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                The Works of ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

          (This is Mr. Ingersoll's last public address,
          delivered before the American Free Religious
               association, Boston, June 2, 1899.)

     It is asserted that an infinite God created all things,
governs all things, and that the creature should be obedient and
thankful to the creator; that the creator demands certain things,
and that the person who complies with these demands is religious.
This kind of religion has been substantially universal.

     For many centuries and by many peoples it was believed that
this God demanded sacrifices; that he was pleased when parents shed
the blood of their babes. Afterward it was supposed that he was
satisfied with the blood of oxen, lambs and doves, and that in
exchange for or on account of these sacrifices, this God gave rain,
sunshine and harvest. It was also believed that if the sacrifices
were not made, this God sent pestilence, famine, flood and
earthquake.

     The last phase of this belief in sacrifice was, according to
the Christian doctrine, that God accepted the blood of his son, and
that after his son had been murdered, he, God, was satisfied, and
wanted no more blood.

     During all these years and by all these peoples it was
believed that this God heard and answered prayer, that he forgave
sins and saved the souls of true believers. This, in a general way,
is the definition of religion.

     Now, the questions are, Whether religion was founded on any
known fact? Whether such a being as God exists? Whether he was the
creator of yourself and myself? Whether any prayer was ever
answered? Whether any sacrifice of babe or ox secured the favor of
this unseen God?

     First -- Did an infinite God create the children of men?

     Why did he create the intellectually inferior?

     Why did he create the deformed and helpless?

     Why did he create the criminal, the idiotic, the insane?



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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     Can infinite wisdom and power make any excuse for the creation
of failures?

     Are the failures under obligation to their creator?

     Second -- Is an infinite God the governor of this world?

     Is he responsible for all the chiefs, kings, emperors, and
queens?

     Is he responsible for all the wars that have been waged, for
all the innocent blood that has been shed?

     Is he responsible for the centuries of slavery, for the backs
that have been scarred with the lash, for the babes that have been
sold from the breasts of mothers, for the families that have been
separated and destroyed?

     Is this God responsible for religious persecution, for the
Inquisition, for the thumb-screw and rack, and for all the
instruments of torture?

     Did this God allow the cruel and vile to destroy the brave and
virtuous? Did he allow tyrants to shed the blood of patriots?

     Did he allow his enemies to torture and burn his friends?

     What is such a God worth?

     Would a decent man, having the power to prevent it, allow his
enemies to torture and burn his friends?

     Can we conceive of a devil base enough to prefer his enemies
to his friends?

     If a good and infinitely powerful God governs this world, how
can we account for cyclones, earthquakes, pestilence and famine?

     How can we account for cancers, for microbes, for diphtheria
and the thousand diseases that prey on infancy?

     How can we account for the wild beasts that devour human
beings, for the fanged serpents whose bite is death?

     How can we account for a world where life feeds on life?

     Were beak and claw, tooth and fang, invented and produced by
infinite mercy?

     Did infinite goodness fashion the wings of the eagles so that
their fleeing prey could be overtaken?

     Did infinite goodness create the beasts of prey with the
intention that they should devour the weak and helpless?

     Did infinite goodness create the countless worthless living
things that breed within and feed upon the flesh of higher forms?


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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     Did infinite wisdom intentionally produce the microscopic
beasts that feed upon the optic nerve?

     Think of blinding a man to satisfy the appetite of a microbe!

     Think of life feeding on life! Think of the victims! Think of
the Niagara of blood pouring over the precipice of cruelty!

     In view of these facts, what, after all, is religion?

     It is fear.

     Fear builds the altar and offers the sacrifice.

     Fear erects the cathedral and bows the head of man in worship.

     Fear bends the knees and utters the prayer.

     Fear pretends to love.

     Religion teaches the slave-virtues -- obedience, humility,
self-denial, forgiveness, non-resistance.

     Lips, religious and fearful, tremblingly repeat this passage:
"Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." This is the abyss of
degradation.

     Religion does not teach self-reliance, independence,
manliness, courage, self-defence. Religion makes God a master and
man his serf. The master cannot be great enough to make slavery
sweet.

