What Is Religion?
Ingersoll's last public address.

by Robert G. Ingersoll
(1899)

From The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (Dresden Edition, 1900–1902), Volume 4.
Source: https://thegreatagnostic.com/works/what-is-religion/
Public domain. CC0 / Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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• This was Col. Ingersoll's last public address, delivered
    before the American Free Religious Association, in the
    Hollis Street Theatre, 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?

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?

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-I 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 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.

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 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
benefited 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.

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?

VII. 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.

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 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 the reptile mammalia, to the marsupials, to
the lemures, 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,
Ernst 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?

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.

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.
