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
You will find by reading that second chapter that God tried to palm off
on Adam a beast as his helpmeet. Everybody talks about the Bible and
nobody reads it; that is the reason it is so generally believed. I am
probably the only man in the United States who has read the Bible
through this year. I have wasted that time, but I had a purpose in
view. Just read it, and you will find, about the twenty-third verse,
that God caused all the animals to walk before Adam in order that he
might name them. And the animals came like a menagerie into town, and
as Adam looked at all the crawlers, jumpers and creepers, this God
stood by to see what he would call them. After this procession passed,
it was pathetically remarked, "Yet was there not found any helpmeet for
Adam." Adam didn't see anything that he could fancy. And I am glad he
didn't. If he had, there would not have been a free-thinker in this
world; we should have all died orthodox. And finding Adam was so
particular, God had to make him a helpmeet, and having used up the
nothing, he was compelled to take part of the man to make the woman
with, and he took from the man a rib. How did he get it? And then
imagine a God with a bone in his hand, and about to start a woman,
trying to make up his mind whether to make a blonde or a brunette.
Right here it is only proper that I should warn you of the consequences
of laughing at any story in the Bible. When you come to die, your
laughing at this story will be a thorn in your pillow. As you look
back upon the record of your life, no matter how many men you have
wrecked and ruined, and no matter how many women you have deceived and
deserted--all that may be forgiven you but if you recollect that you
have laughed at God's book you will see through the shadows of death,
the leering looks of fiends and the forked tongues of devils. Let me
show you how it will be. For instance it is the day of judgment. When
the man is called up by the recording secretary, or whoever does the
cross-examining, he says to his soul "Where are you from?" "I am from
the world." "Yes sir. What kind of a man were you?" "Well, I don't
like to talk about myself." "But you have to. What kind of a man were
you?" "Well, I was a good fellow; I loved my wife, I loved my children.
My home was my heaven; my fire-side was my paradise, and to sit there
and see the lights and shadows falling on the faces of those I love,
that to me was a perpetual joy. I never gave one of them a solitary
moment of pain. I don't owe a dollar in the world and I left enough to
pay my funeral expenses and keep the wolf of want from the door of the
house I loved. That is the kind of a man I am." "Did you belong to any
church?" "I did not. They were too narrow for me. They were always
expecting to be happy simply because somebody else was to be damned."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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