                               II

     If this God exists, how do we know that he is good? How can we
prove that he is merciful, that he cares for the children of men?
If this God exists, he has on many occasions seen millions of his
poor children plowing the fields, sowing and planting the grain,
and when he saw them he knew that they depended on the expected
crop for life, and yet this good God, this merciful being, withheld
the rain. He caused the sun to rise, to steal all moisture from the
land, but gave no rain. He saw the seeds that man had planted
wither and perish, but he sent no rain. He saw the people look with
sad eyes upon the barren earth, and he sent no rain. He saw them
slowly devour the little that they had, and saw them when the days
of hunger came -- saw them slowly waste away, saw their hungry,
sunken eyes, heard their prayers, saw them devour the miserable
animals that they had, saw fathers and mothers, insane with hunger,
kill and eat their shriveled babes, and yet the heaven above them
was as brass and the earth beneath as iron, and he sent no rain.
Can we say that in the heart of this God there blossomed the flower
of pity? Can we say that he cared for the children of men? Can we
say that his mercy endureth forever?

     Do we prove that this God is good because he sends the cyclone
that wrecks villages and covers the fields with the mangled bodies
of fathers, mothers and babes? Do we prove his goodness by showing
that he has opened the earth and swallowed thousands of his 

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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

helpless children, or that with the volcanoes he has overwhelmed
them with rivers of fire? Can we infer the goodness of God from the
facts we know?

     If these calamities did not happen, would we suspect that God
cared nothing for human beings? If there were no famine, no
pestilence, no cyclone, no earthquake, would we think that God is
not good?

     According to the theologians, God did not make all men alike.
He made races differing in intelligence, stature and color. Was
there goodness, was there wisdom in this?

     Ought the superior races to thank God that they are not the
inferior? If we say yes, then I ask another question: Should the
inferior races thank God that they are not superior, or should they
thank God that they are not beasts?

     When God made these different races he knew that the superior
would enslave the inferior, knew that the inferior would be
conquered, and finally destroyed.

     If God did this, and knew the blood that would be shed, the
agonies that would be endured, saw the countless fields covered
with the corpses of the slain, saw all the bleeding backs of
slaves, all the broken hearts of mothers bereft of babes, if he saw
and knew all this, can we conceive of a more malicious fiend?

     Why, then, should we say that God is good?

     The dungeons against whose dripping walls the brave and
generous have sighed their souls away, the scaffolds stained and
glorified with noble blood, the hopeless slaves with scarred and
bleeding backs, the writhing martyrs clothed in flame, the virtuous
stretched on racks, their joints and muscles torn apart, the flayed
and bleeding bodies of the just, the extinguished eyes of those who
sought for truth, the countless patriots who fought and died in
vain, the burdened, beaten, weeping wives, the shriveled faces of
neglected babes, the murdered millions of the vanished years, the
victims of the winds and waves, of flood and flame, of imprisoned
forces in the earth, of lightning's stroke, of lava's molten
stream, of famine, plague and lingering pain, the mouths that drip
with blood, the fangs that poison, the beaks that wound and tear,
the triumphs of the base, the rule and sway of wrong, the crowns
that cruelty has worn and the robed hypocrites, with clasped and
bloody hands, who thanked their God -- a phantom fiend -- that
liberty had been banished from the world, these souvenirs of the
dreadful past, these horrors that still exist, these frightful
facts deny that any God exists who has the will and power to guard
and bless the human race.

                               III

             THE POWER THAT WORKS FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

     Most people cling to the supernatural. If they give up one
God, they imagine another. Having outgrown Jehovah, they talk about
the power that works for righteousness.

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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     What is this power?

     Man advances, and necessarily advances through experience. A
man wishing to go to a certain place comes to where the road
divides. He takes the left hand, believing it to be the right road,
and travels until he finds that it is the wrong one. He retraces
his steps and takes the right hand road and reaches the place
desired. The next time he goes to the same place, he does not take
the left hand road. He has tried that road, and knows that it is
the wrong road. He takes the right road, and thereupon these
theologians say, "There is a power that works for righteousness."

     A child, charmed by the beauty of the flame, grasps it with
its dimpled hand. The hand is burned, and after that the child
keeps its hand out of the fire. The power that works for
righteousness has taught the child a lesson.

     The accumulated experience of the world is a power and force
that works for righteousness. This force is not conscious, not
intelligent. It has no will, no purpose. It is a result.

     So thousands have endeavored to establish the existence of God
by the fact that we have what is called the moral sense; that is to
say, a conscience.

     It is insisted by these theologians, and by many of the so-
called philosophers, that this moral sense, this sense of duty, of
obligation, was imported, and that conscience is an exotic. Taking
the ground that it was not produced here, was not produced by man,
they then imagine a God from whom it came.

