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Paley says that the more wonderful a thing is, the greater the necessity
for creation; that a watch is a wonderful thing, and that it must have
had a creator; that the watchmaker is more wonderful than the watch,
therefore he must have had a creator. Then we come to God; He is
altogether more wonderful than the watchmaker, therefore He had no
creator. There is a link out somewhere; I don't pretend to understand
it. And so I say, that had the world been any other way, you would have
seen the same evidence of design, precisely. We grow up with our
conditions, and you cannot imagine of a first cause. Why? Every cause
has an effect.

Strike your hands together; they feel warm. The effect becomes a cause
instantly, and that cause produces another effect, and the effect
another cause; and there could not have been a cause until there was an
effect. Because until there was an effect, nothing had been caused;
until something had been caused, I am positive there was no cause. Now
you cannot conceive of a lost effect, because the lost effect of which
you can think, will in turn become a cause and that cause produce
another effect. And as you cannot think of a lost effect, you cannot
think of a first cause; it is not thinkable by the human mind.

They say God governs this world. Why does He not govern Russia as well
as He does Massachusetts? Why does He allow the Czar to send beautiful
girls of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, simply for saying a word in favor
of human liberty, to mines in Siberia, where they draw carts with knees
bruised and bleeding, with hands scarred and swollen? What is that God
worth that allows such things in the world He governs? Did He govern
this country when it had four millions of slaves?--when it turned the
cross of Christ into a whipping-post--when the holy bible was an
auction-block on which the mother stood while her babe was sold from her
breast?--when bloodhounds were considered apostles? Was God governing
the world when the prisoners were confined in the Bastille? It seems to
me, if there is a God, and someone would repeat the word "Bastille." it
would cover almost his face with the blood of shame. But they say
heaven will balance all the ills of life. Let us see: A large majority
of us are sinners--at least a large majority with whom I am acquainted;
and a majority of the Christians with whom I am acquainted are worse
than sinners. And if their doctrine is true, you will be astonished at
the gentlemen you will see in hell that day. You will know by the cast
of their countenance that they used to preach here. They say that it
may be that the sinners here have a very good time, and that the
Christians don't have a very good time; that it is awful hard work to
serve the Lord, and that you carry a cross when you deny yourself the
delights of murder and forgery, and all manner of rascality that fills
life with delight. But they say that while the rascals are having a
good time, they will catch it in the other world. But, according to
their account, ninety-nine out of a hundred will be damned, and I think
it will be a close call for the hundredth. Like that dear old Scotch
woman, when she was talking about the Presbyterian faith, some one said
to her: "My dear woman, if your doctrine is true, nobody but you and
your husband will be saved." "Ah," said she, "I'm na' sae sure about
John." About one in a hundred will be saved, and the other ninety-nine
will be in misery. So that on the average there will not be half as
much happiness in the next world as in this. So, instead of God's plan
getting better, it gets worse; and throughout all the ages of eternity
there will be less happiness than in this world. This world is a
school; this world is where we develop moral muscle. It may be that we
are here simply because men cannot advance only through agony and pain.
If it is necessary to have pain and agony to advance morally, then
nobody can advance in heaven. Hell will be the only place offering
opportunities to any gentleman who wishes to increase his moral muscle.

A gentleman once asked me if I could suggest any improvement on the
present order of things, if I had the power. Well, said I, in the first
place, I would make good health catching instead of disease. There will
be no humanity until we get the orthodox God out of our religion. I
want to do what little I can to put another one in God's name, so that
we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy,
justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice
our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom.
See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a
guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what
religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the
country that has got the least religion is the most prosperous, and the
country that has got the most religion is in the worst condition.

In the vast cemetery, called the past, are most of the religions of men
and there, too, are nearly all their gods.

The sacred temples of India were ruins long ago. Over column and
cornice; over the painted and pictured walls, cling and creep the
trailing vines. Brahma, the golden, with four heads and four arms;
Vishnu, the sombre, the punisher of the wicked, with his three eyes, his
crescent, and his necklace of skulls; Siva, the destroyer, red with
seas of blood; Kali, the goddess; Draupadi, the white-armed, and
Chrishna, the Christ, all passed away and left the thrones of heaven
desolate. Along the banks of the sacred Nile, Iris no longer wandering
weeps, searching for the dead Osiris. The shadow of Typhon's scowl
falls no more upon the waves. The sun rises as of yore, and his golden
beams still smite the lips of Memnon, but Memnon is as voiceless as the
Sphinx. The sacred fanes are lost in desert sands; the dusty mummies
are still waiting for the resurrection promised by their priests, and
the old beliefs wrought in curiously sculptured stone, sleep in the
mystery of a language lost and dead Odin, the author of life and soul,
Vili and Ve, and the mighty giant Ymir, strode long ago from the ice
halls of the North; and Thor, with iron glove and glittering hammer,
dashes mountains to the earth no more.

