Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The most influential intellectual in this nation’s history
and the father of America’s Golden Age of Free thought.
He fought to end slavery, demanded equal rights for women,
served as the inspiration for both the U.N. and the birth control pill,
and overturned the laws which made blasphemy a crime in this country.
He was the most popular public speaker of his day,
once drawing a crowd of 50,000 in Chicago,
and it’s estimated that he was seen and heard by more Americans
than any individual before the advent of film and television.
Mark Twain after hearing Ingersoll described the experience as,
“Just the supreme combination of English words that was
ever put together since the world began.”
Ingersoll proved a major influence on Twain’s later writings
which incorporates not only Ingersoll’s ideas,
but his exact phrasing and words to such an extent that some
scholars have stated that Twain was guilty of plagiarism.
Ingersoll was a hero to James Garfield, Ulysses Grant,
Margaret Sanger, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison,
Henry Ward Beecher, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
He befriended Frederick Douglass, who stated that of all men
in his acquaintance, there were only two who treated him as an equal —
Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll.
Oscar Wilde meeting Ingersoll when he travelled the nation’s Midwest
praised him as the most intelligent man in America.
The poet Walt Whitman said of him,
“America don’t know to-day how proud she ought to be of Ingersoll."
But what set Ingersoll apart from the politicians of his day,
sets him apart from the politicians of ours:
HE WAS THE MOST OUTSPOKEN FOE OF RELIGION THIS COUNTRY HAS EVER KNOWN:
“The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior. ”
“I do not believe in forgiveness as it is preached by the church.
We do not need the forgiveness of God, but of each other and of ourselves.”
“To hate man and love God seems to be the sum of all creeds.”
“The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss,
while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain,
is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture
of insanity and ignorance, called faith.”
“And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children
when he had to drown his?”
COME AND SPEND AN HOUR WITH ROBERT INGERSOLL,
DENOUNCED BY THE NATION’S CHURCHES AS “THE GREAT SATAN,”
AND MEET THE GREATEST AMERICAN YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF.
