Last November, I stopped into a book store at LaGuardia because I needed something to read on my flight. I found, "What's God Got to Do with It? Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk & the Separation of Church & State," a collection of Ingersoll's work edited by Tim Page. The description on the back intrigued me:
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) is one of the great lost figures in United States history, all but forgotten at just the time America needs him most. An outspoken and unapologetic agnostic, fervent champion of the separation of church and state, and advocate of the rights of women and African Americans, he drew enormous audiences in the late nineteenth century with his lectures on "freethought."
We do indeed need to resurrect Ingersoll's work. He offers compelling arguments to fight back against our modern day theocrats - the Bush administration, Bill Frist, Jerry Falwell, the AFA - all those who are seeking an end to religious freedom in this country. The applicability of Ingersoll's work today is uncanny.
He saw the impossibility of our nation selecting its official God:
And if there is to be an acknowledgment of God in the Constitution, the question naturally arises as to which God is to have this honor. Shall we select the God of the Catholics - he who has established an infallible church presided over by an infallible pope, and who is delighted with certain ceremonies and placated by prayers uttered in exceedingly common Latin? Is it the God of the Presbyterian with the Five Points of Calvinism, who is ingenious enough to harmonize necessity and responsibility, and who in some way justifies himself for damning most of his own children? Is it the God of the Puritan, the enemy of joy - of the Baptists, who is great enough to govern the universe, and small enough to allow the destiny of a soul to depend on whether the body it inhabited was immersed or spinkled? What God is it proposed to put in the Constitution? Is it the God of the Old Testament, who was a believer in slavery and who justified polygamy? If slavery was right then, it is right now; and if Jehovah was right then, the Mormons are right now. Are we to have the God who issued a commandment against all art - who was the enemy of investigation and of free speech? Is it the God who commanded the husband to stone his wife to death because she differed with him on the subject of religion?
Ingersoll also saw the absurdity in what is today described as the secular liberals' efforts to remove God from the public square:
It is proposed to acknowledge a God who is the lawful and rightful Governor of nations; the one who ordained the powers that be. If this God is really the Governor of nations, it is not necessary to acknowledge him in the Constitution. This would not add to his power. If he governs all nations now, he has always controlled the affairs of men.
Having this control, why did he not see to it that he was recognized in the Constitution of the United States? If he had the supreme authority and neglected to put himself in the Constitution, is not this, at least, prima facie evidence that he did not desire to be there?
He understood that when religion influences policy decisions, women suffer, as we now witness the retraction of the availability of abortion and birth control, a bizarre fixation on women who cannot speak, such as Laci Peterson and Terri Schiavo, and the plain reality that brutal crimes are committed against women precisely because we are women.
As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The Bible was not written by a woman. Within its lids there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her. She is regarded as the property of man ... She is as much below her husband as her husband is to Christ. She is not allowed to speak. The gospel is too pure to be spoken by her polluted lips.
Now, think about our social safety net and the diversion of our tax dollars to churches under Bush's "faith based initiative." Ingersoll has a response:
There should be no Methodist or Catholic or Presbyterian hospitals or orphan asylums. All these should be supported by the State. There is no such thing as Catholic charity or Methodist charity. Charity belongs to humanity, not to any particular form of faith or religion. You will find as many charitable people who never heard of religion, as you can find in any church. The State should provide for those who ought to be provided for.
And perhaps most important of all, Ingersoll reminds us why we are continue our activism, in whatever form it takes, to wrest control of this country from the GOP:
I belong to the party that is prosperous when the country is prosperous. I belong to the party that believes in good crops; that is glad when a fellow finds a gold mine; that rejoices when there are forty bushels of wheat to an acre ... I belong to the party that is happy when the people are happy; when the laboring man gets three dollars a day; when he has roast beef on his table; when he has a carpet on the floor ... I belong to the party that is happy when everybody smiles, when we have plenty of money, good horses, good carriages; when our wives are happy and our children feel glad. I belong to the party whose banner floats side by side with the great flag of the country; that does not grow fat on defeat.
Much of Ingersoll's work is available online and discoverable with a Google search of his name. His writings are worthy of resurrection; Tim Page is right that this is a time when America needs Ingersoll the most.
In closing, I'll add one last Ingersoll quote, simply because it's so powerful:
Slowly, beautifully, like the coming of the dawn, came the grand truth that the universe is governed by law - that disease fastens itself upon the good and upon the bad; that the tornado cannot be stopped by counting beads; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended knees, the lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, nor the cruel waves of the sea for prayer; that paying tithes causes rather than prevents famine; that pleasure is not sin; that happiness is the only good; that demons and gods exist only in the imagination; that faith is a lullaby, sung to put the soul to sleep; that devotion is a bribe that fear offers to supposed power; that offering rewards in another world for obedience in this is simply buying a soul on credit; that knowledge consists in ascertaining the laws of nature, and that wisdom is the science of happiness.