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
much heat as it would take to burn a lump of solid coal three times as
big as the globe. And yet we find in that book that the sun was not
only stopped, but turned back ten degrees, simply to convince a
gentleman that he was not going to die of a boil. They will say I will
be damned if I do not believe that, and I tell them I will if I do.
Then he gives us the history of astronomy, and he gives it to us in
five words: "He made the stars also." He came very near forgetting the
stars. Do you believe that the man who wrote that knew that there are
stars as much larger than this earth as this earth is larger than the
apple which Adam and Eve are said to have eaten. Do you believe that
he knew that this world is but a speck in the shining, glittering
universe of existence? I would gather from that that he made the stars
after he got the world done. The telescope, in reading the infinite
leaves of the heavens, has ascertained that light travels at the rate
of 192,000 miles per second, and it would require millions of years to
come from some of the stars to this earth. Yet the beams of those
stars mingle in our atmosphere, so that if those distant orbs were
fashioned when this world began, we must have been whirling in space
not six thousand, but many millions of years. Do you believe the man
who wrote that as a history of astronomy really knew that this world
was but a speck compared with millions of sparkling orbs? I do not.
He then proceeds to tell us that God made fish and cattle, and that man
and woman were created male and female. The first account stops at the
second verse of the second chapter. You see, the Bible originally was
not divided into chapters; the first Bible that was ever divided into
chapters in our language was made in the year of grace 1550. The Bible
was originally written in the Hebrew language, and the Hebrew language
at that time had no vowels in writing. It was written with consonants,
and without being divided into chapters or into verses, and there was
no system of punctuation whatever. After you go home tonight write an
English sentence or two with only consonants close together, and you
will find that it will take twice as much inspiration to read it as it
did to write it. When the Bible was divided into verses and chapters,
the divisions were not always correct, and so the division between the
first and second chapter of Genesis is not in the right place. The
second account of the creation commences at the third verse and it
differs from the first in two essential points. In the first account
man is the last made; in the second man is made before the beasts. In
the first account, man is made "male and female"; in the second only a
male is made, and there is no intention of making a woman whatever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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