The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 02 (of 12): Dresden Edition—LecturesIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 02 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Lectures
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
Besides, God may have changed his mind on many things; he has on
slavery, and polygamy at least, according to the church; and yet his
church now wants to go and destroy polygamy in Utah with the sword. Why
do they not send missionaries there with copies of the Old Testament?
By reading the lives of Abraham and Isaac, and Lot, and a few other
patriarchs who ought to have been in the penitentiary, maybe they can
soften their hearts.
More Miracles.
There is another miracle I do not believe,--the resurrection. I want to
speak about it as we would about any ordinary transaction. In the first
place, I do not believe that any miracle was ever performed, and if
there was, you cannot prove it. Why? Because it is altogether more
reasonable to believe that the people were mistaken about it than that
it happened. And why? Because, according to human experience, we know
that people will not always tell the truth, and we never saw a miracle
ourselves, and we must be governed by our experience; and if we go by
our experience, we must say that the miracle never happened--that the
witnesses were mistaken.
A man comes into Jerusalem, and the first thing he does is to cure the
blind. He lets the light of day visit the night of blindness. The eyes
are opened, and the world is again pictured upon the brain. Another man
is clothed with leprosy. He touches him and the disease falls from
him, and he stands pure, and clean, and whole. Another man is deformed,
wrinkled, and bent. He touches him, and throws around him again the
garment of youth. A man is in his grave, and he says, "Come forth!"
And the man walks in life, feeling his heart throb and his blood going
joyously through his veins. They say that actually happened. I do not
know.
There is one wonderful thing about the dead people that were raised--we
do not hear of them any more. What became of them? If there was a man
in this city who had been raised from the dead, I would go to see him
to-night. I would say, "Where were you when you got the notice to come
back? What kind of a country is it? What kind of opening there for a
young man? How did you like it? Did you meet there the friends you had
lost? Is there a world without death, without pain, without a tear? Is
there a land without a grave, and where good-bye is never heard?" Nobody
ever paid the slightest attention to the dead who had been raised. They
did not even excite interest when they died the second time. Nobody
said, "Why, that man is not afraid. He has been there once. He has
walked through the valley of the shadow." Not a word. They pass quietly
away.
I do not believe these miracles. There is something wrong somewhere
about that business. I may suffer eternal punishment for all this, but I
cannot, I do not, believe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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