Reading Time: 2 minutes I am reading Susan Jacoby’s recent book, “The Great Agnostic,” subtitled “Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.” Ingersoll was a very popular orator and lecturer in the second half of the 19th Century, despite the fact that he was an outspoken critic of organized religion, particularly Christianity. “Freethought” was a euphemism for atheism and agnosticism, advocating […]
Robert Ingersoll
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The Superlative Robert Green Ingersoll
Reading Time: 7 minutes Robert Green Ingersoll was a truly great thinker. You can find a great deal of awesome content from him on the superlative theingersolltimes.com website. Please check it out, and send its curator your appreciation for putting it together. He is a tireless worker! Something for your Monday: By the same book they proved that nearly everybody is […]
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Ingersoll: Reason and the Brain
Reading Time: 2 minutes These are truly beautiful words from Robert G Ingersoll, as taken from the superb site which has a fine selection of his writing, curated by a friend of mine: Reason and the Brain Nature has furnished every human being with a light more or less brilliant, more or less powerful. That light is Reason; […]
Posted inThe Secular
A little Ingersoll for you
Reading Time: 3 minutes Robert Green Ingersoll was a truly great thinker. You can find a great deal of awesome content from him on the superlative theingersolltimes.com website. Please check it out, and send its curator your appreciation for putting it together. Something for your Monday:
Posted inReligion
The Doctrine of Atonement – Robert Ingersoll
Reading Time: 5 minutes I have elsewhere talked about how the Doctrine of the Atonement is simply nonsensical. Well, here is the eminent thinker Robert Ingersoll on the subject.
According to one of these gospels, and according to the prevalent Christian belief, the Christian religion rests upon the doctrine of the atonement
Posted inEthics and Morality
The Immorality of the Atonement – The Idea that God Wants Blood
Reading Time: 6 minutes Here is another piece, this time on the atonement and sin, from a friend who supplies adverts and what have you to the Free Inquiry magazine amongst others. He has a special interest in the fascinating life of Robert Ingersoll.
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Kitteridge on Ingersoll on Free Will
Reading Time: 3 minutes In refutation of the argument for “free moral agency,” Ingersoll once used the following illustration, — itself an argument as clear as it is unanswerable: —
“It is insisted that man is free, and is responsible, because he knows right from wrong. But the compass does not navigate the ship; neither does it in any way, of itself, determine the direction that is taken. When wind and waves are too powerful, the compass is of no importance. The pilot may read it correctly, and may know the direction the ship ought to take, but the compass is not a force. So men, blown by the tempests of passion, may have the intellectual conviction that they should go another way; but of what use, of what force, is the conviction?”
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Robert Ingersoll
Reading Time: 6 minutes I recently heard Susan Jacoby wax lyrical about Ingersoll on the Reasonable Doubts podcast and I must confess, I know very little about him. I feel, though, that I should as he appears to have been an iconoclast in his time.
I was recently sent a message by Julian Haydon alerting me to this link (thanks also to Haydon for letting me know he thought my free will book was the best that he’d ever read!):