TITAN OF HUMANITY
Bruce Springsteen
I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the “better angels” of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.
– Bruce Springsteen
Added: Oct. 2, 2008
FOUND ON FIND A GRAVE
A Tribute to Walt Whitman
CAMDEN, N. J., MARCH 30, 1892.
MY FRIENDS: Again we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face with the mystery of Death. A great man, a great American, the most eminent citizen of this Republic, lies dead before us, and we have met to pay a tribute to his greatness and his worth.
Saints
The saints have poisoned life with piety. They have soured the mother’s milk. They have insisted that joy is crime—that beauty is a bait with which the Devil captures the souls of men—that laughter leads to sin—that pleasure, in its every form, degrades, and that love itself is but the loathsome serpent of unclean desire. They have tried to compel men to love shadows rather than women—phantoms rather than people.
Art and Morality
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher. Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines. The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.
YOUR FORBEARS FLOCKED TO HIS LECTURES
LET THIS GREAT MAN SPEAK TO YOU
AS HE DID TO THEM
YOU WILL NEVER SEE COMMON SENSE
EXPRESSED SO BEAUTIFULLY
All I insist is, if there is another life, the basest soul that finds its way to that dark or radiant shore will have the everlasting chance of doing right.
Nothing but the most cruel ignorance, the most heartless superstition, the most ignorant theology, ever imagined that the few days of human life spent here, surrounded by mists and clouds of darkness, blown over life’s sea by storms and tempests of passion, fixed for all eternity the condition of the human race.
If this doctrine be true this life is but a net, in which Jehovah catches souls for hell.
The Grant Banquet
Mark Twain, was also a speaker at this great event. He said of Ingersoll’s speech: the supremest combination of words that was ever put together since the world began …Bob Ingersoll’s music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears.
At the Grave of a Friend’s Child
Washington, D. C., January 8, 1882. A DC detective friend asked Ingersoll to speak at his child’s grave.
MY FRIENDS: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and death are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet what all the dead have met.
The Real Bible
The real Bible is not the work of inspired men, or prophets, or apostles, or evangelists, or of Christs.
Every man who finds a fact, adds, as it were, a word to this great book. It is not attested by prophecy, by miracles, or signs. It makes no appeal to faith, to ignorance, to credulity or fear.
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