Ingersoll why agnostic

They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few. To the question that retains its politically divisive power to this day—whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no.

In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword. To 19th-century freethinkers, as to their 18th-century predecessors, intellectual and material progress went hand in hand with abandonment of superstition, and strong ties between government and religion amounted to state-endorsed superstition.

The golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as have the culture wars of the past three decades. The argument over the proper role of religion in civil government was and is only a subsidiary of the larger question of whether the claims of supposedly revealed religion deserve any particular respect or deference in a pluralistic society.

In the 19th century, however, the issues were newer, as was the science bolstering the secular side of the arguments, and the forces of religious orthodoxy were stronger. To this Ingersoll also said no, spreading the gospel though he would never have called it that of reason, science, and humanism to audiences across the country. The son of an unsuccessful Presbyterian minister who never managed to remain attached to one congregation for very long, Ingersoll grew up poor. Like his hero Abraham Lincoln, he had little formal education.

Ingersoll spoke out of a past in which self-education was the only route to learning for those not born to money, on behalf of an American future in which education, certainly if freethinkers had their way, would be available to all. Despite a schedule so demanding that he occasionally lost his voice, Ingersoll filled his audiences with energy and enthusiasm as he walked around the stage, usually speaking from memory.

Described by one 20th-century biographer as the Babe Ruth of the podium, Ingersoll weighed more than pounds—a disproportionate share of them concentrated in his abdomen—by his 40s. We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with all our conclusions.

Philosophy has not the egotism of faith. It is a great pleasure to drive the fiend of fear out of the hearts of men women and children. It is a positive joy to put out the fires of hell. He certainly did not put to rest the issue of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with all of the attendant controversies about the proper role of religion in public institutions and rituals.

Intellectual history is a relay race, not a yard dash. Ingersoll was one of those indispensable people who keep an alternative version of history alive. This includes both Founder worshippers who see the passionate, risk-taking leaders of the Revolution as figures on a marble frieze and anti-intellectual ideologues who think that too much education is a dangerous thing.

Debs, Frederick Douglass, W. Fields, H. Mencken, Robert M. He was a Republican who upheld the gold standard and traveled in social circles that included business titans like Carnegie. Yet his closest friends and fervent admirers also included champions of labor such as Debs, who would garner more than a million votes as the Socialist candidate for president in , and La Follette of Wisconsin, the leader of the Progressive movement until his death in Freedom was what he preached; he wanted the shackles off everywhere.

He wanted me to think boldly about all things. Ingersoll gave up a promising career in politics to pursue his campaign against religious orthodoxy and for the separation of church and state. As contemporary newspaper accounts make clear, Ingersoll was a master at reaching people who were either indifferent or downright hostile to his antireligious views.

That was never true the second time the Great Agnostic spoke; the eloquent contrarian won an audience by word of mouth and through the local newspapers. When Ingersoll was at the height of his career, most newspapers still followed the hoary yet informative journalistic custom of reporting applause and laughter in summaries of speeches. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career.

Candidates are forced to pretend that they are Catholics with Protestant proclivities, or Christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all.

The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to do their own thinking. More about Susan Jacoby. From the show Fighting Creeping Creationism. He who cannot harmonize the cruelties of the Bible with the goodness of Jehovah, cannot harmonize the cruelties of Nature with the goodness and wisdom of a supposed Deity.

He will find it impossible to account for pestilence and famine, for earthquake and storm, for slavery, for the triumph of the strong over the weak, for the countless victories of injustice. He will find it impossible to account for martyrs -- for the burning of the good, the noble, the loving, by the ignorant, the malicious, and the infamous. How can the Deist satisfactorily account for the sufferings of women and children? In what way will he justify religious persecution -- the flame and sword of religious hatred?

Why did his God sit idly on his throne and allow his enemies to wet their swords in the blood of his friends? Why did he not answer the prayers of the imprisoned, of the helpless? And when he heard the lash upon the naked back of the slave, why did he not also hear the prayer of the slave?