Broken are the circles and the cromlechs of the ancient Druids; fallen
upon the summits of the hills, and covered with the centuries' moss are
the sacred cairns. The divine fires of Persia and of the Aztecs have
died out in the ashes of the past, and there is none to rekindle, and
none to feed the holy flames. The harp of Orpheus is still; the drained
cup of Bacchus has been thrown aside; Venus lies dead in stone, and her
white bosom heaves no more with love. The streams still murmur, but no
naiads bathe; the trees still wave, but in the forest aisles no dryads
dance. The gods have flown from high Olympus. Not even the beautiful
women can lure them back, and Danae lies unnoticed, naked to the stars.
Hushed forever are the thunders of Sinai; lost are the voices of the
prophets, and the lard once flowing with milk and honey is but a desert
waste. One by one the myths have faded from the clouds; one by one the
phantom host has disappeared, and, one by one, facts, truths and
realities have taken their places. The supernatural has almost gone,
but man is the natural remains. The gods have fled, but man is here.
Nations, like individuals, have their periods of youth, of manhood and
decay. Religions are the same. The same inexorable destiny awaits them
all. The gods created with the nations must perish with their creators.
They were created by men, and, like men, they must pass away. The
deities of one age are the by-words of the next. The religion of our
day, and country, is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than
others have been. When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the world's
throne. When the sceptre passed to Egypt, Isis and Osiris received the
homage of mankind. Greece, with her fierce valor, swept to empire, and
Zeus put on the purple of authority. The earth trembled with the tread
of Rome's intrepid sons, and Jove grasped with mailed hand the
thunderbolts of heaven. Rome fell, and Christians from her territory,
with the red sword of war, carved out the ruling nations of the world,
and now Jehovah sits upon the old throne. Who will be His successor?

Ingersoll's lecture on The Religion of Our Day

Ladies and Gentlemen:--I am glad that I have lived long enough to see
one gentleman in the pulpit brave enough to say that God would not be
offended at one who speaks according to the dictates of his conscience;
who does not believe that God will give wings to a bird, and then damn
the bird for flying. I thank the pastor and I thank the church for
allowing its pastor to be so brave.

I admit that thousands and thousands of church people, with their
pastors and the deacons, are today advocating religious principles that
they deem right and good. I honor these men, but I do not believe that
their method is a good one. I do not want these people to forgive me
for the views I entertain, but I want them so to act that I will not
have to forgive them. I am the friend of every one who preaches the
gospel of absolute intellectual liberty, and that man is my friend.

Is there a God who says that if man does so and so He will damn him?
Can there be such a fiend? I am not responsible to man unless I injure
him; nor to God unless I injure Him, but one cannot injure God, for "He
is infinite."

When I was young I was told that the bible was inspired, written by God,
that even the lids of the book were inspired. They say He is a personal
God; if so, He has not revealed Himself to me. There may be many gods.
As I look around I see that justice does not prevail, that innocence is
not always effectual and a perfect shield. If there be a God these
things could not be. If God made us all, why did He not make us all
equally well. He had the power of an infinite god. Why did God people
the earth with so many idiots? I admit that orthodoxy could not exist
without them, but why did God make them? If we believe the bible then
He should have made us all idiots, for the orthodox Christian says the
idiots will not be damned, simply transplanted, while the sensible man,
who believeth not, will be sent to eternal damnation? If there is any
God that made us, what right had He to make idiots? Is a man with a
head like a pin under any obligation to thank God? Is the black man,
born in slavery, under any obligation to thank God for his badge of
servitude?

What kind of a God is it that will allow men and women to be put in
dungeons and chains simply because they loved Him and prayed to Him?
And what kind of a God is it that will allow such men and women to be
burned at the stake? If God won't love such men and women, then under
what circumstances will he love?

Famine stalks over the land and millions die, not only the bad but the
good, and there in the heavens above sits an infinite God who can do
anything, can change the rocks and the stones, and yet these millions
die. I do not say there is no God, but I do ask, what is God doing?
Look at the agony, and wretchedness and woe all over the land. Is there
goodness, is there mercy in this? I do not say there is not, but I want
to know, and I want to know if a man is to be damned for asking the
question?

(He eloquently recited the agonies that clustered around the French
Bastille, where great men and heroic women suffered and died for loving
liberty, and said: If there is a God, I think that one word, Bastille,
would bring the blush of shame to His face.)

I find that the men who have received revelation are the worst; and that
where the bible goes there go the sword and the fagot. If an infinite
God makes a revelation to me He knows how I will understand it. If God
wrote the bible he knew that no two people would understand it alike.

When I read the bible I found that God in His infinite wisdom couldn't
control the people He had created and that He had to drown them. If I
had infinite power and couldn't make a people that I could control and
had to drown them, why I'd resign.

