The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 4 (of 12)

s of Christianity-of superstition, were sown in my

eed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters

size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits-obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces-found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand mi

was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief-as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun-its size? that he was acquainted with S

d nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afte

t the writer of Genesis was inspi

the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all kno

that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired-did not pretend that the

ed" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and that he knew no more about creation

tronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after

ures-of the chalk cliffs, something about coral reefs-about the deposits made by rivers, the effect of volcanoes, of glaciers, and of the all surrounding sea-just enough to know that the Laurentian rocks were millions of ages older than the grass beneath my feet-just enough to feel certain that this world had been pursuing its

y should attack the geologists. They should deny the facts that have been discovered. They sho

nough to know that implements of stone, implements that had been formed by human hands, had been found mingled with the bones of extinct animals, bones th

I knew that the Old Testament was the work of ignorant men-that it was a mingling of truth and mistake, of wisdom and foolishness, of cruelty and kindness, of philosophy and absurdity-that it contain

mistook the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them proudly proved that "there were giants in those days." They

all the flood might have been local. They told the astronomers that the sun and moon were not actually, bu

d in the Old Testament by saying that the people were so degraded t

to evade the facts, to dodge th

they harmonized them-then they denied that they had denied them. T

y itself a superstition. Afterward they said the facts, as claimed, were true and that they esta

hey swallowed, and anything they

ecause it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and

he was either ignorant, dishonest or insane. These stories about devils demonstrate the human, the ignorant origin of the New Testament. I gave