     Man is a social being. We live together in families, tribes
and nations.

     The members of a family, of a tribe, of a nation, who increase
the happiness of the family, of the tribe or of the nation, are
considered good members. They are praised, admired and respected.
They are regarded as good; that is to say, as moral.

     The members who add to the misery of the family, the tribe or
the nation, are considered bad members.

     They are blamed, despised, punished. They are regarded as
immoral.

     The family, the tribe, the nation, creates a standard of
conduct, of morality. There is nothing supernatural in this.

     The greatest of human beings has said, "Conscience is born of
love."

     The sense of obligation, of duty, was naturally produced.

     Among savages, the immediate consequences of actions are taken
into consideration. As people advance, the remote consequences are
perceived. The standard of conduct becomes higher. The imagination 



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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

is cultivated. A man puts himself in the place of another. The
sense of duty becomes stronger, more imperative. Man judges
himself.

     He loves, and love is the commencement, the foundation of the
highest virtues. He injures one that he loves. Then comes regret,
repentance, sorrow, conscience. In all this there is nothing
supernatural.

     Man has deceived himself. Nature is a mirror in which man sees
his own image, and all supernatural religions rest on the pretence
that the image, which appears to be behind this mirror. has been
caught.

     All the metaphysicians of the spiritual type, from Plato to
Swedenborg, have manufactured their facts, and all founders of
religion have done the same.

     Suppose that an infinite God exists, what can we do for him?
Being infinite, he is conditionless; being conditionless, he cannot
be benefitted or injured. He cannot want. He has.

     Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite
being wants his praise!

                               IV

     What has our religion done? Of course, it is admitted by
Christians that all other religions are false, and consequently we
need examine only our own.

     Has Christianity done good? Has it made men nobler, more
merciful, nearer honest? When the church had control, were men made
better and happier?

     What has been the effect of Christianity in Italy, in Spain,
in Portugal, in Ireland?

     What has religion done for Hungary or Austria? What was the
effect of Christianity in Switzerland, in Holland, in Scotland, in
England, in America? Let us be honest. Could these countries have
been worse without religion? Could they have been worse had they
had any other religion than Christianity?

     Would Torquemada have been worse had he been a follower of
Zoroaster? Would Calvin have been more bloodthirsty if he had
believed in the religion of the South Sea Islanders? Would the
Dutch have been more idiotic if they had denied the Father, Son and
Holy Ghost, and worshiped the blessed trinity of sausage, beer and
cheese? Would John Knox have been any worse had he deserted Christ
and become a follower of Confucius?

     Take our own dear, merciful Puritan Fathers? What did
Christianity do for them? They hated pleasure. On the door of life
they hung the crape of death. They muffled all the bells of
gladness. They made cradles by putting rockers on coffins. In the
Puritan year there were twelve Decembers. They tried to do away
with infancy and youth, with prattle of babes and the song of the 
morning.
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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     The religion of the Puritan was an unadulterated curse. The
Puritan believed the Bible to be the word of God, and this belief
has always made those who held it cruel and wretched. Would the
Puritan have been worse if he had adopted the religion of the North
American Indians?

     Let me refer to just one fact showing the influence of a
belief in the Bible on human beings.

     "On the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth she was
presented with a Geneva Bible by an old man representing Time. with
truth standing by his side as a child. The Queen received the
Bible, kissed it, and pledged herself to diligently read therein.
In the dedication of this blessed Bible the Queen was piously
exhorted to put all Papists to the sword."

     In this incident we see the real spirit of Protestant lovers
of the Bible. In other words, it was just as fiendish, just as
infamous as the Catholic spirit.

     Has the Bible made the people of Georgia kind and merciful?
Would the lynchers be more ferocious if they worshiped gods of wood
and stone?

                                V

               HOW CAN MANKIND BE REFORMED WITHOUT

                            RELIGION?

     Religion has been tried, and in all countries, in all times,
has failed.

     Religion has never made man merciful.

     Remember the Inquisition.

     What effect did religion have on slavery?

     What effect upon Libby, Saulsbury and Andersonville?

     Religion has always been the enemy of science, of
investigation and thought.

     Religion has never made man free.

     It has never made man moral, temperate, industrious and
honest.

     Are Christians more temperate, nearer virtuous, nearer honest
than savages?

     Among savages do we not find that their vices and cruelties
are the fruits of their superstitions?

