Chapter 27

Every member of a church promises to remain orthodox, that is to say--stationary. Growth is heresy. Orthodox ideas are the feathers that have been molted by the eagle of progress. They are the dead leaves under the majestic palm; while heresy is the bud and blossom at the top.

Imagine a vine that grows at one end and decays at the other. The end that grows is heresy; the end that rots is orthodox. The dead are orthodox, and your cemetery is the most perfect type of a well regulated church. No thought, no progress, no heresy there. Slowly and silently, side by side, the satisfied members peacefully decay. There is only this difference--the dead do not persecute.

And what does a trial for heresy mean? It means that the church says to a heretic, "Believe as I do, or I will withdraw my support; I will not employ you; I will pursue you until your garments are rags; until your children cry for bread; until your cheeks are furrowed with tears. I will hunt you to the very portals of the tomb, and then my God will do the rest. I will not imprison you. I will not burn you. The law prevents my doing that. I helped make the law, not, however, to protect you, nor deprive me of the right to exterminate you, but in order to keep other churches from exterminating me."

A trial for heresy means that the spirit of persecution still lingers in the church; that it still denies the right of private judgment; that it still thinks more of creed than truth; that it is still determined to prevent the intellectual growth of man. It means that churches are shambles in which are bought and sold the souls of men. It means that the church is still guilty of the barbarity of opposing thought with force. It means that if it had the power, the mental horizon would be bounded by a creed, that it would bring again the whips, and chains, and dungeon keys, the rack and fagot of the past.

But let me tell the church it lacks the power. There has been, and still are, too many men who own themselves--too much thought, too much knowledge for the church to grasp again the sword of power. The church must abdicate. For the Eglon of superstition, science has a message from truth.

The heretics have not thought and suffered and died in vain. Every heretic has been, and is, a ray of light. Not in vain did Voltaire, that great man, point from the foot of the Alps, the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. Not in vain were the splendid utterances of the infidels, while beyond all price are the discoveries of science. The church has impeded, but it has not and it cannot stop the onward march of the human race. Heresy can not be burned, nor imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at Ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual new world; the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to new thoughts. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

Why should a man be afraid to think, and why should he fear to express his thoughts?

Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded?

Is it possible that a God delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honor and renown a God must win in such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a firefly!

Go on, presbyteries and synods, go on! Thrust the heretics out of the church. That is to say, throw away your brains--put out your eyes. The Infidels will thank you. They are willing to adopt your exiles. Every deserter from your camp is a recruit for the army of progress. Cling to the ignorant dogmas of the past; read the 109th Psalm; gloat over the slaughter of mothers and babes; thank God for total depravity; shower your honors upon hypocrites, and silence every minister who is touched with that heresy called genius.

Be true to your history. Turn out the astronomers, the geologists, the naturalists, the chemists, and all the honest scientists. With a whip of scorpions, drive them all out. We want them all. Keep the ignorant, the superstitious, the bigoted, and the writers of charges and specifications. Keep them, and keep them all. Repeat your pious platitudes in the drowsy ears of the faithful, and read your bible to heretics, as kings read some forgotten riot-act to stop and stay the waves of revolution. You are too weak to excite anger. We forgive your efforts as the sun forgives a cloud--as the air forgives the breath you waste.

How long, O how long will man listen to the threats of God, and shut his ears to the splendid promises of Nature? How long, O how long will man remain the cringing slave of a false and cruel creed.

By this time the whole world should know that the real bible has not yet been written; but is being written, and that it will never be finished until the race begins its downward march or ceases to exist. The real bible is not the work of inspired men, nor prophets, nor apostles, nor evangelists, nor of Christ. Every man who finds a fact, adds, as it were, a word to this great book. It is not attested by prophecy, by miracles or by signs. It makes no appeal to faith, to ignorance, to credulity of fear. It has no punishment for unbelief, and no reward for hypocrisy. It appears to men in the name of demonstration. It has nothing to conceal. It has no fear of being read, of being investigated and understood. It does not pretend to be holy or sacred; it simply claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, and implores every reader to verify every line for himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each thing that exists testifies of its perfection. The earth with its heart of fire and crowns of snow; with its forests and plains, its rocks and seas; with its every wave and cloud; with its every leaf, and bud, and flower, confirms its every word, and the solemn stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the eternal witnesses of its truth.

Ingersoll's Lecture on The Bible

The true bible appeals to man in the name of demonstration. It has nothing to conceal. It has no fear of being read, of being contradicted, of being investigated and understood. It does not pretend to be holy or sacred, it simply claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, and implores every reader to verify every line for himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each thing that exists testifies of its perfection. The earth, with its heart of fire and crowns of snow; with its forests and plains, its rocks and seas; with its every wave and cloud; with its every leaf and bud and flower, confirms its every word, and the solemn stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the external witnesses of its truth.

I will tell you what I mean by inspiration. I go and look at the sea, and the sea says something to me; it makes an impression upon my mind. That impression depends, first, upon my experience; secondly, upon my intellectual capacity. Another looks upon the same sea. He has a different brain, he has had a different experience, he has different memories and different hopes. The sea may speak to him of joy and to me of grief and sorrow. The sea cannot tell the same thing to two beings, because no two human beings have had the same experience. So, when I look upon a flower, or a star, or a painting, or a statue, the more I know about sculpture the more that statue speaks to me. The more I have had of human experience, the more I have read, the greater brain I have, the more the star says to me. In other words, nature says to me all that I am capable of understanding.

Think of a God wicked and malicious enough to inspire this prayer in the 109th Psalm! Think of one infamous enough to answer it! Had this inspired Psalm been found in some temple erected for the worship of snakes, or in the possession of some cannibal king, written with blood upon the dried skins of babes, there would have been a perfect harmony between its surroundings and its sentiments.

Now, I read the bible, and I find that God so loved this world that he made up his mind to damn the most of us. I have read this book and what shall I say of it? I believe it is generally better to be honest. Now, I don't believe the bible. Had I not better say so? They say that if you do you will regret it when you come to die. If that be true, I know a great many religious people who will have no cause to regret it--they don't tell their honest convictions about the bible.

The bible was the real persecutor. The bible burned heretics, built dungeons, founded the Inquisition, and trampled upon all the liberties of men. How long, O how long, will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long, will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper than death?

The believers in the bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of God. These stories are not redeemed by a single flash of wit or humor. They never rise above the dull details of stupid vice. For one, I cannot afford to soil my pages with extracts from them; and all such portions of the scriptures I leave to be examined, written upon, and explained by the clergy. Clergymen may know some way by which they can extract honey from these flowers. Until these passages are expunged from the old testament, it is not a fit book to be read by either old or young. It contains pages that no minister in the United States would read to his congregation for any reward whatever. There are chapters that no gentleman would read in the presence of a lady. There are chapters that no father would read to his child. There are narratives utterly unfit to be told; and the time will come when mankind will wonder that such a book was ever called inspired.

But as long as the bible is considered as the work of God, it will be hard to make all men too good and pure to imitate it; and as long as it is imitated there will be vile and filthy books. The literature of our country will not be sweet and clean until the bible ceases to be regarded as the production of a god.

In the days of Thomas Paine the church believed and taught that every word in the bible was absolutely true. Since his day it has been proven false in its cosmogony, false in its astronomy, false in its chronology, false in its history, and so far as the old testament is concerned, false in almost everything. There are but few, if any, scientific men who apprehend that the bible is literally true. Who on earth at this day would pretend to settle any scientific question by a text from the bible? The old belief is confined to the ignorant and zealous. The church itself will before long be driven to occupy the position of Thomas Paine!

I love any man who gave me, or helped to give me, the liberty I enjoy tonight. I love every man who helped put our flag in heaven. I love every man who has lifted his voice in all the ages for liberty, for a chainless body, and a fetterless brain. I love every man who has given to every other human being every right that he claimed for himself. I love every man who thought more of principle than he did of position. I love the men who have trampled crowns beneath their feet that they might do something for mankind.

