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
Day after day there are mournful processions of men and women, patriots
and mothers, girls whose only crime is that the word Liberty burst into
flower between their pure and loving lips, driven like beasts across
the melancholy wastes of Siberian snow. These men, these women, these
daughters, go to exile and to slavery, to a land where hope is satisfied
with death. Does it seem possible to you that an "Infinite Father" sees
all this and sits as silent as a god of stone?
And yet, according to your Presbyterian creed, according to your
inspired book, according to your Christ, there is another procession, in
which are the noblest and the best, in which you will find the wondrous
spirits of this world, the lovers of the human race, the teachers of
their fellow-men, the greatest soldiers that ever battled for the right;
and this procession of countless millions, in which you will find the
most generous and the most loving of the sons and daughters of men, is
moving on to the Siberia of God, the land of eternal exile, where agony
becomes immortal.
How can you, how can any man with brain or heart, believe this infinite
lie?
Is there not room for a better, for a higher philosophy? After all, is
it not possible that we may find that everything has been necessarily
produced, that all religions and superstitions, all mistakes and all
crimes, were simply necessities? Is it not possible that out of this
perception may come not only love and pity for others, but absolute
justification for the individual? May we not find that every soul
has, like Mazeppa, been lashed to the wild horse of passion, or like
Prometheus to the rocks of fate?
You ask me to take the "sober second thought." I beg of you to take the
first, and if you do, you will throw away the Presbyterian creed; you
will instantly perceive that he who commits the "smallest sin" no
more deserves eternal pain than he who does the smallest virtuous deed
deserves eternal bliss; you will become convinced that an infinite God
who creates billions of men knowing that they will suffer through all
the countless years is an infinite demon; you will be satisfied that
the Bible, with its philosophy and its folly, with its goodness and its
cruelty, is but the work of man, and that the supernatural does not and
cannot exist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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