Ingersoll
on morality.
Ingersoll
believed that believers who felt themselves morally superior had their moral
geography backwards. “Mr. Black insists that without a belief in God there can
be no perception of right and wrong, and that it is impossible for an atheist
to have a conscience. Mr. Black, the Christian, the believer in God, upholds
wars of extermination. I denounce such wars as murder. He upholds the
institution of slavery. I denounce that institution as the basest of crimes.
Yet I am told that I have no knowledge of right and wrong. Religion and
morality do not necessarily go together. As a matter of fact, religion
has often been the enemy of morality. Religion and morality have nothing
in common, and yet there is no religion except the practice of morality.
But what you call religion is simply superstition. Religion as it is now taught
teaches our duties toward God -- our obligations to the Infinite, and the
results of a failure to discharge those obligations. I believe that we are
under no obligations to the Infinite; that we cannot be. All our obligations
are to each other, and to sentient beings.”
He explained that we should serve each other rather than serving a deity who needs nothing. “lt is far better for a man to love his fellow-men than to love God. It is better to love wife and children than to love Christ. It is better to serve your neighbor than to serve your God. The reason is palpable. I do not believe that there is any infinite being to whom we owe anything. We cannot owe any duty to any being who requires nothing -- to any being that we cannot possibly help, to any being whose happiness we cannot increase. If God is infinite, we cannot make him happier than he is. If God is infinite, we can neither give, nor can he receive, anything. Anything that we do or fail to do, cannot, in the slightest degree, affect an infinite God. You can do nothing for God -- you can do something for wife and children. You can add to the sunshine of a life. You can plant flowers in the pathway of another.”
Ingersoll pointed out that slavery, wars of conquest, polygamy, rape in war, killing disobedient wives, all condoned by Jehovah in ancient times, are not acceptable in modern society: “nations that entertain these views to-day are regarded as savage, and, probably, with the exception of the South Sea Islanders, the Feejees, some citizens of Delaware, and a few tribes in Central Africa, no human beings can be found degraded enough to agree upon these subjects with the Jehovah of the ancient Jews.” The Delaware reference cracked me up. “Suppose that we should now discover a Hindu book of equal antiquity with the Old Testament, containing a defence of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious persecution, would we regard it as evidence that the writers were inspired by an infinitely wise and merciful God?” He then pointed out that the man who believes that the Bible is inerrant is in a bind: “he must maintain that Jehovah is just as bad now as he was four thousand years ago, or that he was just as good then as he is now, but that human conditions have so changed that slavery, polygamy, religious persecutions, and wars of conquest are now perfectly devilish. Once they were right, once they were commanded by God himself; now, they are prohibited. There has been such a change in the conditions of man that, at the present time, the devil is in favor of slavery, polygamy, religious persecution, and wars of conquest. That is to say, the devil entertains the same opinion to-day that Jehovah held four thousand years ago, but in the meantime Jehovah has remained exactly the same, changeless and incapable of change….Neither will it do to say that God adapted his revelation to the prejudices of mankind. Why should God confirm a barbarian in his prejudices? Why should he fortify a heathen in his crimes? If a [divine] revelation is of any importance whatever, it is to eradicate prejudices from the human mind. It should be a lever with which to raise the human race. It has always seemed reasonable that an infinite God ought to have been able to make man grand enough to know, even without a special revelation, that it is not altogether right to steal the labor, or the wife, or the child, of another. When the whole question is thoroughly examined, the world will find that Jehovah had the prejudices, the hatreds, and superstitions of his day.”
Ingersoll had his own notion of the intersection between religion and morality: “What is blasphemy? To live on the unpaid labor of other men -- that is blasphemy. To enslave your fellow-man, to put chains upon his body -- that is blasphemy. To enslave the minds of men, to put manacles upon the brain, padlocks upon the lips -- that is blasphemy. To deny what you believe to be true, to admit to be true what you believe to be a lie -- that is blasphemy. To strike the weak and unprotected, in order that you may gain the applause of the ignorant and superstitious mob -- that is blasphemy. To persecute the intelligent few, at the command of the ignorant many -- that is blasphemy. To forge chains, to build dungeons, for your honest fellow-men -- that is blasphemy. To pollute the souls of children with the dogma of eternal pain -- that is blasphemy. To violate your conscience -- that is blasphemy. The jury that gives an unjust verdict, and the judge who pronounces an unjust sentence, are blasphemers. The man who bows to public opinion against his better judgment and against his honest conviction, is a blasphemer.”
