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
That is what they believe, and he is mistaken; and I want to tell Dr.
Kyder today, if there is a God, and He wrote the Old Testament, there
is a Hell. The God that wrote the Old Testament will have a Hell. And
I want to tell Dr. Ryder another thing, that the Bible teaches an
eternity of punishment. I want to tell him that the Bible upholds the
doctrine of Hell. I want to tell Him that if there is no Hell,
somebody ought to have said so, and Jesus Christ should not have said:
"I will at the last day say: 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'" If there was
not such a place, Christ would not have said: "Depart from me, ye
cursed, and these shall go hence into everlasting fire." And if you,
Dr. Ryder, are depending for salvation on the God that wrote the Old
Testament, you will inevitably be eternally damned.
There is no hope for you. It is just as bad to deny Hell as it is to
deny Heaven. It is just as much blasphemy to deny the devil as to deny
God, according to the orthodox creed. He admits that the Jews were
polygamists, but, he says, how was it they finally quit it? I can tell
you--the soil was so poor they couldn't afford it. Prof. Swing says
the Bible is a poem, Dr. Ryder says it is a picture. The Garden of
Eden is pictorial; a pictorial snake and a pictorial woman, I suppose,
and a pictorial man, and maybe it was a pictorial sin. And only a
pictorial atonement.
INGERSOLL'S REPLY TO RABBI BIEN
Then there is another gentleman, and he a rabbi, a Rabbi Bien, or Bean,
or whatever his name is, and he comes to the defense of the Great
Law-giver. There was another rabbi who attacked me in Cincinnati, and
I couldn't help but think of the old saying that a man got off when he
said the tallest man he ever knew, his name was Short. And the fattest
man he ever saw, his name was Lean. And it is only necessary for me to
add that this rabbi in Cincinnati was Wise.
The rabbi here, I will not answer him, and I will tell you why. Because
he has taken himself outside of all the limits of a gentleman; because
he has taken it upon himself to traduce American women in language the
beastliest I ever read; and any man who says that the American women
are not just as good women as any God can make and pick his mud today,
is an unappreciative barbarian.
I will let him alone because he denounced all the men in this country,
all the members of Congress, all the members of the Senate, and all the
judges upon the Bench; in his lecture he denounced them as thieves and
robbers. That won't do. I want to remind him that in this country the
Jews were first admitted to the privileges of citizens; that in this
country they were first given all their rights, and I am as much in
favor of their having their rights as I am in favor of having my own.
But when a rabbi so far forgets himself as to traduce the women and men
of this country, I pronounce him a vulgar falsifier, and let him alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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