The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 07 (of 12): Dresden Edition—DiscussionsIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 07 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Discussions
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
I have an almost infinite admiration for Voltaire; and when I hear that
name pronounced, I think of a plume floating over a mailed knight--I
think of a man that rode to the beleaguered City of Catholicism and
demanded a surrender--I think of a great man who thrust the dagger of
assassination into your Mother Church, and from that wound she never
will recover.
One word more. This gentleman says that children are destructive--that
the first thing they do is to destroy their bibs. The gentleman, I
should think from his talk, has preserved his!
They talk about blasphemy. What is blasphemy? Let us be honest with each
other. Whoever lives upon the unpaid labor of others is a blasphemer.
Whoever slanders, maligns, and betrays is a blasphemer. Whoever denies
to others the rights that he claims for himself is a blasphemer.
Who is a worshiper? One who makes a happy home--one who fills the
lives of wife and children with sunlight--one who has a heart where
the flowers of kindness burst into blossom and fill the air with
perfume--the man who sits beside his wife, prematurely old and wasted,
and holds her thin hands in his and kisses them as passionately and
loves her as truly and as rapturously as when she was a bride--he is a
worshiper--that is worship.
And the gentleman brought forward as a reason why we should not have
free speech, that only a few years ago some of the best men in the
world, if you said a word in favor of liberty, would shoot you down.
What an argument was that! They were not good men. They were
the whippers of women and the stealers of babes--robbers of the
trundlebed--assassins of human liberty. They knew no better, but I do
not propose to follow the example of a barbarian because he was honestly
a barbarian.
So much for debauching his family by telling them that his precepts
are false. If he has taught them as he has taught us to-night, he has
debauched their minds. I would be honest at the cradle. I would not
tell a child anything as a certainty that I did not know. I would be
absolutely honest.
But he says that thought is absolutely free--nobody can control thought.
Let me tell him: Superstition is the jailer of the mind. You can so
stuff a child with superstition that its poor little brain is a bastile
and its poor little soul a convict. Fear is the jailer of the mind, and
superstition is the assassin of liberty.
So when anybody goes into his family and tells these great and shining
truths, instead of debauching his children they will kill the snakes
that crawl in their cradles. Let us be honest and free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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