The best minds of the orthodox world, today, are endeavoring to prove the existence of a personal Deity. All other questions occupy a minor place. You are no longer asked to swallow the bible whole, whale, Jonah and all; you are simply required to believe in God, and pay your pew-rent. There is not now an enlightened minister in the world who will seriously contend that Samson's strength was in his hair, or that the necromancers of Egypt could turn water into blood, and pieces of wood into serpents. These follies have passed away.

For my part, I would infinitely prefer to know all the results of scientific investigation than to be inspired as Moses was. Supposing the bible to be true; why is it any worse or more wicked for free-thinkers to deny it, than for priests to deny the doctrine of evolution, or the dynamic theory of heat? Why should we be damned for laughing at Samson and his foxes, while others, holding the nebular hypothesis in utter contempt, go straight to heaven?

Now when I come to a book, for instance, I read the writings of Shakespeare--Shakespeare, the greatest human being who ever existed upon this globe. What do I get out of him? All that I have sense enough to understand. I get my little cup full. Let another read him who knows nothing of the drama, who knows nothing of the impersonation of passion; what does he get from him? Very little. In other words, every man gets from a book, a flower, a star, or the sea, what he is able to get from his intellectual development and experience. Do you then believe that the bible is a different book to every human being that receives it? I do. Can God, then, through the bible, make the same revelation to two men? He cannot. Why? Because the man who reads is the man who inspires. Inspiration is in the man and not in the book.

The real oppressor, enslaver and corrupter of the people is the bible. That book is the chain that binds, the dungeon that holds the clergy. That book spreads the pall of superstition over the colleges and schools. That book puts out the eyes of science, and makes honest investigation a crime. That book unmans the politician and degrades the people. That book fills the world with bigotry, hypocrisy and fear.

Volumes might be written upon the infinite absurdity of this most incredible, wicked and foolish of all the fables contained in that repository of the impossible, called the bible. To me it is a matter of amazement, that it ever was for a moment believed by any intelligent human being.

Is it not infinitely more reasonable to say that this book is the work of man, that it is filled with mingled truth and error, with mistakes and facts, and reflects, too faithfully perhaps, the "very form and pressure of its time?" If there are mistakes in the bible, certainly they were made by man. If there is anything contrary to nature, it was written by man. If there is anything immoral, cruel, heartless or infamous, it certainly was never written by a being worthy of the adoration of mankind.

It strikes me that God might write a book that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that a real god could produce a work that would excite the admiration of mankind.

The man who now regards the old testament as, in any sense, a sacred or inspired book is, in my judgment, an intellectual and moral deformity. There is in it so much that is cruel, ignorant and ferocious that it is to me a matter of amazement that it was ever thought to be the work of a most merciful deity.

Admitting that the bible is the book of God, is that His only good job? Will not a man be damned as quick for denying the equator as denying the bible? Will he not be damned as quick for denying geology as for denying the scheme of salvation? When the bible was first written it was not believed. Had they known as much about science as we know now, that bible would not have been written.

Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed His will to man. To each reader the bible conveys a different meaning. About the meaning of this book, called a revelation, there have been ages of war and centuries of sword and flame. If written by an infinite God, He must have known that these results must follow; and thus knowing, He must be responsible for all.

Paine thought the barbarities of the old testament inconsistent with what he deemed the real character of God. He believed that murder, massacre and indiscriminate slaughter had never been commanded by the Deity. He regarded much of the bible as childish, unimportant and foolish. The scientific world entertains the same spirit in which he had attacked the pretensions of kings. He used the same weapons. All the pomp in the world could not make him cower. His reason knew no "Holy of Holies," except the abode of Truth.

Nothing can be clearer than that Moses received from the Egyptians the principal parts of his narrative, making such changes and additions as were necessary to satisfy the peculiar superstitions of his own people.