     To those who believe in the Uniformity of Nature, religion is
impossible.


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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     Can we affect the nature and qualities of substance by prayer?
Can we hasten or delay the tides by worship? Can we change winds by
sacrifice? Will kneelings give us wealth? Can we cure disease by
supplication? Can we add to our knowledge by ceremony? Can we
receive virtue or honor as alms?

     Are not the facts in the mental world just as stubborn -- just
as necessarily produced -- as the facts in the material world? Is
not what we call mind just as natural as what we call body?

     Religion rests on the idea that Nature has a master and that
this master will listen to prayer; that this master punishes and
rewards; that he loves praise and flattery and hates the brave and
free.

     Has man obtained any help from heaven?

                               VI

     If we have a theory, we must have facts for the foundation. We
must have corner-stones. We must not build on guesses, fancies,
analogies or inferences. The structure must have a basement. If we
build, we must begin at the bottom.

     I have a theory and I have four corner-stones.

     The first stone is that matter -- substance -- cannot be
destroyed, cannot be annihilated.

     The second stone is that force cannot be destroyed, cannot be
annihilated.

     The third stone is that matter and force cannot exist apart --
no matter without force -- no force without matter.

     The fourth stone is that that which cannot be destroyed could
not have been created; that the indestructible is the uncreatable.

     If these corner-stones are facts, it follows as a necessity
that matter and force are from and to eternity; that they can
neither be increased nor diminished.

     It follows that nothing has been or can be created; that there
never has been or can be a creator.

     It follows that there could not have been any intelligence,
any design back of matter and force.

     There is no intelligence without force. There is no force
without matter. Consequently there could not by any possibility
have been any intelligence, any force, back of matter.

     It therefore follows that the supernatural does not and cannot
exist. If these four corner-stones are facts, Nature has no master.
If matter and force are from and to eternity, it follows as a
necessity that no God exists; that no God created or governs the
universe; that no God exists who answers prayer; no God who succors


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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

the oppressed; no God who pities the sufferings of innocence; no
God who cares for the slaves with scarred flesh, the mothers robbed
of their babes; no God who rescues the tortured, and no God that
saves a martyr from the flames. In other words, it proves that man
has never received any help from heaven; that all sacrifices have
been in vain, and that all prayers have died unanswered in the
heedless air. I do not pretend to know. I say what I think.

     If matter and force have existed from eternity, it then
follows that all that has been possible has happened, all that is
possible is happening, and all that will be possible will happen.

     In the universe there is no chance, no caprice. Every event
has parents.

     That which has not happened, could not. The present is the
necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the
future.

     In the infinite chain there is, and there can be, no broken,
no missing link. The form and motion of every star, the climate of
every world, all forms of vegetable and animal life, all instinct,
intelligence and conscience, all assertions and denials, all vices
and virtues, all thoughts and dreams, all hopes and fears, are
necessities. Not one of the countless things and relations in the
universe could have been different.

                               VII

     If matter and force are from eternity, then we can say that
man had no intelligent creator, that man was not a special
creation.

     We now know, if we know anything, that Jehovah, the divine
potter, did not mix and mould clay into the forms of men and women,
and then breathe the breath of life into these forms.

     We now know that our first parents were not foreigners. We
know that they were natives of this world, produced here, and that
their life did not come from the breath of any god. We now know, if
we know anything, that the universe is natural, and that men and
women have been naturally produced. We now know our ancestors, our
pedigree. We have the family tree.

     We have all the links of the chain, twenty-six links inclusive
from moner to man.

     We did not get our information from inspired books. We have
fossil facts and living forms.

     From the simplest creatures, from blind sensation, from
organism, from one vague want, to a single cell with a nucleus, to
a hollow ball filled with fluid, to a cup with double walls, to a
flat worm, to a something that begins to breathe, to an organism
that has a spinal chord, to a link between the invertebrate to the
vertebrate, to one that has a cranium -- a house for a brain -- to
one with fins, still onward to one with fore and hinder fins, to 


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the reptile mammalia, to the marsupials, to the lemurs, dwellers in
trees, to the simiae, to the pithecanthropi, and lastly, to man.

     We know the paths that life has traveled. We know the
footsteps of advance. They have been traced. The last link has been
found. For this we are indebted, more than to all others, to the
greatest of biologists, Ernest Haeckel.

     We now believe that the universe is natural and we deny the
existence of the supernatural.

