The Enduring Relevance of Robert Ingersoll
More than a century after his death, the Great Agnostic's arguments for reason, liberty, and human dignity feel not like history but like dispatches from the present.
August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899
Robert Green Ingersoll The Great Agnostic
“The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll
Robert Green
Ingersoll
1833–1899
Robert Green Ingersoll
Colonel, Attorney General, Orator
America's Great Agnostic
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899) was the most celebrated orator of the Gilded Age — a lawyer, Civil War colonel, political leader, and America's foremost champion of freethought, reason, and human liberty.
In an era of rigid religious orthodoxy, Ingersoll stood before thousands to proclaim the dignity of the doubter, the beauty of honest inquiry, and the moral imperative of intellectual freedom. He packed the largest halls in America — not with revivals or politics, but with lectures on science, secularism, and the rights of the human mind.
His complete works, collected posthumously in the twelve-volume Dresden Edition, remain among the most passionate and beautifully written defenses of freethought in the English language.
66
Years of Life
12
Dresden Volumes
100s
Lectures Given
1833
Born in Dresden, NY
His Most Celebrated Works
From piercing lectures on religion to passionate defenses of human freedom — a selection of Ingersoll's greatest writings.
Vol. 1
1877
Lecture
Ghosts
An examination of how fear gave birth to the gods — how primitive humanity, confronted by the terror of death and the unknown, invented supernatural explanations that persist to this day.
Vol. 1
1872
Lecture
The Gods
Ingersoll's first and most celebrated freethought lecture — a sweeping examination of how humanity invented its gods, and a passionate defense of reason as the only honest guide.
Vol. 2
1879
Lecture
Some Mistakes of Moses
A meticulous, witty, and often devastating examination of the historical, scientific, and moral contradictions of the Old Testament — Ingersoll at his most formidable and most entertaining.
Vol. 2
1880
Lecture
What Must We Do to Be Saved?
An examination of the orthodox doctrine of salvation — its history, its internal contradictions, and its moral consequences — from one of America's most formidable critics of Christian theology.
Vol. 3
1874
Lecture
Heretics and Heresies
A defense of the heretic as the true hero of human progress — and a demand that every person be granted the right to reach their own conclusions by their own road.
Vol. 3
1869
Lecture
Humboldt
Ingersoll's first major public oration — a celebration of the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt as the ideal of the scientific mind and the humanist spirit.
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith.
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Connected to the Great Minds of His Age
Ingersoll moved among presidents, poets, scientists, and reformers — a man at the center of American intellectual life.
LA
Abraham Lincoln
Political Hero & Intellectual Inspiration
TM
Mark Twain
Close Friend & Fellow Freethinker
WW
Walt Whitman
Poet & Admirer
DF
Frederick Douglass
Fellow Champion of Human Liberty
Essays & Commentary
Reflections on Ingersoll's ideas, his legacy, and the enduring relevance of freethought.
Ingersoll and Lincoln: Two Men of the Frontier Mind
Though they never met, Ingersoll's reverence for Lincoln illuminates both men — two frontier lawyers shaped by self-reliance, skepticism, and a passion for human freedom.
Ingersoll and the Scientific Spirit
Long before science communication became a profession, Ingersoll was translating the discoveries of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall into language that could reach any American who bought a ticket to a lecture.
His Creed
“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”