Ingersoll also noted that, only a few years after American religious leaders led the fight to abolish slavery and uplift African-Americans to a position of equality, they were backsliding. “How inconsistent these Christians are! In St. Louis the other day I read an interview with a Christian minister -- one who is now holding a revival. The question was whether in these revivals, when they were trying to rescue souls from eternal torture, they would allow colored people to occupy seats with white people; and that revivalist, preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ, said he would not allow the colored people to sit with white people; they must go to the back of the church. These same Christians tell us that in heaven there will be no distinction. That Christ cares nothing for the color of the skin. That in Paradise white and black will sit together, swap harps, and cry hallelujah in chorus; yet this minister, believing as he says he does, that all men who fail to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will eternally perish, was not willing that a colored man should sit by a white man and hear the gospel of everlasting peace. According to this revivalist, the ship of the world is going down; Christ is the only life-boat; and yet he is not willing that a colored man, with a soul to save, shall sit by the side of a white brother, and be rescued from eternal death. He admits that the white brother is totally depraved; that if the white brother had justice done him he would be damned: that it is only through the wonderful mercy of God that the white man is not in hell; and yet such a being, totally depraved, is too good to sit by a colored man! Total depravity becomes arrogant; total depravity draws the color line in religion, and an ambassador of Christ says to the black man, Stand away; let your white brother hear first about the love of God."
Ingersoll condemned the peddling of religious fallacies to children. “It is said that some of the Indian tribes place the heads of their children between pieces of bark until the form of the skull is permanently changed. To us this seems a most shocking custom: and yet, after all, is it as bad as to put the souls of our children in the strait-jacket of a creed? to so utterly deform their minds that they regard the God of the Bible as a being of infinite mercy, and really consider it a virtue to believe a thing just because it seems unreasonable? There are thousands of men and women, fathers and mothers, who repudiate with their whole hearts the creeds of superstition, and still allow their children to be taught these lies. They allow their imaginations to be poisoned with the dogma of eternal pain. They allow arrogant and ignorant parsons, meek and foolish teachers, to sow the seeds of barbarism in the minds of their children -- seeds that will fill their lives with fear and pain. All the machinery of the church is constantly employed in corrupting the reason of children. Every Sunday school has for its object the crushing out of every germ of individuality. The poor children are taught that nothing can be more acceptable to God than unreasoning obedience and eyeless faith, and that to believe God did an impossible act, is far better than to do a good one yourself. Every child in the Christian world has uttered its wondering protest against this outrage. Nothing can be more important to a human being than to be free and to live without fear. Fathers and mothers should do their utmost to make their children free. They should teach them to doubt, to investigate, to inquire, and every father and mother should know that by the cradle of every child, as by the cradle of the infant Hercules, crawls the serpent of superstition.”
He even suggested that the Bible was too obscene for children. “A petition was sent to Congress praying for the repeal or modification of certain postal laws, to the end that the freedom of conscience and of the press should not be abridged. Nobody holds in greater contempt than I the writers, publishers, or dealers in obscene literature. One of my objections to the Bible is that it contains hundreds of grossly obscene passages not fit to be read by any decent man, thousands of passages, in my judgment, calculated to corrupt the minds of youth. I hope the time will soon come when the good sense of the American people will demand a Bible with all obscene passages left out.”
