Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - LatestIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
and love to every one--we do not know; we can not 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 Sysiphus sat down upon the
stone that he had been heaving up 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 Danaidae left off trying to fill their sieves 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. Some day Eurydice will reach
the blessed light, and at some time there will fade from the memory of
men the superstition of religion.
Ingersoll's Lecture on "Blasphemy"
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, "That 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 spurting 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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