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Title: Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches by Robert Green Ingersoll, Roger E. Greeley ISBN: 0-87975-209-2 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: January, 1983 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Republicans before Tom Delay
Comment: Ingersoll wrote of a Republican party that still remembered the meaning of republic, before it became the haven of the religious right. A man who could have been President easily, but chose personal integrity over political ambition. The great agnostic was never an atheist, he may have lived the best Christian life of the 19th Century. This book makes you want to weep when we think of all the great men that are overlooked because their truth was unpopular, while we glorify the Andrew Jackson and omit his Indian Removal Act from high school history books.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Great Agnostic
Comment: Nobody knows Ingersoll's name today, and that's a shame. America has pushed him down into the footnotes of its history books. If it remembers him at all, it is as an atheist crackpot, a son of Tom Paine.
"I would rather be right than be president." Henry Clay said it, but if he hadn't, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll would have. It was certainly more true of Ingersoll than of Clay. He had the qualities people sought, then and now, in a leader. He had a keen, powerful mind; he was a matchless orator in an age which understood, and adored, oratory. He had led a regiment bravely in battle in the Civil War. He was honest, moral, dignified and in love with his wife and daughters. But when people encouraged him to run for president, or governor, he told them it was impossible, that he could only win votes if he would renounce his agnosticism, which he would never do. He would renounce high office rather than be false to his conception of truth. Between power and integrity there was, for him, no choice. And this disqualified him for office.
Mark Twain idolized him. Oscar Wilde, when he came to the United States, was curious to see this man Ingersoll whose lectures were so much more in demand than his own. He attended several Ingersoll performances, and pronounced him "the most intelligent man in America." It has been written that Frederick Douglass said that, "of all the great men of his personal acquaintance, there had been only two in whose presence he could be without feeling that he was regarded as inferior to them -- Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll."
People turned out by the thousands to hear him speak -- 50,000 one night in Chicago, in the days before microphones and sound systems. Ingersoll criss-crossed an America still deeply pious, heaping scorn on the brutality of religion. By the time he died in 1899, he had probably been heard by more human beings than any other person who lived in the 19th century. Although Ingersoll launched a broad-front free-thinker's assault on religious credulity, people seemed to focus on his words against the stupider aspects of Christianity, the ones that good, intelligent people had, by the late 1800s, outgrown. His sarcasm shreded the lingering bigotry in the national religion.
He held the odd status of beloved agnostic in a Christian land, in part, because this public man was so clearly living an honest, useful and loving life. His house was filled with spiritual and intellectual light, and he used a wonderful mind and a matchless personal power in the service of the good of all humanity. He frankly advocated equality for women when few men did, and he damned child abuse masquerading as parental authority. "Gentlemen," he said in one circumstance, "it isn't to have you think that I would call Christ 'an illegitimate child' which hurts me: it is that you should think that I would think any the less of Christ if I knew it was so."
His friend Walt Whitman probably captured the common view of Ingersoll when he called him, "a fiery blast for new virtues, which are only old virtues done over for honest use again." The odd thing is, Ingersoll would have been shut out of public discourse in America today. The fundamentalist movement began a few years after Ingersoll died, and the level of public and private spirituality in this country sank steadily and rapidly, unto the current level, where leading "men of faith" include Bob Jones and Jimmy Swaggart, "a cellarage only to be gazed at across the barriers of libel law."
Ingersoll's words and his life give proof to the suspicion many Americans may have, but few dare utter, that people without religion can live full, generous public lives, can have a better sense of right and wrong, than those bound up in creeds. I look forward to the day when I can cast a vote for a man as worthy as Ingersoll to be president of the United States, whether he believes in God or not. I doubt I will live to do it.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Book For Thinkers...
Comment: I have to admit that much of the fundamentalist, "born-again" Christian dogma leaves me cold. I wince when I hear about the fire and brimstone of a god who would sentence one of his children to infinite punishment for a finite transgression. So did Robert G. Ingersoll.
In fact, Ingersoll spent the better part of his life urging the rejection of a god who hurls thunderbolts and and seeks bloody sacrifices as atonements for man's "depravity." In this book you will find challenging essays that will prompt you to think about your religious/spiritual assumptions. Some folks said that Ingersoll was an atheist or at least an agnostic, but I'm not sure that is true. I believe that he definitely rejected the religious superstitions of a jealous/angry/vengeful god.
But I also believe that a man can't write as did Ingersoll if he is not touched by something beyond himself; something that whispers through the organized mass of rage that sometimes passes itself off as Christianity. One of my most favorite sayings of Ingersoll is "Around the cross of immortality, fundamentalist Christianity has coiled a serpent called hell."
If you are not afraid to think and be exposed to new ideas, then you will find yourself pondering this book long after you have finished reading it. If I could sum up Ingersoll's main thrust down through the years it would be, "fear not." Perhaps there are no more important words than those.
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Title: American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll by Orvin Larson ISBN: 1877733334 Publisher: Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert G. Ingersoll ISBN: 0879753617 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: September, 1986 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, Philip Sheldon Foner ISBN: 0806505494 Publisher: Lyle Stuart Hardcover Pub. Date: November, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Sixty-Five Press Interviews With Robert G. Ingersoll by Robert Green Ingersoll, Robert G. Ingersoll ISBN: 1578849101 Publisher: American Atheist Press Pub. Date: 15 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S ISBN: 0932813747 Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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