy self or kill all the males among the little ones and kill every man, but all the women and girls keep alive for yourselves. Which of those two passages would they select as having been written by the devil? If God wrote the last, there is no need of a devil. Is there a Christian in the wide world who does not wish that God from the thunder and lightning of Sinai had said, you shall not enslave your fellow man? I am opposed to any man who is in favor of slavery. If revolution is needed at all, it is to prevent man in slaving his fellow man. But they said God did the best he could, that the Jews were so bad that he had to come up kind of slow. If he had told them suddenly they must not murder and steal, they would not have paid any respect to the 10 Commandments. Suppose you go to the cannibal islands to prevent the gentlemen there from eating missionaries and you've found they ate them raw. The first move is to induce them to cook them. After you get them to eat cooked missionaries, you will then, without them knowing it, occasionally slip in a little mutton. We will go on gradually decreasing missionaries and increasing mutton until finally the last will be so cultivated that they will prefer the sheep to the priest. I think the missionaries would object to that mode, of course. I know this was written by the Jews themselves. If they were to write it now it would be different. Today they are a civilized people. I do not wish it understood that a word I say tonight touches the slightest prejudice in any man's mind against the Jewish people. They are as good a people as live today, I will say right here they never had any luck until Jehovah abandoned them. Now we come to the New Testament. They tell me that it is better than the old. I say it is worse. The great objection to the Old Testament is that it is cruel, but in the Old Testament the revenge of God stopped with the portals of the tomb. He never threatened punishment after death. He never threatened one thing beyond the grave. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal punishment. Is the New Testament inspired? I have not time to give many reasons, but I will give some. In the first place they tell me the very fact that the witnesses disagree in minor matters show that they have not conspired to tell the same story. Good. And I say in every lawsuit where four or five witnesses testify or endeavor to testify to the same transaction, it is natural that they should differ on minor points. Why? Because no two occupy exactly the same position, no two see exactly alike, no two remember precisely the same and their disagreement is due to and accounted for by the imperfection of human nature and the fact that they did not all have an equal opportunity to know. But if you admit or say that the four witnesses were inspired by an infinite being who did see it all, then they should remember all the same because inspiration does not depend on memory. That brings me to another point. Why were there four gospels? What is the use of more than one correct account of anything? If you want to spread it, send copies, no human being has got the ingenuity to tell me why there were four gospels when one correct gospel would have been enough. Why should there have been four original multiplication tables? One is enough and if anybody has got any use for it, he can copy that one. The very fact that we have got four gospels shows that it is not an inspired book. The next point is that according to the New Testament, the salvation of the world depended upon the atonement. Only one of the books in the New Testament says anything about that and that is John. The church followed John and they ought to follow John because the church wrote that book called John. According to that, the whole world was to be damned on account of the sins of one man and that absurdity was the father and mother of another absurdity. That the whole world could be saved on account of the virtue of another man. I deny both propositions. No man can sin for me, no man can be virtuous for me. I must reap what I sow. But they say the law must be satisfied. What kind of a law is it that would demand punishment of the innocent? Just think of it, here is a man about to be hanged and another comes up and says that man has got a family and I have not, that man is in good health and I am not well and I will be hung in his place. And the governor says, all right, a murder has been committed and we've got to have a hanging, we don't care who. Under the mosaic dispensation there was no remission of sins without the shedding of blood. If a man committed a murder, he brought a pair of doves or a sheep to the priest and the priest laid his hands on the animal and the sins of the man were transferred to the animal. You see how that could be done easy enough. Then they killed the animal and sprinkled its blood on the altar. That let the man off. And why did God demand the sacrifice of a sheep? I will tell you because priests love mutton. To make the innocent suffer is the greatest crime. I don't wish to go to heaven on the virtues of somebody else. If I can't settle by the books and go, I don't wish to go. I don't want to feel as if I was there on sufferance that I was in the poor house of the universe supported by the town. They tell us Judas betrayed Christ. Well, if Christ had not been betrayed, no atonement would have been made and then every human soul would have been damned and heaven would have been for rent. Supposing that Judas knew the Christian system, then perhaps he thought that by betraying Christ he could get forgiven, not only for the sins that he had already committed but for the sin of betrayal. And if on the way to Calvary and later some brave heroic soul had rescued Christ from the mob, he would have made his own damnation sure. Ah, it won't do. There is no logic in that. They say God tried to civilize the Jews. If he had succeeded according to the Christian system, we all would have been damned because if the Jews had been civilized, they would not have crucified Christ. They would have believed in the freedom of speech and as a result the world would have been lost for 2,000 years. The Christian world has been trying to explain the atonement and they have always ended by failing to explain it. Now I come to the second objection which is that certain belief is necessary to salvation. I will believe according to the evidence. In my mind are certain scales which weigh everything and my integrity stands there and knows which side goes up and which side goes down. If I am an honest man, I will report the weights like an honest man. They say I must believe a certain thing or I will be eternally damned. They tell me that to believe is the safer way. I deny it. The safest thing you can do is be honest. No man when the shadows of the last hours were gathering around him ever wished that he had lived the life of a hypocrite. If I find it the day of judgment that I have been mistaken, I will say so like a man. If God tells me then that he is the author of the Old Testament, I will admit that he is worse than I thought he was and when he comes to pronounce sentence upon me, I will say to him, do unto others as you would that others should do unto you. I have a