Ingersoll was outraged at the way Christianity treated women, to include the Torah law dictating that a woman who gives birth is unclean, and a woman bearing a daughter doubly unclean. “Christianity found the Roman matron a free woman. Polygamy was never known in Rome; and although divorces were allowed by law, the Roman state had been founded for more than five hundred years before either a husband or a wife asked for a divorce. From the foundation of Christianity, -- I mean from the time it became the force in the Roman state, -- woman, as such, went down in the scale of civilization. The scepter was taken from her hands, and she became once more the slave and serf of man. …I find that in this day and generation, the meanest men have the lowest estimate of woman; that the greater the man is, the grander he is, the more he thinks of mother, wife and daughter. I also find that just in the proportion that he has lost confidence in the polygamy of Jehovah and in the advice and philosophy of Saint Paul, he believes in the rights and liberties of woman.” Ingersoll was also repelled at the rule, in Torah law, that if a member of your family talks about other gods, he must be killed; also the repeated theme – Abraham, Jephthah, Gethsemane – of parents being expected to kill their children. “Read the story of Jephthah and his daughter, and then tell me what you think of a father who would sacrifice his daughter to God, and what you think of a God who would receive such a sacrifice. This one story should be enough to make every tender and loving father hold this book in utter abhorrence.”
Ingersoll indicated that the belief in an omnipotent benevolent deity was greatly undermined by the complete futility of prayer. “There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has been paralyzed -- no truthful account in all the literature of the world of the innocent being shielded by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every day -- men are this moment lying in wait for their human prey -- wives are whipped and crushed, driven to insanity and death -- little children begging for mercy, lifting imploring, tear-filled eyes to the brutal faces of fathers and mothers -- sweet girls are deceived, lured, and outraged, but God has no time to prevent these things -- no time to defend the good and to protect the pure. He is too busy numbering hairs and watching sparrows.”
He drove his point home by reminding his audience of the fate of the slaves recently freed, not by prayer, but by the workings of man. “Through many centuries millions were enslaved, babes were sold from mothers, husbands from wives, backs were scarred with the lash. The poor wretches lifted their clasped hands toward heaven and prayed for justice, for liberty -- but their god did not hear. He cared nothing for the sufferings of slaves, nothing for the tears of wives and mothers, nothing for the agony of men. He answered no prayers. He broke no chains. He freed no slaves. The miserable wretches appealed to the priests of God, but they were on the other side. They defended the masters. The slaves had nothing to give. Does it not seem to you that your God must have felt a touch of shame when the poor slave mother -- one that had been robbed of her babe -- knelt and with clasped hands, in a voice broken with sobs, commenced her prayer with the words Our Father?” Ingersoll isn’t being entirely fair to the clergy, many of whom advocated abolition, but his lament about all of the ignored prayers was spot on.
He also pointed out that the previous year Americans had prayed in the millions, in a vain effort to save the life of President Garfield who had been shot. “I said all the clergymen of the world could not save one human life. They tried it last year. They tried it in the United States. The Christian world upon its knees implored God to save one life, and the man died. The man died! Had the man recovered the whole church would have claimed that it was in answer to prayer. The man having died, what does the church say now? What is the answer to this?”
Ingersoll also pointed out the fate of God’s most fervent followers – his martyrs. “Let the gentleman read the history of religious persecution. Let him read the history of those who were put in dungeons. of those who lifted their chained hands to God and mingled prayer with the clank of fetters; men that were in the dungeons simply for loving this God, simply for worshiping this God. And what did God do? Nothing. The chains remained upon the limbs of his worshipers. They remained in the dungeons built by theology, by malice, and hatred; and what did God do? Nothing. Thousands of men were taken from their homes, fagots were piled around their bodies; they were consumed to ashes, and what did God do? Nothing. The sword of extermination was unsheathed, hundreds and thousands of men, women and children perished. Women lifted their hands to God and implored him to protect their children, their daughters; and what did God do? Nothing. Why should any man depend on the goodness of a God who created countless millions, knowing that they would suffer eternal grief? There are two facts inconsistent in my mind -- a martyr and a God. Injustice upon earth renders the justice of heaven impossible.”
Although he sympathized with the martyrs, he did not credit their beliefs. “All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr -- never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves.”
