Robert G. Ingersoll – författare

This first of twelve volumes of works by the great nineteenth-century orator and freethinker is comprised of lectures, including “The Gods” (a logical critique of religion), “Humboldt,” “Thomas Paine,” “Individuality,” “Heretics and Heresies,” “The Ghosts,” “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” “About Farming in Illinois,” and “What Must We Do to be Saved?”

One of the nineteenth century’s leading spokesmen for freethinking and agnosticism, Ingersoll attempts nothing less than a deconstruction of the Old Testament in this volume. The stories of the Tower of Babel, Noah and the flood, the plagues of Egypt, and the forty years of wandering in the desert . . . all are greeted with skepticism, to say the least.

The author said he preferred “the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith.” The title essay in this 1892 collection of five lectures on skepticism and religion asserts, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.” Includes “Humboldt,” “Thomas Paine,” “Individuality,” and “Heretics and Heresies.”

This second volume gathers more lectures by iconoclast Robert Ingersoll, these on religious issues and themes. In “Some Mistakes of Moses,” the author takes on the questions of science in the Bible; “Some Reasons Why” tackles monotheism and punishment; “Orthodoxy” considers the question of miracles; and lastly, “Myth and Miracle” makes the case for science, art, and secular education.

In this third of twelve volumes, the great nineteenth-century pundit and agnostic considers some influential careers in history and the arts, but touches on religion as well. Lectures includes “Shakespeare,” calling him the Great Genius of our World; “Robert Burns,” the story of his life as well as why Burns’s poetry is loved; “Abraham Lincoln;” “Voltaire;” “Liberty in Literature;” “The Great Infidels;” “Which Way?”; and “About the Holy Bible.”

In this fourth volume of Ingersoll’s works, the reader comes across one of the political activist’s best-known lectures, “Why I Am an Agnostic;” also “The Truth,” in which Ingersoll calls the science of theology the only dishonest science; “How to Reform Mankind;” “Thanksgiving Sermon;” “A Lay Sermon;” “The Foundations of Faith;” “Superstition;” “The Devil;” “Progress;” and “What Is Religion?”

In the1880s, Ingersoll, the arch-agnostic and skeptic, carried on a theological feud—fought from the pulpit and lectern—with Presbyterian reformer Thomas De Witt Talmage. Volume five of Ingersoll’s collected works includes “Six Interviews on Talmage,” “The Talmagian Catechism,” and “A Vindication of Thomas Paine.”

This sixth of twelve volumes of Ingersoll’s collected works features discussions with Judge Jeremiah Black, the Reverend. Henry M. Field, William E. Gladstone, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, and others. Includes “The Christian Religion,” “Colonel Ingersoll on Christianity,” “Rome or Reason?”, “Is Divorce Wrong?”, “Divorce,” and others.

The author, the son of an abolitionist minister, takes on his contemporaries’ views on religion in volume seven of his collected works. Included here are the discussions “My Reviewers Reviewed,” which takes on the subjects of women’s equality to men, immortality, and slavery, among others; “My Chicago Bible Class;” “The Brooklyn Divines;” “The Limitations of Toleration;” “A Christmas Sermon;” and more.

Volume eight of Ingersoll’s collected works holds forth on religion, politics, and culture in this book of interviews. In Q&A format, Ingersoll answers all the questions readers would ever want to ask of him. Interviews take the titles “The Bible and a Future Life,” “Politics and [General] Grant,” “The Civil Rights Bill,” “Prohibition,” “Trial of the Chicago Anarchists,” “Working Girls,” “Inebriety,” among others.