Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll—Latest
Contents
[Thomas Paine]
[Liberty of Man, Woman and Child]
[Orthodoxy]
[Blasphemy]
[Some Reasons Why]
[Intellectual Development]
[Human Rights]
[Talmagian Theology (Second Lecture)]
[Talmagian Theology (Third Lecture)]
[Religious Intolerance]
[Hereafter]
[Review of His Reviewers]
[How the Gods Grow]
[The Religion of our Day]
[Heretics And Heresies]
[The Bible]
[Voltaire]
[Myth and Miracle]
[Ingersoll's Letter, on The Chinese God]
[Ingersoll's Letter, Is Suicide a Sin?]
[Ingersoll's Letter, The Right To One's Life]
Ingersoll's Lecture on Thomas Paine—Delivered in Central Music Hall,
Chicago, January 29, 1880 (From the Chicago Times, Verbatim Report)
Ladies and Gentlemen:—It so happened that the first speech—the very first public speech I ever made—took occasion to defend the memory of Thomas Paine.
I did it because I had read a little something of the history of my country. I did it because I felt indebted to him for the liberty I then enjoyed—and whatever religion may be true, ingratitude is the blackest of crimes. And whether there is any God or not, in every star that shines, gratitude is a virtue.
The man who will tell the truth about the dead is a good man, and for one, about this man, I intend to tell just as near the truth as I can.
Most history consists in giving the details of things that never happened—most biography is usually the lie coming from the mouth of flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice, and whoever attacks the religion of a country will, in his turn, be attacked. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by all the meanness of ingenuity. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that there is still one weapon left in the arsenal of Jehovah—slander.
I was reading, yesterday, a poem called the "Light of Asia," and I read in that how a Boodh seeing a tigress perishing of thirst, with her mouth upon the dry stone of a stream, with her two cubs sucking at her dry and empty dugs, this Boodh took pity upon this wild and famishing beast, and, throwing from himself the Yellowrobe of his order, and stepping naked before this tigress, said: "Here is meat for you and your cubs." In one moment the crooked daggers of her claws ran riot in his flesh, and in another he was devoured. Such, during nearly all the history of this world, has been the history of every man who has stood in front of superstition.