Robert G. Ingersoll
Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was a Civil War veteran, American political leader, and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism.
Ingersoll was most noted as an orator, the most popular of the age, when oratory was public entertainment. He spoke on every subject, from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, but his most popular subjects were agnosticism and the sanctity and refuge of the family. He committed his speeches to memory although they were sometimes more than three hours long. His audiences were said never to be restless.
His radical views on religion, slavery, woman's suffrage, and other issues of the day effectively prevented him from ever pursuing or holding political offices higher than that of state attorney general. Illinois Republicans tried to pressure him into running for governor on the condition that Ingersoll conceal his agnosticism during the campaign, which he refused on the basis that concealing information from the public was immoral.
Many of Ingersoll's speeches advocated freethought and humanism, and often poked fun at religious belief. For this, the press often attacked him, but neither his views nor the negative press could stop his rising popularity. At the height of Ingersoll's fame, audiences would pay $1 or more to hear him speak, a giant sum for his day.
While his essays are obviously dated to their time, he was remarkably liberal for his period. In his essay, "How to Reform Mankind" Ingersoll states, "There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women -- of free mothers." From the same essay, he had an excellent suggestion for all that good space lost in the grand churches that stand all over our country:
"Now, it seems to me that it would be far better for the people of a town, having a population of four or five thousand, to have one church and the edifice should be of use, not only on Sunday, but on every day of the week. In this building should be the library of the town. It should be the clubhouse of the people, where they could find the principal newspapers and periodicals of the world. Its auditorium should be like a theater. Plays should be presented by home talent; an orchestra formed, music cultivated. The people should meet there at any time they desire ... and connected with it should be rooms for the playing of games, billiards, cards, and chess ...
It should be the intellectual center. They could employ a gentleman of ability, possibly of genius, to address them on Sundays, on subjects that would be of real interest, of real importance ... Let him make his congregation conversant with the philosophies of the world, with the great thinkers, the great poets, the great artists, the great actors, the great orators, the great inventors, the captains of industry, the soldiers of progress. Let them have a Sunday school in which the children shall be made acquainted with the facts of nature; with botany, entomology, something of geology and astronomy. Let them be made familiar with the greatest of poems, the finest paragraphs of literature, with stories of the heroic, the self-denying and generous. Now, it seems to me that such a congregation in a few years would become the most intelligent people in the United States."
It is this kind of practicality of rational thought that just tickles me.
[The background on Robert Ingersoll's life is sourced from Wikipedia]
Emmanuel L. Goldstein (yes, that Emmanuel Goldstein!)
