Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.
I WANT to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow some priest to be the pilot of our souls.
HE WHO ENDEAVORS TO CONTROL THE MIND BY FORCE IS A TYRANT, AND HE WHO SUBMITS IS A SLAVE. This very mentality may explain why todays Christians continue along a path of self-loathing rather than self-love. Sadly, both are viewed as threats to the santity and power of the Christian fundamentalist world. In America there is an ever growing distain for critical thinking and scientific inquiry. Sadly, this same mentality lives on today. As Ingerson observed, "It is a part of their business (these preachers) to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndals, Hæckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, ." The reality was they had to make a living, even if it requited turning their minds away from human progress and modernity. In his 1879 essay “Some Mistakes of Moses” Robert Ingersol expresses a deep pity for the men of the cloth who sought to preach a gospel based on the inerrant word of God (Bible).
His influential speeches were posthumously collected in a twelve-volume work known as the Dresden Editions. He spoke publicly on religion, slavery and women's suffrage. Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, inspired late-19th-century Americans to uphold the founders’ belief in separation of church and state.
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