The following article was adapted from the keynote address given at the thirtieth anniversary celebration event at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York, on August 12, 2023.—The Editoris
Seth Andrews with Margaret Downey. Image credit: Debbie Allen
Today we remember and honor one of the greatest minds of the past several centuries: thoughtful, wildly intelligent, insightful, impactful, and remarkable. So you can imagine my surprise when the organizers of the thirtieth anniversary of the reopening of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum asked me to deliver the keynote.
Robert Green Ingersoll was a brilliant man; I’m an ex-Christian who took thirty years to figure out that Bible donkeys couldn’t speak Hebrew. But maybe my invitation makes sense. I’m a storyteller, telling the story of his journey as it influenced and encouraged my own, 108 years after his death.
Ingersoll’s words gave me food for thought, courage, and hope at a crossroads in my life. I was thirty-seven years old and finally holding my faith to the fires. The exit from Christianity was often scary and stressful. My gut was in knots. I feared losing my family, my friends, my job, my identity.
Fortunately, along the way, my Google searches about nonreligion brought me to the writings of Ingersoll, and my eyes locked onto them. He was deep, but he didn’t write in the typical snobby PhD-speak that academics often use to make the commoners feel stupid.
Ingersoll wasn’t a shepherd barking at sheep. His words beckoned me as if I were a fellow traveler, allowing me to admire and learn but always speaking to me as an equal. That was his gift. He was perhaps the most quotable writer of the past 300 years.
Ingersoll’s words were so influential that for more than the past decade I’ve often included a favorite Ingersoll quote over my signature when I sign books at conventions. In my activism, this quote has become a creed. In his famous 1885 lecture “Orthodoxy,” Ingersoll said, “The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.”
With so many celebrated untruths circulating in society today, I wonder how Ingersoll would respond to modern times. The conspiracies, the inequities, the cruelties, the possibilities. What might his commentary on our twenty-first century be? I’m convinced it would be the same commentary he made back in the 1800s. The backdrop has changed but human nature has not.
I would love to hear his take on history revisionists such as self-taught evangelical pseudo-historian David Barton, Dallas mega-pastor Robert James Jeffress preaching sermons titled “America Is a Christian Nation,” or former President Donald J. Trump tear-gassing a street crowd so he could hold a Bible he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.
I would want Ingersoll to respond to reports of Supreme Court conservatives holding private prayers as they impose Christian ideology by fiat. I would try to introduce him to my own Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, the man who gave a 2022 midterm election prayer dedicating the entire state to his Jesus, effectively declaring Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, spiritualists, atheists, and others to be second-class citizens standing on Stitt’s holy ground. I would ask for Ingersoll’s commentary on the rise of authoritarians claiming to be God’s proxy and divinely appointed kings.
What might Ingersoll teach us—again—about the same things he battled over a hundred years ago: the privileged and powerful at war with democracy and decency?
In 1873, Ingersoll delivered a lecture on the Declaration of Independence. He reiterated a sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial by a nation, of the dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others.
Six years later, Ingersoll said, “It probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions. And when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this Government will be destroyed. The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church.” He could have written those words this morning!
I wonder if Ingersoll would watch the twenty-first-century book-banners and wonder if his own writings were next. Censors would circle with signs, holding Bibles, saying, “Our children can’t be exposed to an enemy of God! He’s an agent of evil. Banish the words of the heretic!”
Ingersoll couldn’t know it in his time, but his writings changed my perception of heresy. “Ex-vangelicals” often understand logically that religious dogmas are bogus. They can rationally cast off the myths and monsters. Emotionally, however, many struggle with deeply imprinted notions about the sacred. Damnation for heresy makes no sense—but they tiptoe around the “sacred” just in case.
Ingersoll House in Dresden, New York. (Now the Ingersoll Museum.)
Ingersoll knew well why highly controlled cultures have blasphemy laws. Those laws are mechanisms for manipulation through terror. Point and cry “heretic” at a dissenter, and you don’t just discredit the witness. You strike fear of pain and punishment into the hearts of anybody who dares to doubt.