Ingersoll was fascinated with the clergy’s obsession with the Sabbath – preachers trying to stop ships from sailing on Sunday (which would make ocean voyages impractical) or even to rescue sailors from drowning on Sunday (he said nothing about the fact that Christians switched the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday for no logical reason). But he was not puzzled at all as to why preachers wanted all businesses to shut down on Sunday: “The clergy know that their churches will remain empty if any other place remains open. Ministers should not expect to fill their churches by shutting up other places. They can only increase their congregations by improving their sermons. They will have more hearers when they say more worth hearing.”
He explained that we should serve each other rather than serving a deity who needs nothing. “lt is far better for a man to love his fellow-men than to love God. It is better to love wife and children than to love Christ. It is better to serve your neighbor than to serve your God. The reason is palpable. I do not believe that there is any infinite being to whom we owe anything. We cannot owe any duty to any being who requires nothing -- to any being that we cannot possibly help, to any being whose happiness we cannot increase. If God is infinite, we cannot make him happier than he is. If God is infinite, we can neither give, nor can he receive, anything. Anything that we do or fail to do, cannot, in the slightest degree, affect an infinite God. You can do nothing for God -- you can do something for wife and children. You can add to the sunshine of a life. You can plant flowers in the pathway of another.”
Ingersoll pointed out that slavery, wars of conquest, polygamy, rape in war, killing disobedient wives, all condoned by Jehovah in ancient times, are not acceptable in modern society: “nations that entertain these views to-day are regarded as savage, and, probably, with the exception of the South Sea Islanders, the Feejees, some citizens of Delaware, and a few tribes in Central Africa, no human beings can be found degraded enough to agree upon these subjects with the Jehovah of the ancient Jews.” The Delaware reference cracked me up. “Suppose that we should now discover a Hindu book of equal antiquity with the Old Testament, containing a defence of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious persecution, would we regard it as evidence that the writers were inspired by an infinitely wise and merciful God?” He then pointed out that the man who believes that the Bible is inerrant is in a bind: “he must maintain that Jehovah is just as bad now as he was four thousand years ago, or that he was just as good then as he is now, but that human conditions have so changed that slavery, polygamy, religious persecutions, and wars of conquest are now perfectly devilish. Once they were right, once they were commanded by God himself; now, they are prohibited. There has been such a change in the conditions of man that, at the present time, the devil is in favor of slavery, polygamy, religious persecution, and wars of conquest. That is to say, the devil entertains the same opinion to-day that Jehovah held four thousand years ago, but in the meantime Jehovah has remained exactly the same, changeless and incapable of change….Neither will it do to say that God adapted his revelation to the prejudices of mankind. Why should God confirm a barbarian in his prejudices? Why should he fortify a heathen in his crimes? If a [divine] revelation is of any importance whatever, it is to eradicate prejudices from the human mind. It should be a lever with which to raise the human race. It has always seemed reasonable that an infinite God ought to have been able to make man grand enough to know, even without a special revelation, that it is not altogether right to steal the labor, or the wife, or the child, of another. When the whole question is thoroughly examined, the world will find that Jehovah had the prejudices, the hatreds, and superstitions of his day.”
Ingersoll had his own notion of the intersection between religion and morality: “What is blasphemy? To live on the unpaid labor of other men -- that is blasphemy. To enslave your fellow-man, to put chains upon his body -- that is blasphemy. To enslave the minds of men, to put manacles upon the brain, padlocks upon the lips -- that is blasphemy. To deny what you believe to be true, to admit to be true what you believe to be a lie -- that is blasphemy. To strike the weak and unprotected, in order that you may gain the applause of the ignorant and superstitious mob -- that is blasphemy. To persecute the intelligent few, at the command of the ignorant many -- that is blasphemy. To forge chains, to build dungeons, for your honest fellow-men -- that is blasphemy. To pollute the souls of children with the dogma of eternal pain -- that is blasphemy. To violate your conscience -- that is blasphemy. The jury that gives an unjust verdict, and the judge who pronounces an unjust sentence, are blasphemers. The man who bows to public opinion against his better judgment and against his honest conviction, is a blasphemer.”
