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
Let me ask you how it came to pass that an ignorant driver of camels,
a man without family, without wealth, became master of hundreds of
millions of human beings? How is it that he conquered and overran more
than half of the Christian world? How is it that on a thousand fields
the banner of the cross went down in blood, while that of the crescent
floated in triumph? How do you account for the fact that the flag of
this impostor floats to-day above the sepulchre of Christ? Was this a
miracle? Was Mohammed inspired? How do you account for Confucius, whose
name is known wherever the sky bends? Was he inspired--this man who
for many centuries has stood first, and who has been acknowledged
the superior of all men by hundreds and thousands of millions of
his fellow-men? How do you account for Buddha,--in many respects the
greatest religious teacher this world has ever known,--the broadest,
the most intellectual of them all; he who was great enough, hundreds of
years before Christ was born, to declare the universal brotherhood of
man, great enough to say that intelligence is the only lever capable of
raising mankind? How do you account for him, who has had more followers
than any other? Are you willing to say that all success is divine? How
do you account for Shakespeare, born of parents who could neither read
nor write, held in the lap of ignorance and love, nursed at the breast
of poverty--how do you account for him, by far the greatest of the human
race, the wings of whose imagination still fill the horizon of human
thought; Shakespeare, who was perfectly acquainted with the human heart,
knew all depths of sorrow, all heights of joy, and in whose mind were
the fruit of all thought, of all experience, and a prophecy of all to
be; Shakespeare, the wisdom and beauty and depth of whose words increase
with the intelligence and civilization of mankind? How do you account
for this miracle? Do you believe that any founder of any religion could
have written "Lear" or "Hamlet"? Did Greece produce a man who could
by any possibility have been the author of "Troilus and Cressida"? Was
there among all the countless millions of almighty Rome an intellect
that could have written the tragedy of "Julius Cæsar"? Is not the play
of "Antony and Cleopatra" as Egyptian as the Nile? How do you account
for this man, within whose veins there seemed to be the blood of every
race, and in whose brain there were the poetry and philosophy of a
world?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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