Via Arts & Letters Daily and American Scholar:
Ingersoll emerged as the leading figure in what historians of American secularism consider the golden age of freethought—an era when immigration, industrialization, and science, especially Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection, were challenging both religious orthodoxy and the supposedly simpler values of the nation’s rural Anglo-Saxon past. That things were never really so simple was the message Ingersoll repeatedly conveyed as he spoke before more of his countrymen than even elected public leaders, including presidents, did at a time when lectures were both a form of mass entertainment and a vital source of information.
Points:
- “Known as Robert Injuresoul to his clerical enemies, he [Robert Ingersoll] raised the issue of what role religion ought to play in the public life of the American nation for the first time since the writing of the Constitution, when the Founders deliberately left out any acknowledgment of a deity as the source of governmental power.”
- “To the question that retains its politically divisive power to this day—whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no.”
- “The argument over the proper role of religion in civil government was (and is) only a subsidiary of the larger question of whether the claims of supposedly revealed religion deserve any particular respect or deference in a pluralistic society.”
- “The overarching question in Ingersoll’s time was whether any of these issues [evolution, race, immigration, women’s rights, sexual behavior, freedom of artistic expression, and vast disparities in wealth] could or should be resolved by appeals to divine authority. To this Ingersoll also said no, spreading the gospel (though he would never have called it that) of reason, science, and humanism to audiences across the country.”
Ponder:
- Does religion have a role at all?
- Can we arrive at ethical decisions from a purely empirical perspective?
Some perspectives on apologetics: s: