Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
They tell me that I ought not to attack the bible--that I have
misrepresented it, and among other things that I have said that,
according to the bible, the world was made of nothing. Well, what was
it made of? They say God created everything. Consequently, there must
have been nothing when He commenced. If he didn't make it of nothing,
what did he make it of? Where there was, nothing, He made something.
Yes; out of what? I don't know. This doctor of divinity, and I should
think such a divinity would need a doctor, says that God made the
universe out of His omnipotence. Why not out of His omniscience, or
His omnipresence? Omnipotence is not a raw material. It is the
something to work raw material with. Omnipotence is simply all
powerful, and what good would strength do with nothing? The weakest
man ever born could lift as much nothing as God. And he could do as
much with it after he got it lifted. And yet a doctor of divinity tells
me that this world was made of omnipotence. And right here let me say
I find even in the mind of the clergymen the seeds of infidelity. He
is trying to explain things. That is a bad symptom. The greater the
miracle the greater the reward for believing it. God cannot afford to
reward a man for believing anything reasonable. Why, even the scribes
and Pharisees would believe a reasonable thing. Do you suppose God is
to crown you with eternal joy and give you a musical instrument for
believing something where the evidence is clear? No, sir. The larger
the miracle the more grace. And let me advise the ministers of Chicago
and of this country, never to explain a miracle; it cannot be
explained. If you succeed in explaining it, the miracle is gone. If
you fail you are gone. My advice to the clergy is, use assertion; just
say "it is so," and the larger the miracle the greater the glory reaped
by the eternal. And yet this man is trying to explain, pretending that
He had some raw material of some kind on hand. And then I objected to
the fact that He didn't make the sun until the fourth day, and that,
consequently, the grass could not have grown--could not have thrown its
mantle of green over the shoulders of the hill--and that the trees
would not blossom and cast their shade upon the sod without some
sunshine; and what does this man say? Why, that the rocks, when they
crystallized, emitted light, even enough to raise a crop by. And he
says "vegetation might have depended on the glare of volcanoes in the
moon." What do you think would be the fate of agriculture depending on
the "glare of volcanoes in the moon?" Then he says "the aurora
borealis." Why, you couldn't raise cucumbers by the aurora borealis.
And he says "liquid rivers of molten granite." I would like to have a
farm on that stream. He guesses everything of the kind except
lightning-bugs and foxfire. Now, think of that explanation in the last
half of the nineteenth century by a minister. The truth is, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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