Robert Green Ingersoll was born on this day in 1833.
Writer Kimberly Winston said of Colonel Robert Ingersoll, that he “was a Victorian-era rock star who packed theaters with people who traveled hundreds of miles to hear his leactures against religion.”
Sometimes called “the Great Agnostic,” He himself died just short of the turn into the twentieth, but he was without a doubt the principal figure in the “Golden Age of Freethought” that ran through the last quarter of the nineteenth century and well into the second decade of the twentieth.
In my childhood I was indirectly influenced by Ingersoll through my father who was a fervent devotee. My father liked how the colonel raised the plain errors and contradictions of the Bible that he enumerated in his various lectures, which were collected and published in numerous editions over the years.
They say if you want to lose your faith make friends with a priest. So perhaps appropriately, Ingersoll was the son of a Congregationalist preacher. But in his case it was the treatment of his father by his congregations and denomination which probably first inspired the seeds of doubt. The Reverend Ingersoll was a broadminded liberal, as well as a social justice activist and abolitionist, who was tried for his liberalism, found guilty, and was defrocked. While he was eventually restored to the ministry, the events were never forgotten by his son.
Briefly a school teacher, Ingersoll read the law and at twenty-one passed the Illinois bar in 1854. After building a practice he married Eva Amelia Parker in 1862. They would have two daughters.
With the outbreak of the war he raised a regiment, the 11th Illinois volunteers and led it as their colonel. He would be known by that military title for the rest of his life. Colonel Ingersoll saw combat at the battle of Shiloh. After the war he was elected Attorney General for the state, where he began to be noted in Republican circles for his fiery oratory. Ingersoll was encouraged to play down his agnosticism, about which he made no bones, and run for governor. The colonel, however, refused to play down his views on religion.
But he did like to talk, and he sure could turn a phrase. He turned his attention to public speaking in an era when that was a principal form of entertainment. Colonel Ingersoll was interested in and spoke on a wide range of subjects. His political talks were on fire. But as it turned out his celebrations of family and his blunt agnosticism bleeding quickly into atheism, were what gained him fame.
As I mentioned, he could turn a phrase. He is remembered for his variation on the golden rule, “Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.” Similarly, “Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The plan to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.” I hope you notice the threads of interdependence in his various pronouncements. Others include “I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.”
Of course, again, it was the colonel’s thoughts on religion that people most responded to. The article on Ingersoll at Wikipedia holds up as an example a line from his lecture “The Great Infidels,” where he declared “All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed, and bore fruit in this one word – hell.” And, he was blunt about religion, “Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth – about the others.”
Later I found much to reflect on in his line, cited in Joseph Lewis’ “Ingersoll the Magnificent, where he is said to have declared, “Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.” As a liberal or naturalist Buddhist (I continue to struggle to find the best term for this emergent Buddhism that is the product of a meeting of west and east) I find the current obsession with many of the “new atheists” with the denial of deity a great missing of the real issue.
Whether there is a god or gods is of little significance as we can see in our lives they have no direct import. But, the belief there is some part of us that is not touched by nor part of the world has led to more sufferings among human beings than there are grains of sand along the course of the Nile.
But, after rejecting the authority of various scriptures, all hierarchies, and the conventions of deities and souls, he did come to have what we today would call a pretty clear view of the world and our place in it – the traditional territory of religions. In his world, everything passes. “In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.” And, as I’ve already noted, he really understood interdependence. The colonel said, “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.” And his response to these insights was for us to take care of each other, to give ourselves over to the power of love.
I can see why he was also called “America’s conscience.” The colonel really was interesting. Me, I am very much taken with his naturalistic spirituality, and think we could all profit from digging into it a bit more…
So, happy birthday, Colonel! May you be remembered and celebrated!
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