Tag Robert Ingersoll

A little Ingersoll for you

Robert Green Ingersoll was a truly great thinker. You can find a great deal of awesome content from him on the superlative theingersolltimes.com website. Please check it out, and send its curator your appreciation for putting it together. Something for your Monday:

The Doctrine of Atonement – Robert Ingersoll

I have elsewhere talked about how the Doctrine of the Atonement is simply nonsensical. Well, here is the eminent thinker Robert Ingersoll on the subject.

According to one of these gospels, and according to the prevalent Christian belief, the Christian religion rests upon the doctrine of the atonement

Kitteridge on Ingersoll on Free Will

In refutation of the argument for “free moral agency,” Ingersoll once used the following illustration, — itself an argument as clear as it is unanswerable: —

“It is insisted that man is free, and is responsible, because he knows right from wrong. But the compass does not navigate the ship; neither does it in any way, of itself, determine the direction that is taken. When wind and waves are too powerful, the compass is of no importance. The pilot may read it correctly, and may know the direction the ship ought to take, but the compass is not a force. So men, blown by the tempests of passion, may have the intellectual conviction that they should go another way; but of what use, of what force, is the conviction?”

Robert Ingersoll

I recently heard Susan Jacoby wax lyrical about Ingersoll on the Reasonable Doubts podcast and I must confess, I know very little about him. I feel, though, that I should as he appears to have been an iconoclast in his time.

I was recently sent a message by Julian Haydon alerting me to this link (thanks also to Haydon for letting me know he thought my free will book was the best that he’d ever read!):