According to the theologians, God, 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 difficulties, these brothers began to cut out each other's hearts. In every land, where this letter from God 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 God every possible crime has been committed, every conceivable outrage has been perpetrated. Brave men, tender and loving women, beautiful girls and prattling babes have been exterminated in the name of Jesus Christ.

The church has burned honesty and rewarded hypocrisy. And all this, because it was commanded by a book--a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book--to examine it, even--was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this world or in the next.

All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the bible is simply and purely of human invention--of barbarian invention--is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of you brain the cowled form of superstition--then read the holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and such atrocity.

Whether the bible is false or true, is of no consequence in comparison with the mental freedom of the race. Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is inestimable. As long as man believes the bible to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief--the result of free thought.

What man who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease God? And yet our entire system of religion is based on that belief. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few.

It is hard to conceive how any sane man can read the bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.

The bible was originally written in the Hebrew language, and the Hebrew language at that time had no vowels in writing. It was written entirely with consonants, and without being divided into chapters and verses, and there was no system of punctuation whatever. After you go home to-night write an English sentence or two with only consonants close together, and you will find that it will take twice as much inspiration to read it as it did to write it.

The real bible is not the result of inspired men, nor prophets, nor evangelists, nor christs. The real bible has not been written, but is being written. Every man who finds a fact adds a word to this great book.

The bad passages in the bible are not inspired. No god ever ordered a soldier to sheathe his sword in the breast of a mother. No god ever ordered a warrior to butcher a smiling, prattling babe. No god ever upheld tyranny. No god ever said, be subject to the powers that be. No god endeavored to make man a slave and woman a beast of burden. There are thousands of good passages in the bible. Many of them are true. There are in it wise laws, good customs, some lofty and splendid things. And I do not care whether they are inspired or not, so they are true. But what I do insist upon is that the bad is not inspired.

There is no hope for you. It is just as bad to deny hell as it is to deny heaven. Prof. Swing says the bible is a poem. Dr. Ryder says it is a picture. The Garden of Eden is pictorial; a pictorial snake and a pictorial woman, I suppose, and a pictorial man, and may be it was a pictorial sin. And only a pictorial atonement!

Man must learn to rely on himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fire and clothing will. To prevent famine one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world.

Ingersoll's Lecture on Voltaire

Ladies and Gentlemen: The infidels of one age have often been the aureoled saints of the next.

The destroyers of the old are the creators of the new. As time sweeps on the old passes away and the new in its turn becomes of old.

There is in the intellectual world, as in the physical, decay and growth, and ever by the grave of buried age stand youth and joy.

The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

Political rights have been preserved by traitors; the liberty of mind by heretics.

To attack the king was treason; to dispute the priest was blasphemy.

For many years the sword and cross were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other.

The throne and altar were twins--two vultures from the same egg.

James I said: "No bishop; no king." He might have added: No cross, no crown. The king owned the bodies of men; the priest, the souls. One lived on taxes collected by force, the other on alms collected by fear--both robbers, both beggars.

These robbers and these beggars controlled two worlds. The king made laws, the priest made creeds. Both obtained their authority from God, both were the agents of the infinite. With bowed backs the people carried the burdens of one, and with wonder's open mouth received the dogmas of the other. If the people aspired to be free, they were crushed by the king, and every priest was a Herod, who slaughtered the children of the brain.

The king ruled by force, the priest by fear, and both by both. The king said to the people: "God made you peasants, and He made me king; He made you to labor, and me to enjoy; He made rags and hovels for you, robes and palaces for me. He made you to obey and me to command. Such is the justice of God," And the priest said: "God made you ignorant and vile; He made me holy and wise; you are the sheep, I am the shepherd; your fleeces belong to me. If you do not obey me here, God will punish you now and torment you forever in another world. Such is the mercy of God."

"You must not reason. Reason is a rebel. You must not contradict--contradiction is born of egotism; you must believe. He that has ears to hear let him hear. Heaven is a question of ears."

Fortunately for us, there have been traitors and there have been heretics, blasphemers, thinkers, investigators, lovers of liberty, men of genius, who have given their lives to better the condition of their fellow-men.