Objectively reading the Bible gave me plenty of opportunities for doubt. Did I really believe that humankind came from a dirt man and rib woman in an enchanted garden bearing a magical tree offered up by a talking snake? Did I buy Old Testament claims of giants, thousand-year-old men, floating zoos, and supermen whose power was determined by the length of their hair? Did I hold to the claim that a cosmic wizard impregnated an unwed teenager with himself via ghost sex so the offspring could become a bloody meat puppet to rescue us from a torture that God himself created?
You bet I doubted! Then I disbelieved. Yet my emotional heart remained hamstrung by the indoctrination of my youth. James 1:6 declared doubt a sin: “But when you ask God, you must believe and not doubt. Anyone who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”
I thought of the disciple Thomas, chastised by the resurrected Christ for daring to say, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). Thomas made the errors of doubt and inquiry! Yet Ingersoll wrote that “Progress is born of doubt and inquiry.” Ingersoll inspired me to embrace and celebrate my doubts. And he realized long ago that the doubters would be branded blasphemers by the privileged.
In Ingersoll’s “Heretics and Heresies” (1874), he wrote:
<<BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE>>Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe. It is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.
Heresy cannot be burned, or imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyters and synods. At ecumenical councils on the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal day, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual of the New World, the unknown sea toward which the brave sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.<<END BLOCK QUOTE>>
Ingersoll was fearless: fearless against the clerics, fearless against the dogmas. He said many heretical things during the religious resurgence just after the end of the Civil War, a time when a growing number of people were magnetized back into churches and Christian nationalist thinking. The era of Ingersoll saw “In God We Trust” first printed on American coins. He knew which god the evangelicals meant, and if he were alive today, he would see the same maneuverings by theocrats and Christian dominionists weaponizing a specific deity behind the shield of “religious liberty.”
I am also convinced that Ingersoll would recognize and thank believers who are better than their religions. We have seen Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious people in this country join us in interfaith coalitions promoting state-church separation and secular values. That’s a lesson I would like to see learned by many in my own activist circles. The religious do not fit into our boxes. Very often good and lovely people want what we want—love, equality, humanity. In Ingersoll’s words: “I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart.”
As most of you know, I’m an atheist. My wife is “spiritual.” We disagree on spirits, but we share humanist values. I have had guests on my show who were practicing Baptists protecting state-church separation. We disagree on Christianity but share humanist values.
I am also a fan of Muslim human rights activist Deeyah Khan. We disagree on Islam but share humanist values. Yet how many times have we burned the bridges that Ingersoll would have encouraged us to build? How often have we made enemies of our allies?
In the Twitter-verse (or X-verse?), where the world is simultaneously more connected yet more divided than ever, I am convinced Ingersoll would be pleading with people to see the “other” in three full dimensions. I’m also quite convinced he would wince at much of the insulting, branding, and name-calling that passes for “debate” in this world.
“Arguments cannot be branded with insults,” he told us. “Kindness is strength. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, everyone should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm.” Now, do I think he never raised his voice or got justifiably indignant? No. But I do think he understood that one doesn’t change the world by shouting “idiot!” at the opposition.
I suspect that Ingersoll was a lot like Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens didn’t scream at people for having horrible ideas, and even against fanatical antagonists he almost always kept his cool. Did keeping cool make him weak? Should Hitchens have surrendered his high ground? Of course not! Despite the occasional (and necessary) “Hitch slap,” he demonstrated how to be the adult in the room. He showed us the difference between reacting and knee-jerking. Hitchens proved that we won’t win the day with mere volume but with brave, informed, and empathetic engagement. Hitchens was a thinker, but he also felt compassion, and the attendees at his speeches and debates knew it.
I think this is the ticket to our success. In a recent podcast conversation with science communicator and educator Melanie Trecek-King of the organization Thinking Is Power, she introduced me to a gem of a quote: “People won’t care what you believe unless they believe that you care.”
Ingersoll cared. We remember, invoke, and celebrate him because he cared. If a man who lived and died over a century ago can inspire an apostate like me, I’m convinced that others can stand on his shoulders to inspire many more. We should all be kind as we doubt. We need to chase facts, denounce fictions, challenge authority, and live each moment in the real world. In this way, per Ingersoll’s words, we can be true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of our human hearts.
Seth Andrews bio.
Ingersoll’s Eternal Horizon of Progress
Seth Andrews
The following article was adapted from the keynote address given at the thirtieth anniversary celebration event at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York, on August 12, 2023.
Today we remember and honor one of the greatest minds of the past several centuries: thoughtful, wildly intelligent, insightful, impactful, and remarkable. So you can imagine my surprise when the organizers of the thirtieth anniversary of the reopening of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum asked me to deliver the keynote.
Robert Green Ingersoll was a brilliant man; I’m an ex-Christian who took thirty years to figure out that Bible donkeys couldn’t speak Hebrew. But maybe my invitation makes sense. I’m a storyteller, telling the story of his journey as it influenced and encouraged my own, 108 years after his death.
Ingersoll’s words gave me food for thought, courage, and hope at a crossroads in my life. I was thirty-seven years old and finally holding my faith to the fires. The exit from Christianity was often scary and stressful. My gut was in knots. I feared losing my family, my friends, my job, my identity.
Fortunately, along the way, my Google searches about nonreligion brought me to the writings of Ingersoll, and my eyes locked onto them. He was deep, but he didn’t write in the typical snobby PhD-speak that academics often use to make the commoners feel stupid.
Ingersoll wasn’t a shepherd barking at sheep. His words beckoned me as if I were a fellow traveler, allowing me to admire and learn but always speaking to me as an equal. That was his gift. He was perhaps the most quotable writer of the past 300 years.
Ingersoll’s words were so influential that for more than the past decade I’ve often included a favorite Ingersoll quote over my signature when I sign books at conventions. In my activism, this quote has become a creed. In his famous 1885 lecture “Orthodoxy,” Ingersoll said, “The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.”
With so many celebrated untruths circulating in society today, I wonder how Ingersoll would respond to modern times. The conspiracies, the inequities, the cruelties, the possibilities. What might his commentary on our twenty-first century be? I’m convinced it would be the same commentary he made back in the 1800s. The backdrop has changed but human nature has not.
I would love to hear his take on history revisionists such as self-taught evangelical pseudo-historian David Barton, Dallas mega-pastor Robert James Jeffress preaching sermons titled “America Is a Christian Nation,” or former President Donald J. Trump tear-gassing a street crowd so he could hold a Bible he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.
I would want Ingersoll to respond to reports of Supreme Court conservatives holding private prayers as they impose Christian ideology by fiat. I would try to introduce him to my own Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, the man who gave a 2022 midterm election prayer dedicating the entire state to his Jesus, effectively declaring Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, spiritualists, atheists, and others to be second-class citizens standing on Stitt’s holy ground. I would ask for Ingersoll’s commentary on the rise of authoritarians claiming to be God’s proxy and divinely appointed kings.
What might Ingersoll teach us—again—about the same things he battled over a hundred years ago: the privileged and powerful at war with democracy and decency?
In 1873, Ingersoll delivered a lecture on the Declaration of Independence. He reiterated a sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial by a nation, of the dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others.
Six years later, Ingersoll said, “It probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions. And when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this Government will be destroyed. The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church.” He could have written those words this morning!
I wonder if Ingersoll would watch the twenty-first-century book-banners and wonder if his own writings were next. Censors would circle with signs, holding Bibles, saying, “Our children can’t be exposed to an enemy of God! He’s an agent of evil. Banish the words of the heretic!”
Ingersoll couldn’t know it in his time, but his writings changed my perception of heresy. “Ex-vangelicals” often understand logically that religious dogmas are bogus. They can rationally cast off the myths and monsters. Emotionally, however, many struggle with deeply imprinted notions about the sacred. Damnation for heresy makes no sense—but they tiptoe around the “sacred” just in case.
Ingersoll knew well why highly controlled cultures have blasphemy laws. Those laws are mechanisms for manipulation through terror. Point and cry “heretic” at a dissenter, and you don’t just discredit the witness. You strike fear of pain and punishment into the hearts of anybody who dares to doubt.
Objectively reading the Bible gave me plenty of opportunities for doubt. Did I really believe that humankind came from a dirt man and rib woman in an enchanted garden bearing a magical tree offered up by a talking snake? Did I buy Old Testament claims of giants, thousand-year-old men, floating zoos, and supermen whose power was determined by the length of their hair? Did I hold to the claim that a cosmic wizard impregnated an unwed teenager with himself via ghost sex so the offspring could become a bloody meat puppet to rescue us from a torture that God himself created?
