By Susan Jacoby
ISBN-10: 0300137257
ISBN-13: 9780300137255
ISBN-10: 0300205783
ISBN-13: 9780300205787
During the Gilded Age, which observed the sunrise of America’s enduring tradition wars, Robert eco-friendly Ingersoll was once referred to as “the nice Agnostic.” The nation’s most famed orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment cause, secularism, and the separation of church and kingdom with a energy unrivaled on account that America’s progressive iteration. while he died in 1899, even his spiritual enemies stated that he may need aspired to the U.S. presidency had he been prepared to masks his competition to faith. To the query that keeps its debatable energy today—was the us based as a Christian nation?—Ingersoll spoke back an emphatic no.
In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the writer of Freethinkers: A historical past of yank Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful position in an American highbrow culture extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the present iteration of “new atheists.” Jacoby illuminates the ways that America’s often-denigrated and forgotten secular historical past encompasses concerns, starting from women’s rights to evolution, as powerful and divisive this day as they have been in Ingersoll’s time. Ingersoll emerges during this portrait as one of many essential public figures who preserve another model of historical past alive. He dedicated his existence to that maximum secular proposal of all—liberty of moral sense belonging to the spiritual and nonreligious alike.
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Additional info for The great agnostic : