Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest Part 20

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 superst.i.tion.

Great Britain is the religious nation par excellence, and there you will find the most cant and most hypocrisy. They are always thanking G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion, 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 mult.i.tude of sins.

They have got so now they d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.ned!

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 h.e.l.l today." Then he ridiculed the miracles recorded in the new testament, p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.ned," and in another we are promised that if we forgive our enemies G.o.d will forgive us--and there's sense in this last promise. The first I believe a lie--it was never spoken by G.o.d.

Christ said: Love your enemies. n.o.body 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 G.o.d, 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. G.o.d can't turn into h.e.l.l a man who makes on this earth a little heaven for himself, wife and babes.

Any minister who preaches the doctrine of h.e.l.l 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. G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned. The church persecutes the living, and her G.o.d burns the dead.

It is claimed that G.o.d 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d hates?

Why should she show mercy to a kind and n.o.ble heretic whom her G.o.d will burn in eternal fire? Why should a Christian be better than his G.o.d?

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.

Every church pretends that it has a revelation from G.o.d, and that this revelation must be given to the people through the church; that the church acts through its priests, and that ordinary mortals must be content with a revelation--not from G.o.d--but from the church. Had the people submitted to this preposterous claim, of course there could have been but one church, and that church never could have advanced. It might have retrograded, because it is not necessary to think, or investigate, in order to forget. Without heresy there could have been no progress.

The highest type of the orthodox christian does not forget. Neither does he learn. He neither advances nor recedes. He is a living fossil, imbedded in that rock called faith. He makes no effort to better his condition, because all his strength is exhausted in keeping other people from improving theirs. The supreme desire of his heart is to force all others to adopt his creed, and in order to accomplish this object, he denounces all kinds of free thinking as a crime, and this crime he calls heresy. When he had the power, heresy was the most terrible and formidable of words. It meant confiscation, exile, imprisonment, torture, and death.

In those days the cross and rack were inseparable companions. Across the open bible lay the sword and f.a.got. Not content with burning such heretics as were alive, they even tried the dead, in order that the church might rob their wives and children. The property of all heretics was confiscated, and on this account they charged the dead with being heretical--indicted, as it were, their dust--to the end that the church might clutch the bread of orphans. Learned divines discussed propriety of tearing out the tongues of heretics before they were burned, and the general opinion was that this ought to be done, so that the heretics should not be able, by uttering blasphemies, to shock the christians who were burning them. With a mixture of ferocity and christianity, the priests insisted that heretics ought to be burned at a slow fire, giving as a reason, that more time was given them for repentance.

No wonder that Jesus Christ said, "I came not to bring peace but a sword!"

Every priest regarded himself as the agent of G.o.d. He answered all questions by authority, and to treat him with disrespect was an insult offered to G.o.d. No one was asked to think, but all were commanded to obey.

In 1208 the inquisition was established. Seven years afterward; the fourth council of the Lateran enjoined all kings and rulers to swear an oath that they would exterminate heretics from their dominions. The sword of the church was unsheathed, and the world was at the mercy of ignorant and infuriated priests, whose eyes feasted upon the agonies they inflicted. Acting as they believed, or pretended to believe under the command of G.o.d, stimulated by the hope of infinite reward in another world--hating heretics with every drop of their bastille blood--savage beyond description--merciless beyond conception--these infamous priests in a kind of frenzied joy, leaped upon the helpless victims of their rage. They crushed their bones in iron boots, tore their quivering flesh with iron hooks and pinchers, cut off their lips and eyelids, pulled out their nails, and into the bleeding quick thrust needles, tore out their tongues, extinguished their eyes, stretched them upon racks, flayed them alive, crucified them with their head downward, exposed them to wild beasts, burned them at the stake, mocked their cries and groans, ravished their wives, robbed their children, and then prayed G.o.d to finish the holy work in h.e.l.l.

Millions upon millions were sacrificed upon the altars of bigotry. The Catholic burned the Lutheran, the Lutheran burned the Catholic; the Episcopalian tortured the Presbyterian, the Presbyterian tortured the Episcopalian. Every denomination killed all it could of every other; and each Christian felt it duty bound to exterminate every other Christian who denied the smallest fraction of his creed.

In the reign of Henry the VIII., that pious and moral founder of the Apostolic Episcopal church, there was pa.s.sed by the Parliament of England an act ent.i.tled, "An act for abolis.h.i.+ng of diversity of opinion." And in this act was set forth what a good Christian was obliged to believe.

First, that in the sacrament was the real body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Second, that the body and blood of Jesus Christ was in the bread, and the blood and body of Jesus Christ was in the wine.

Third, that priests should not marry.

Fourth, that vows of chast.i.ty were of perpetual obligation.

Fifth, that private ma.s.ses ought to be continued.

And sixth, that auricular confession to a priest must be maintained.

This creed was made by law, in order that all men might know just what to believe by simply reading the statute. The church hated to see the people wearing out their brains in thinking upon these subjects. It was thought far better that a creed should be made by Parliament, so that whatever might be lacking in evidence might be made up in force.

The punishment for denying the first article was death by fire. For the denial of any other article, imprisonment, and for the second offense--death.

Your attention is called to these six articles, established during the reign of Henry VIII, and by the Church of England, simply because not one of these articles is believed by that church today. If the law then made by the church could be enforced now, every Episcopalian would be burned at the stake.

Similar laws were pa.s.sed in most Christian countries, as all orthodox churches firmly believed that mankind could be legislated into heaven.

According to the creed of every church, slavery leads to heaven, liberty leads to h.e.l.l. It was claimed that G.o.d had founded the church, and that to deny the authority of the church was to be a traitor to G.o.d, and consequently an ally of the devil. To torture and destroy one of the soldiers of Satan was a duty no good Christian cared to neglect.

Nothing can be sweeter than to earn the grat.i.tude of G.o.d by killing your own enemies. Such a mingling of profit and revenge, of heaven for yourself and d.a.m.nation for those you dislike, is a temptation that your ordinary Christian never resists.

According to the theologians, G.o.d, the father of us all wrote a letter to His children. The children have always differed somewhat as to the meaning of this letter. In consequence of these honest differences, these brothers began to cut out each other's hearts. In every land, where this letter from G.o.d has been read, the children to whom and for whom it was written have been filled with hatred and malice. They have imprisoned and murdered each other, and the wives and children of each other. In the name of G.o.d every possible crime has been committed, every conceivable outrage has been perpetrated. Brave men, tender and loving women, beautiful girls, prattling babes have been exterminated in the name of Jesus Christ. For more than fifty generations the church has carried the black flag. Her vengeance has been measured only by her power. During all these years of infamy no heretic has ever been forgiven. With the heart of a fiend she has hated; with the clutch of avarice she has grasped; with the jaws of a dragon she has devoured, pitiless as famine, merciless as fire, with the conscience of a serpent. Such is the history of the church of G.o.d.

I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart. They have been true to their convictions, and with a self-denial and fort.i.tude excelled by none, have labored and suffered for the salvation of men. Imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, believing that by personal effort they could rescue at least a few souls from the infinite shadow of h.e.l.l, they have cheerfully endured every hards.h.i.+p and scorned danger and death. And yet, notwithstanding all this, they believed that honest error was a crime. They knew that the bible so declared, and they believed that all unbelievers would be eternally lost. They believed that religion was of G.o.d, and all heresy of the devil. They killed heretics in defense of their own souls and the souls of their children. They killed them, because, according to their idea, they were the enemies of G.o.d, and because the bible teaches that the blood of the unbeliever is a most acceptable sacrifice to heaven.

Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church perpetrated all these crimes.