Ingersoll also noted that, only a few years after American religious leaders led the fight to abolish slavery and uplift African-Americans to a position of equality, they were backsliding. “How inconsistent these Christians are! In St. Louis the other day I read an interview with a Christian minister -- one who is now holding a revival. The question was whether in these revivals, when they were trying to rescue souls from eternal torture, they would allow colored people to occupy seats with white people; and that revivalist, preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ, said he would not allow the colored people to sit with white people; they must go to the back of the church. These same Christians tell us that in heaven there will be no distinction. That Christ cares nothing for the color of the skin. That in Paradise white and black will sit together, swap harps, and cry hallelujah in chorus; yet this minister, believing as he says he does, that all men who fail to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will eternally perish, was not willing that a colored man should sit by a white man and hear the gospel of everlasting peace. According to this revivalist, the ship of the world is going down; Christ is the only life-boat; and yet he is not willing that a colored man, with a soul to save, shall sit by the side of a white brother, and be rescued from eternal death. He admits that the white brother is totally depraved; that if the white brother had justice done him he would be damned: that it is only through the wonderful mercy of God that the white man is not in hell; and yet such a being, totally depraved, is too good to sit by a colored man! Total depravity becomes arrogant; total depravity draws the color line in religion, and an ambassador of Christ says to the black man, Stand away; let your white brother hear first about the love of God."
Ingersoll condemned the peddling of religious fallacies to children. “It is said that some of the Indian tribes place the heads of their children between pieces of bark until the form of the skull is permanently changed. To us this seems a most shocking custom: and yet, after all, is it as bad as to put the souls of our children in the strait-jacket of a creed? to so utterly deform their minds that they regard the God of the Bible as a being of infinite mercy, and really consider it a virtue to believe a thing just because it seems unreasonable? There are thousands of men and women, fathers and mothers, who repudiate with their whole hearts the creeds of superstition, and still allow their children to be taught these lies. They allow their imaginations to be poisoned with the dogma of eternal pain. They allow arrogant and ignorant parsons, meek and foolish teachers, to sow the seeds of barbarism in the minds of their children -- seeds that will fill their lives with fear and pain. All the machinery of the church is constantly employed in corrupting the reason of children. Every Sunday school has for its object the crushing out of every germ of individuality. The poor children are taught that nothing can be more acceptable to God than unreasoning obedience and eyeless faith, and that to believe God did an impossible act, is far better than to do a good one yourself. Every child in the Christian world has uttered its wondering protest against this outrage. Nothing can be more important to a human being than to be free and to live without fear. Fathers and mothers should do their utmost to make their children free. They should teach them to doubt, to investigate, to inquire, and every father and mother should know that by the cradle of every child, as by the cradle of the infant Hercules, crawls the serpent of superstition.”
He even suggested that the Bible was too obscene for children. “A petition was sent to Congress praying for the repeal or modification of certain postal laws, to the end that the freedom of conscience and of the press should not be abridged. Nobody holds in greater contempt than I the writers, publishers, or dealers in obscene literature. One of my objections to the Bible is that it contains hundreds of grossly obscene passages not fit to be read by any decent man, thousands of passages, in my judgment, calculated to corrupt the minds of youth. I hope the time will soon come when the good sense of the American people will demand a Bible with all obscene passages left out.”
Ingersoll was outraged at the way Christianity treated women, to include the Torah law dictating that a woman who gives birth is unclean, and a woman bearing a daughter doubly unclean. “Christianity found the Roman matron a free woman. Polygamy was never known in Rome; and although divorces were allowed by law, the Roman state had been founded for more than five hundred years before either a husband or a wife asked for a divorce. From the foundation of Christianity, -- I mean from the time it became the force in the Roman state, -- woman, as such, went down in the scale of civilization. The scepter was taken from her hands, and she became once more the slave and serf of man. …I find that in this day and generation, the meanest men have the lowest estimate of woman; that the greater the man is, the grander he is, the more he thinks of mother, wife and daughter. I also find that just in the proportion that he has lost confidence in the polygamy of Jehovah and in the advice and philosophy of Saint Paul, he believes in the rights and liberties of woman.” Ingersoll was also repelled at the rule, in Torah law, that if a member of your family talks about other gods, he must be killed; also the repeated theme – Abraham, Jephthah, Gethsemane – of parents being expected to kill their children. “Read the story of Jephthah and his daughter, and then tell me what you think of a father who would sacrifice his daughter to God, and what you think of a God who would receive such a sacrifice. This one story should be enough to make every tender and loving father hold this book in utter abhorrence.”