right to think. I cannot control my belief. My brain is my castle and if I don't defend it, my soul becomes a slave and a serf. If you throw away your reason, your soul is not worth saving. Salvation depends not upon belief but upon deed, upon kindness, upon justice, upon mercy. Your own deeds are your saviour and you can be saved in no other way. I am told in this Testament to love my enemies. I cannot, I will not. I don't hate enemies. I don't wish to injure enemies but I don't care about seeing them. I don't like them. I love my friends and the man who loves enemies and friends loves me. The doctrine of non-resistance is born of weakness. The man that first said it said it because it was the best he could do under the circumstances. While the church said, love your enemies, in her sacred vestments gleamed the daggers of assassination. With her cunning hand, she wore the purple for hypocrisy and placed the crown upon the brow of crime. For more than one thousand years, larceny held the scales of justice and hypocrisy wore the miter and the tiara of Christ was in fact God. He knew of the future. He knew what crimes and horrors would be committed in his name. He knew the fires of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs that brave men and women would languish in dungeons and darkness that the church would use instruments of torture that in his name his followers would trade in human flesh that cradles would be robbed and women's breasts unbaved for gold and yet he died with voiceless lips. If Christ was God, why did he not tell his disciples and through them the world, man shall not persecute his fellow man? Why didn't he say I am God? Why didn't he explain the doctrine of the Trinity? Why didn't he tell what manner of baptism was pleasing to him? Why didn't he say the Old Testament is true? Why didn't he write his Testament himself? Why did he leave his words to accident, to ignorance, to malice and to chance? Why didn't he say something positive, definite, satisfactory about another world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of immortality to the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he go dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and to doubt? Why? Because he was a man. Colonel Ingersoll read several extracts from the Bible, which he said originated with Zoroaster, Buddha, Cicero, Epictetus, Pythagoras, and other ancient writers. And he read extracts from various pagan writers, which he claimed compared favorably with the best things in the Bible. He continued, No God has a right to create a man who is to be eternally damned. Infinite wisdom has no right to make a failure, and a man who is to be eternally damned is not a conspicuous success. Infinite wisdom has no right to make an instrument that will not finally pay a dividend. No God has a right to add to the agony of this universe, and yet around the angels of immortality, Christianity has coiled this serpent of eternal pain. Upon love's breast the church has placed that asp, and yet people talk to me about the consolations of religion. A few days ago the bark tiger was found upon the wide sea 126 days from Liverpool, for nine days not a mouthful of food or a drop of water was to be had. There was on board the captain, mate, and eleven men, when they had been out a hundred and seventeen days they killed the captain's dog. Nine days more no food, no water, and Captain Kruger stood upon the deck in the presence of his starving crew. With revolver in his hand put it upon his temple and said, boys, this can't last much longer. I am willing to die to save the rest of you. The mate grasped the revolver from his hand and said, wait, and the next day upon the horizon of despair was the smoke of the ship which rescued them. Do you tell me tonight if Captain Kruger was not a Christian, and he had sent that ball crashing through his generous brain that there was an almighty waiting to clutch his naked soul that he might damn him for ever? It won't do. Ah, but they tell me you have no right to pick the bad things out of the Bible. I say an infinite God has no right to put bad things into his Bible. Does anybody believe if God was going to write a book now he would uphold slavery, that he would favor polygamy, that he would say kill the heathen stab, the women dash out the brains of the children? We have civilized him. We make our own God and we make him better day by day. Some honest people really believe that in some wonderful way we are indebted to Moses for geology, to Joshua for astronomy and military tactics, to Samson for weapons of war, to Daniel for holy curses, to Solomon for the art of cross examination, to Jonah for the science of navigation, to St. Paul for steamships and locomotives, to the four gospels for telegraphs and sewing machines, to the apocalypse for looms, sawmills and telephones, and that to the sermon on the mount we are indebted for mortars and crop guns. We are told that no nation has ever been civilized without a Bible. The Jews had one and yet they crucified a perfectly innocent man. They couldn't have done much worse without a Bible. God must have known 6,000 years ago that it was impossible to civilize people without a Bible just as well as they know it now. Why did he ever allow a nation to be without a Bible? Why didn't he give a few leaves to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Take from the Bible the miracles and I admit that the good passages are true. If they are true, they don't need to be inspired. Miracles are the children of mendacity. Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic sublime and eternal march of cause and effect. Reason must be the final arbiter. An inspired book cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. Is a man to be rewarded eternally for believing without evidence or against evidence? Do you tell me that the less brain a man has, the better chance he has for heaven? Think of a heaven filled with men who never thought. Better that all that is should cease to be. Better that God had never been. Better that all the springs and seeds of things should fall and wither in great nature's realm. Better that causes and effects should lose relation. Better that every life should change to breathless death and voiceless blank and every star to blind oblivion and move less not than that this religion should be true. The religion of the future is humanity. The religion of the future will say to every man, you have the right to think and investigate for yourself. Liberty is my religion, everything that is true, every good thought, every beautiful thing, every self-denying action, all these make my Bible. Every bubble, every star or passages in my Bible, a constellation is a chapter, every shining world is a part of it, you cannot interpolate it, you cannot change it, it is the same forever. My Bible is all that speaks to man, every violet, every blade of grass, every tree, every mountain crowned with snow, every star that shines, every throb of love, every honest act, all that is good and true combined make my Bible and upon that book I stand. End of Ingersoll's lecture, some reasons why. This is a LibriVox recording read for you by Ted DeLorm in Fort Mill, South Carolina on April 6, 2009.