The Peculiar Truth about the Great Agnostic
- Dan Spencer
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
The tall, heavyset bald man strode onstage. His voice boomed across the public hall, a commanding presence, and he would speak for over an hour, often longer, without notes. His lectures captivated large audiences wherever he appeared.
His name was Robert Green Ingersoll, and he was more widely regarded in America in the late 1800s than most of today’s best-known podcasters… even though his primary lecture topic was atheism.
Ingersoll became known throughout the US as the Great Agnostic.
In that era, towns across the US, large and small, welcomed traveling lecturers as they were often the sole form of entertainment. He was never turned away from speaking engagements (today we might say ‘canceled’) because of his anti-religious speeches.
In fact, many famous people of the time embraced Ingersoll - Mark Twain, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Andrew Carnegie, among others. He called Walt Whitman his friend.
He was born in 1833 in Dresden, NY along Seneca Lake (ironically, just a stone’s throw from where Joseph Smith would later found Mormonism).
After his mother died when he was a baby, Ingersoll was raised by his father, a Calvinist minister, who home-schooled him. They traveled the US from New England to Illinois.
Ingersoll had a great deal in common with his hero Abraham Lincoln. He studied and then practiced law, entered politics, and made his home in Illinois. He was also an abolitionist and was an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. Ingersoll fought at the battle of Shiloh.
After the war, he married, made his home, and formed his law practice in Peoria, Illinois. In 1867, he became the state’s Attorney General. In ’68, he made an unsuccessful run for governor but lost in part because he refused to tone down his atheism.
Ingersoll was by then a gifted orator, and the lecture stage became his natural milieu. In 1880, he was introduced onstage as the Great Agnostic, and the sobriquet stuck.
With lawyerly aplomb, he spoke at great length about the Bible and its contents; his belief that religion is a form of slavery; the tenets of freethinking and reason. Lecture titles included “Some Mistakes of Moses,” “The Great Infidels,” “The Gods,” and “Why I Am Agnostic.”
Ingersoll also spoke at great length about Shakespeare, Lincoln, liberty, and Thomas Paine.
In the 1880s, he and his wife retired to a home in Dobb’s Ferry, NY north of New York City where he spent the rest of his life.
When an atheist was accused of blasphemy and tried in a court in New Jersey, Ingersoll defended him pro bono. The defendant was found guilty, but the judge’s sentence was a few dollars in fines that Ingersoll paid out of his own pocket.
His health failed, so he stopped lecturing in 1896. He died of a heart attack three years later at age 65. By all accounts, he never rescinded his atheism even in his dying moments.
To this day, a statue of Ingersoll, with his protruding ample belly, exists in Peoria, Illinois.
Here’s a small sampling of Robert Green Ingersoll quotes:
“The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.”
“If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?”
“Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.”
“What has religion to do with facts? Nothing.”
“I have no confidence in any religion that can be demonstrated only to children.”
“It has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature. Is it not wonderful that not one word was written by Christ?”
“If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.”
“It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed.”
“I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.”
“A good deed is the best prayer.”
His collected lectures can be read for free on the Internet through Project Gutenberg.
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