You bet I doubted! Then I disbelieved. Yet my emotional heart remained hamstrung by the indoctrination of my youth. James 1:6 declared doubt a sin: “But when you ask God, you must believe and not doubt. Anyone who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”
I thought of the disciple Thomas, chastised by the resurrected Christ for daring to say, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). Thomas made the errors of doubt and inquiry! Yet Ingersoll wrote that “Progress is born of doubt and inquiry.” Ingersoll inspired me to embrace and celebrate my doubts. And he realized long ago that the doubters would be branded blasphemers by the privileged.
In Ingersoll’s “Heretics and Heresies” (1874), he wrote:
<<BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE>>Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe. It is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.
Heresy cannot be burned, or imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyters and synods. At ecumenical councils on the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal day, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual of the New World, the unknown sea toward which the brave sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.<<END BLOCK QUOTE>>
Ingersoll was fearless: fearless against the clerics, fearless against the dogmas. He said many heretical things during the religious resurgence just after the end of the Civil War, a time when a growing number of people were magnetized back into churches and Christian nationalist thinking. The era of Ingersoll saw “In God We Trust” first printed on American coins. He knew which god the evangelicals meant, and if he were alive today, he would see the same maneuverings by theocrats and Christian dominionists weaponizing a specific deity behind the shield of “religious liberty.”
I am also convinced that Ingersoll would recognize and thank believers who are better than their religions. We have seen Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious people in this country join us in interfaith coalitions promoting state-church separation and secular values. That’s a lesson I would like to see learned by many in my own activist circles. The religious do not fit into our boxes. Very often good and lovely people want what we want—love, equality, humanity. In Ingersoll’s words: “I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart.”
As most of you know, I’m an atheist. My wife is “spiritual.” We disagree on spirits, but we share humanist values. I have had guests on my show who were practicing Baptists protecting state-church separation. We disagree on Christianity but share humanist values.
I am also a fan of Muslim human rights activist Deeyah Khan. We disagree on Islam but share humanist values. Yet how many times have we burned the bridges that Ingersoll would have encouraged us to build? How often have we made enemies of our allies?
In the Twitter-verse (or X-verse?), where the world is simultaneously more connected yet more divided than ever, I am convinced Ingersoll would be pleading with people to see the “other” in three full dimensions. I’m also quite convinced he would wince at much of the insulting, branding, and name-calling that passes for “debate” in this world.
“Arguments cannot be branded with insults,” he told us. “Kindness is strength. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, everyone should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm.” Now, do I think he never raised his voice or got justifiably indignant? No. But I do think he understood that one doesn’t change the world by shouting “idiot!” at the opposition.
I suspect that Ingersoll was a lot like Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens didn’t scream at people for having horrible ideas, and even against fanatical antagonists he almost always kept his cool. Did keeping cool make him weak? Should Hitchens have surrendered his high ground? Of course not! Despite the occasional (and necessary) “Hitch slap,” he demonstrated how to be the adult in the room. He showed us the difference between reacting and knee-jerking. Hitchens proved that we won’t win the day with mere volume but with brave, informed, and empathetic engagement. Hitchens was a thinker, but he also felt compassion, and the attendees at his speeches and debates knew it.
I think this is the ticket to our success. In a recent podcast conversation with science communicator and educator Melanie Trecek-King of the organization Thinking Is Power, she introduced me to a gem of a quote: “People won’t care what you believe unless they believe that you care.”
Ingersoll cared. We remember, invoke, and celebrate him because he cared. If a man who lived and died over a century ago can inspire an apostate like me, I’m convinced that others can stand on his shoulders to inspire many more. We should all be kind as we doubt. We need to chase facts, denounce fictions, challenge authority, and live each moment in the real world. In this way, per Ingersoll’s words, we can be true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of our human hearts.
The following article was adapted from the keynote address given at the thirtieth anniversary celebration event at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York, on August 12, 2023.—The Editoris Today we remember and honor one of the greatest minds of the past several centuries: thoughtful, wildly intelligent, insightful, impactful, and remarkable. So …