The Lecture
“What Is Religion?” was one of the last great lectures Ingersoll delivered before his death in July 1899. It asks a deceptively simple question and gives a searching, compassionate, and definitive answer.
The Question
What is religion?
Not what has religion been, or what have the churches said it is, but what should it actually be, if the word is to mean anything worthy of the human spirit?
I have spent my life examining what goes by the name of religion in the world — the doctrines, the ceremonies, the institutions, the threats and promises, the rituals and the martyrdoms — and I have come to a clear conclusion:
Most of what has gone under the name of religion has been something else entirely. It has been superstition. It has been the organization of fear. It has been the exercise of power by those who claimed divine authority. It has been, very often, the enemy of the very things that I associate with genuine goodness.
What Religion Has Been
Religion, as it has been historically practiced, has been:
The assertion of unprovable propositions as certainties. The punishment of honest doubt as crime or sin. The persecution of those who reached different conclusions by honest inquiry. The control of governments by ecclesiastical authority. The subordination of women. The justification of slavery. The opposition to science.
I am not speaking hypothetically. These are historical facts. Every one of them can be documented in elaborate detail.
This does not mean that no one has ever found comfort, inspiration, or genuine goodness in religion. Many have. Many do. I do not deny this.
But the institutional record is the record I have described. And the man who defends an institution by pointing to its exceptions — rather than its typical operations — is not defending it honestly.
What Religion Ought To Be
And yet the word “religion” points to something real. It points to humanity’s attempt to answer the deepest questions: What are we? Why are we here? How should we live? What do we owe one another?
These are real questions. They deserve real answers — or honest acknowledgment that we do not have real answers.
If I were to define the religion I believe in, it would be this:
The religion of humanity. The religion whose god is Truth. The religion whose worship is honest inquiry. The religion whose sacrament is kindness. The religion whose hell is the sight of suffering that could have been prevented. The religion whose heaven is the sight of suffering that has been relieved.
“Happiness is the only good. Reason the only torch. Justice the only worship. Humanity the only religion. Love the only priest.”
This is the religion I hold. It requires no creed, no church, no clergy. It requires only a human heart.
On the Clergy
I want to say something about the clergy — not about individual clergymen, many of whom are good and honorable people — but about the institution.
The clergy, as an institution, has historically claimed the right to stand between the individual human being and ultimate truth. To say: “You may not approach truth directly. You must approach it through us. Our interpretation is authoritative; yours is presumptuous.”
I deny this claim utterly.
Every human being has the right — and, I would say, the duty — to seek truth directly, by their own reason, in the light of the best available evidence. No institution can legitimately interpose itself between a human mind and honest inquiry.
The priest who says “you must not read that book” has confessed that the book is more powerful than the creed. The church that condemns honest doubt has confessed that it cannot answer honest questions.
On Immortality
I am asked, often, whether I believe in immortality. Whether I believe I will see again the people I have loved and lost.
I answer honestly: I do not know.
I have no evidence that the dead persist in any form. The physics of the universe — as best we understand it — suggests that consciousness is a product of the brain, and that when the brain ceases to function, consciousness ceases.
But the universe is full of surprises. I have lived long enough to know that my ignorance is vastly greater than my knowledge. And so I say: I do not know.
What I do know is that the dead were real. That they lived, and loved, and thought, and suffered. That their lives mattered. That the love they gave is not nothing, even if they are gone.
If they are gone, then the greatest possible tribute to them is to live well — to carry forward whatever was best in them, to honor their memory by being the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
And if they are not gone — well, then we will find out.
“The dead are not lonely, and the living need not mourn. What we call death is only a change of worlds.”
A Final Creed
I believe in this world and in the people in it.
I believe in the power of love and the importance of kindness.
I believe in the nobility of honest inquiry and the dignity of honest doubt.
I believe that every human being is entitled to liberty of conscience — the right to reach their own conclusions by their own road.
I believe that the purpose of a good life is not to prepare for another world, but to make this one, while we have it, as good as it can be.
This is my religion. I commend it to all who are interested.
“What Is Religion?” was first delivered in 1899 and appears in Volume 4 of the Dresden Edition.