                              VIII

                             REFORM.

     For thousands of years men and women have been trying to
reform the world. They have created gods and devils, heavens and
hells; they have written sacred books, performed miracles, built
cathedrals and dungeons; they have crowned and uncrowned kings and
queens; they have tortured and imprisoned, flayed alive and burned;
they have preached and prayed; they have tried promises and
threats; they have coaxed and persuaded; they have preached and
taught, and in countless ways have endeavored to make people
honest, temperate, industrious and virtuous; they have built
hospitals and asylums, universities and schools, and seem to have
done their very best to make mankind better and happier, and yet
they have not succeeded.

     Why have the reformers failed? I will tell them why.

     Ignorance, poverty and vice are populating the world. The
gutter is a nursery. People unable even to support themselves fill
the tenements, the huts and hovels with children. They depend on
the Lord, on luck and charity. They are not intelligent enough to
think about consequences or to feel responsibility. At the same
time they do not want children, because a child is a curse, a curse
to them and to itself. The babe is not welcome, because it is a
burden. These unwelcome children fill the jails and prisons, the
asylums and hospitals, and they crowd the scaffolds. A few are
rescued by chance or charity, but the great majority are failures.
They become vicious, ferocious. They live by fraud and violence,
and bequeath their vices to their children.

     Against this inundation of vice the forces of reform are
helpless, and charity itself becomes an unconscious promoter of
crime.

     Failure seems to be the trademark of Nature. Why? Nature has
no design, no intelligence. Nature produces without purpose,
sustains without intention and destroys without thought. Man has a
little intelligence, and he should use it. Intelligence is the only
lever capable of raising mankind.

     The real question is, can we prevent the ignorant, the poor,
the vicious, from filling the world with their children?

     Can we prevent this Missouri of ignorance and vice from
emptying into the Mississippi of civilization?

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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

     Must the world forever remain the victim of ignorant passion?
Can the world be civilized to that degree that consequences will be
taken into consideration by all?

     Why should men and women have children that they cannot take
care of, children that are burdens and curses? Why? Because they
have more passion than intelligence, more passion than conscience,
more passion than reason.

     You cannot reform these people with tracts and talk. You
cannot reform these people with preach and creed. Passion is, and
always has been, deaf. These weapons of reform are substantially
useless. Criminals, tramps, beggars and failures are increasing
every day. The prisons, jails, poorhouses and asylums are crowded.
Religion is helpless. Law can punish, but it can neither reform
criminals nor prevent crime. The tide of vice is rising. The war
that is now being waged against the forces of evil is as hopeless
as the battle of the fireflies against the darkness of night.

     There is but one hope. Ignorance, poverty and vice must stop
populating the world. This cannot be done by moral suasion. This
cannot be done by talk or example. This cannot be done by religion
or by law, by priest or by hangman. This cannot be done by force,
physical or moral.

     To accomplish this there is but one way. Science must make
woman the owner, the mistress of herself. Science, the only
possible savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to
decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.

     This is the solution of the whole question. This frees woman.
The babes that are then born will be welcome. They will be clasped
with glad hands to happy breasts. They will fill homes with light
and joy.

     Men and women who believe that slaves are purer, truer, than
the free, who believe that fear is a safer guide than knowledge,
that only those are really good who obey the commands of others,
and that ignorance is the soil in which the perfect, perfumed
flower of virtue grows, will with protesting hands hide their
shocked faces.

     Men and women who think that light is the enemy of virtue,
that purity dwells in darkness, that it is dangerous for human
beings to know themselves and the facts in Nature that affect their
well being, will be horrified at the thought of making intelligence
the master of passion.

     But I look forward to the time when men and women by reason of
their knowledge of consequences, of the morality born of
intelligence, will refuse to perpetuate disease and pain, will
refuse to fill the world with failures.

     When that time comes the prison walls will fall, the dungeons
will be flooded with light, and the shadow of the scaffold will
cease to curse the earth. Poverty and crime will be childless. The
withered hands of want will not be stretched for alms. They will be
dust. The whole world will be intelligent, virtuous and free.

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                        WHAT IS RELIGION?

                               IX

     Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

     It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades
of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile.

     It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to
drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to
think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the
breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the
picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and
kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the
forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming
years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel
within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music,
the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart.

     And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach
with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies
wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the
weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for
facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the
now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to
develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the
soul.

     This is real religion. This is real worship.




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