And when children were sold from the breasts of mothers, why was he deaf to the mother's cry? It seems to me that the man who knows the limitations of the mind, who gives the proper value to human testimony, is necessarily an Agnostic. He gives up the hope of ascertaining first or final causes, of comprehending the supernatural, or of conceiving of an infinite personality. From out the words Creator, Preserver, and Providence, all meaning falls. The mind of man pursues the path of least resistance, and the conclusions arrived at by the individual depend upon the nature and structure of his mind, on his experience, on hereditary drifts and tendencies, and on the countless things that constitute the difference in minds.

One man, finding himself in the midst of mysterious phenomena, comes to the conclusion that all is the result of design; that back of all things is an infinite personality -- that is to say, an infinite man; and he accounts for all that is by simply saying that the universe was created and set in motion by this infinite personality, and that it is miraculously and supernaturally governed and preserved.

This man sees with perfect clearness that matter could not create itself, and therefore he imagines a creator of matter.

He is perfectly satisfied that there is design in the world, and that consequently there must have been a designer. It does not occur to him that it is necessary to account for the existence of an infinite personality.

He is perfectly certain that there can be no design without a designer, and he is, equally certain that there can be a designer who was not designed.

The absurdity becomes so great that it takes the place of a demonstration. He takes it for granted that matter was created and that its creator was not.

He assumes that a creator existed from eternity, without cause, and created what is called matter out of nothing; or, whereas there was nothing, this creator made the something that we call substance. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of an infinite personality? Can it imagine a beginningless being, infinitely powerful and intelligent?

If such a being existed, then there must have been an eternity during which nothing did exist except this being; because, if the Universe was created, there must have been a time when it was not, and back of that there must have been an eternity during which nothing but an infinite personality existed.

Is it possible to imagine an infinite intelligence dwelling for an eternity in infinite nothing? How could such a being be intelligent? What was there to be intelligent about? There was but one thing to know, namely, that there was nothing except this being.

How could such a being be powerful? There was nothing to exercise force upon. There was nothing in the universe to suggest an idea. Relations could not exist -- except the relation between infinite intelligence and infinite nothing. The next great difficulty is the act of creation. My mind is so that I cannot conceive of something being created out of nothing.

Neither can I conceive of anything being created without a cause. Let me go one step further. It is just as difficult to imagine something being created with, as without a cause. To pustulate a cause does not in the least lessen the difficulty.

In spite of all, this lever remains without a fulcrum. We cannot conceive of the destruction of substance. The stone can be crushed to powder, and the powder can be ground to such a fineness that the atoms can only be distinguished by the most powerful microscope, and we can then imagine these atoms being divided and subdivided again and again and again; but it is impossible for us to conceive of the annihilation of the least possible imaginable fragment of the least atom of which we can think.

Consequently the mind can imagine neither creation nor destruction. From this point it is very easy to reach the generalization that the indestructible could not have been created. These questions, however, will be answered by each individual according to the structure of his mind, according to his experience, according to his habits of thought, and according to his intelligence or his ignorance, his prejudice or his genius. Probably a very large majority of mankind believe in the existence of supernatural beings, and a majority of what are known as the civilized nations, in an infinite personality.

In the realm of thought majorities do not determine. Each brain is a kingdom, each mind is a sovereign. The universality of a belief does not even tend to prove its truth. A large majority of mankind have believed in what is known as God, and an equally large majority have as implicitly believed in what is known as the Devil.

These beings have been inferred from phenomena. They were produced for the most part by ignorance, by fear, and by selfishness. Man in all ages has endeavored to account for the mysteries of life and death, of substance, of force, for the ebb and flow of things, for earth and star. The savage, dwelling in his cave, subsisting on roots and reptiles, or on beasts that could be slain with club and stone, surrounded by countless objects of terror, standing by rivers, so far as he knew, without source or end, by seas with but one shore, the prey of beasts mightier than himself, of diseases strange and fierce, trembling at the voice of thunder, blinded by the lightning, feeling the earth shake beneath him, seeing the sky lurid with the volcano's glare, -- fell prostrate and begged for the protection of the Unknown.