Then I read in the bible such cruel things, and I do not believe that
God can be cruel. Such cruelty may make one afraid, but cannot inspire
love. I can't love a god that will inflict pain and sorrow, and I
won't.

The preachers say all unbelievers will go to hell--tidings of great joy.
When I confront them they--say I'm taking away their consolation. The
old bible does not mention hell or heaven. Now God should have notified
Adam and Cain of hell, but He didn't. When He came to drown all those
people He didn't tell a single one that He would drown him. He talked
all about water--nothing about fire. When He came down on Mount Sinai,
and told Moses how to cut out clothes for a priest, He never said one
word on the subject. When God gave Moses the ten commandments, engraved
on stone, there He said not one word about hell. There was plenty of
room on the stone; why did He not add: "If you don't keep these
commandments you will be damned." Through all these ages, when God was
talking all the time, and when every howling prophet had His ear, not
one word did He utter of hell or heaven. For 4,000 years God got along
without mentioning those places or even hinting of them. It seems to me
that we ought to have been notified by Him.

(Here the orator recalled many stories from the old bible and subjected
them to keen irony and ridicule. Reciting the story wherein the she
bears came out of the woods and tore to pieces the forty children who
mocked the prophet, he asked: If God did that, what would the devil
have done under the same circumstances? Why; he said, did not God give
a sure cure for leprosy, unless He wanted to have His chosen people to
have that frightful disease?)

Do you believe that God ever told a widow if her brother-in-law refused
to marry her to spit in his face? Do you believe any such nonsense from
a god? I call that courting under difficulties. (Then Colonel
Ingersoll dwelt pathetically on the sweet, innocent babes eaten up by
the lions in the den, after Daniel was rescued from their jaws, and
asked the question, what kind of a god was it that allowed such horrible
deeds?)

They say that I pick out all the bad things in the bible. Well, God
ought not to have put bad things in the book. If you only read the
bible you will not believe it. Why, it is such a bad book that it has
to be supported by legislation. In Maine and elsewhere they will send
you to jail for two years if you deny the bible or the judgment day.

No, we are told we must not only believe in the God we have been talking
about, but must also believe in another one.

Let us look at the church today. The orthodox church--that is, all but
the Universalist. He is trying to be orthodox, but he can't get in.
The God of the Universalists, to say the least, is a gentleman.

Now, what is this religion? To believe certain things that we may be
saved, that we won't be damned. What are they? First, that the old and
new testament are inspired. No matter how kind, how just a man may be,
unless he believes in the inspiration, he will be damned.

Second, he must believe in the trinity. That there are three in one.
That father and son are precisely of the same age, the son, possibly, a
little mite older; that three times one is one, and that once one is
three. It is a mercy you don't know how to understand it, but you must
believe it or be damned. Therein you see the mercy of the Lord. This
trinity doctrine was announced several hundred years after Christ was
born: Do you believe such a doctrine will make a man good or honest?
Will it make him more just? Is the man that believes any better than
the man who does not believe? How is it with nations? Look at Spain,
the last slave-holder in the civilized world; she's christian, she
believes in the trinity! And Italy, the beggar of the world. Under the
rule of priestcraft money streamed in from every land and yet she did
not advance. Today she is reduced to a hand-organ. Take poor Ireland,
groaning under the heel of British oppression; could she cast off her
priests she would soon be one with America in freedom.

Protestantism is better than Catholicism, because there is less of it.
Both dread education. They say they brought the arts and sciences out
of the dark ages; why, they made the dark ages and what did they
preserve? Nothing of value, only an account of events that never
happened. What did they teach the world! Slavery!

The best country the sun ever shown upon is the northern part of the
United States, and there you will find less religion than anywhere else
on the face of the earth. You will find here more people that don't
believe the bible, and you will find better husbands, better wives,
happier homes, where the women are most respected and where the children
get less blows and more huggings and kissings. We have improved just as
we lost this religion and this superstition.

Great Britain is the religious nation par excellence, and there you will
find the most cant and most hypocrisy. They are always thanking God
that they have killed somebody. Look at the opium war with China. They
forced the Chinese to open their ports and receive the deadly drug, and
then had the impudence to send a lot of driveling idiots of missionaries
into China.

Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition, there
you will find the best men, the best women, the best children. Two
powerful levers are at work; love and intelligence. The true test of a
man is generosity, that covers a multitude of sins.

They have got so now they damn a man on a technicality. You must be
baptized by immersion, sprinkling or pouring. If you come to the day of
judgment and can't show the watermark, you're damned!

What more: That a fellow named Adam, whom you don't know and never
voted for, is your representative. You are charged with his sins.
Equally abused is the doctrine of atonement, that you are created with
the sacrifice of another. If Christ had more virtue than Adam had
meanness, then you are ahead.

