The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 06 (of 12): Dresden Edition—DiscussionsIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 06 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Discussions
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
I agree with you that the world is a mystery, not only, but that
everything in nature is equally mysterious, and that there is no way of
escape from the mystery of life and death. To me, the crystallization of
the snow is as mysterious as the constellations. But when you endeavor
to explain the mystery of the universe by the mystery of God, you do not
even exchange mysteries--you simply make one more.
Nothing can be mysterious enough to become an explanation.
The mystery of man cannot be explained by the mystery of God. That
mystery still asks for explanation. The mind is so that it cannot grasp
the idea of an infinite personality. That is beyond the circumference.
This being so, it is impossible that man can be convinced by any
evidence of the existence of that which he cannot in any measure
comprehend. Such evidence would be equally incomprehensible with the
incomprehensible fact sought to be established by it, and the intellect
of man can grasp neither the one nor the other.
You admit that the God of Nature--that is to say, your God--is as
inflexible as nature itself. Why should man worship the inflexible? Why
should he kneel to the unchangeable? You say that your God "does not
bend to human thought any more than to human will," and that "the more
we study him, the more we find that he is not what we imagined him to
be." So that, after all, the only thing you are really certain of in
relation to your God is, that he is not what you think he is. Is it
not almost absurd to insist that such a state of mind is necessary to
salvation, or that it is a moral restraint, or that it is the foundation
of social order?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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