Ingersoll indicated that the belief in an omnipotent benevolent deity was greatly undermined by the complete futility of prayer. “There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has been paralyzed -- no truthful account in all the literature of the world of the innocent being shielded by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every day -- men are this moment lying in wait for their human prey -- wives are whipped and crushed, driven to insanity and death -- little children begging for mercy, lifting imploring, tear-filled eyes to the brutal faces of fathers and mothers -- sweet girls are deceived, lured, and outraged, but God has no time to prevent these things -- no time to defend the good and to protect the pure. He is too busy numbering hairs and watching sparrows.”
He drove his point home by reminding his audience of the fate of the slaves recently freed, not by prayer, but by the workings of man. “Through many centuries millions were enslaved, babes were sold from mothers, husbands from wives, backs were scarred with the lash. The poor wretches lifted their clasped hands toward heaven and prayed for justice, for liberty -- but their god did not hear. He cared nothing for the sufferings of slaves, nothing for the tears of wives and mothers, nothing for the agony of men. He answered no prayers. He broke no chains. He freed no slaves. The miserable wretches appealed to the priests of God, but they were on the other side. They defended the masters. The slaves had nothing to give. Does it not seem to you that your God must have felt a touch of shame when the poor slave mother -- one that had been robbed of her babe -- knelt and with clasped hands, in a voice broken with sobs, commenced her prayer with the words Our Father?” Ingersoll isn’t being entirely fair to the clergy, many of whom advocated abolition, but his lament about all of the ignored prayers was spot on.
He also pointed out that the previous year Americans had prayed in the millions, in a vain effort to save the life of President Garfield who had been shot. “I said all the clergymen of the world could not save one human life. They tried it last year. They tried it in the United States. The Christian world upon its knees implored God to save one life, and the man died. The man died! Had the man recovered the whole church would have claimed that it was in answer to prayer. The man having died, what does the church say now? What is the answer to this?”
Ingersoll also pointed out the fate of God’s most fervent followers – his martyrs. “Let the gentleman read the history of religious persecution. Let him read the history of those who were put in dungeons. of those who lifted their chained hands to God and mingled prayer with the clank of fetters; men that were in the dungeons simply for loving this God, simply for worshiping this God. And what did God do? Nothing. The chains remained upon the limbs of his worshipers. They remained in the dungeons built by theology, by malice, and hatred; and what did God do? Nothing. Thousands of men were taken from their homes, fagots were piled around their bodies; they were consumed to ashes, and what did God do? Nothing. The sword of extermination was unsheathed, hundreds and thousands of men, women and children perished. Women lifted their hands to God and implored him to protect their children, their daughters; and what did God do? Nothing. Why should any man depend on the goodness of a God who created countless millions, knowing that they would suffer eternal grief? There are two facts inconsistent in my mind -- a martyr and a God. Injustice upon earth renders the justice of heaven impossible.”
Although he sympathized with the martyrs, he did not credit their beliefs. “All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr -- never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves.”
Ingersoll was fascinated with the clergy’s obsession with the Sabbath – preachers trying to stop ships from sailing on Sunday (which would make ocean voyages impractical) or even to rescue sailors from drowning on Sunday (he said nothing about the fact that Christians switched the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday for no logical reason). But he was not puzzled at all as to why preachers wanted all businesses to shut down on Sunday: “The clergy know that their churches will remain empty if any other place remains open. Ministers should not expect to fill their churches by shutting up other places. They can only increase their congregations by improving their sermons. They will have more hearers when they say more worth hearing.”