Atonement is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. But there is
one great objection. It saves the wrong man, and it is not honest. (In
holding up the atonement to ridicule the orator said: "If Judas had
failed to betray Christ, the mother of Christ would be in hell today."
Then he ridiculed the miracles recorded in the new testament, pronounced
them absurdities. He said that the four apostolic writers were very
contradictory in their statements, and did not even agree as to the last
word of this great man.)

The ascension was the most striking, the grandest of the miracles, if
true, yet the ascension is only recorded by two of these writers. If He
was God, I know he will forgive somebody for not believing the miracles,
unless convinced.

Another contradiction in the book: in one gospel the condition of
salvation is "whosoever believeth shall not be damned," and in another
we are promised that if we forgive our enemies God will forgive us--and
there's sense in this last promise. The first I believe a lie--it was
never spoken by God.

Christ said: Love your enemies. Nobody can do that. The doctrine of
Confucius is sound--to love one's friends and to do justice to one's
enemies without any mixture of revenge.

If Christ was God, did He not know on His cross what crimes would be
done in His name? Why didn't He settle all disputes about the trinity
and about baptism? Why didn't He post His disciples? Because He could
no more see into the future than I can. Only in this way can you acquit
him of the crimes committed in His name. The way to save our own souls
is to save another soul. God can't turn into hell a man who makes on
this earth a little heaven for himself, wife and babes.

Any minister who preaches the doctrine of hell ought to be ashamed. I
want, if I can while I live, to put an end to all belief in this
infamous doctrine. That doctrine has done incalculable harm, wrought
incalculable injury. I despise it, and I defy it.

The orthodox church says that religion does good; that it restrains
crime. It restrains a man from artificial, not from natural crimes. A
man can be made so religious that he will not eat meat on Friday, yet he
will steal.

Did you ever hear of a tramp coming to town and inquiring where the
deacon of the Presbyterian church lived.

The bible says consider the lilies. What good would it do a naked man
standing out in the bitter blasts of this night to consider the lilies.

What is the social position of a man in heaven who through all eternity
remembers that if he had had a grain of courage he would never have been
there.

The realization of our day does not satisfy the intelligence of the
people--the people have outgrown it. It shocks us and we have got to
have another religion. We must have a religion of charity; one that
will do away with poverty, close the prisons and cover this world with
homes.

Ingersoll's Lecture on Heretics and Heresies

"Liberty, a word without which--All other words are vain."

Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be
guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is a name
given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of
the hatred, arrogance, and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and
who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of
intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet
used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian
era, every art has been exhausted, and every conceivable punishment
inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This
effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the
salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the church still teaches,
that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. God is supposed to hate with
an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the
heretics who have died are supposed, at this moment, to be suffering the
agonies of the damned. The church persecutes the living, and her God
burns the dead.

It is claimed that God wrote a book called the bible, and it is
generally admitted that this book is somewhat difficult to understand.
As long as the church had all the copies of this book, and the people
were not allowed to read it, there was comparatively little heresy in
the world; but when it was printed and read, people began honestly to
differ as to its meaning. A few were independent and brave enough to
give the world their real thoughts, and for the extermination of these
men the church used all her power. Protestants and Catholics vied with
each other in the work of enslaving the human mind. For ages they were
rivals in the infamous effort to rid the earth of honest people. They
infested every country, every city, town, hamlet, and family. They
appealed to the worst passions of the human heart. They sowed the seeds
of discord and hatred in every land. Brother denounced brother, wives
informed against their husbands, mothers accused their children,
dungeons were crowded with the innocent; the flesh of the good and true
rotted in the clasp of chains, the flames devoured the heroic, and in
the name of the most merciful God, his children were exterminated with
famine, sword and fire. Over the wild waves of battle rose and fell the
banner of Jesus Christ. For sixteen hundred years the robes of the
church were red with innocent blood. The ingenuity of Christians was
exhausted in devising punishment severe enough to be inflicted upon
other Christians who honestly and sincerely differed with them upon any
point whatever.

Give any orthodox church the power, and today they would punish heresy
with whip, and chain, and fire. As long as a church deemed a certain
belief essential to salvation, just so long it will kill and burn if it
has the power. Why should the church pity a man whom her God hates?
Why should she show mercy to a kind and noble heretic whom her God will
burn in eternal fire? Why should a Christian be better than his God? It
is impossible for the imagination to conceive of a greater atrocity than
has been perpetrated by the church. Let it be remembered that all
churches have persecuted heretics to the extent of their power. Every
nerve in the human body capable of pain has been sought out and touched
by the church. Toleration has increased only when and where the power
of the church has diminished. From Augustine until now the spirit of
the Christian has remained the same. There has been the same
intolerance, the same undying hatred of all who think for themselves,
the same determination to crush out of the human brain all knowledge
inconsistent with the ignorant creed.

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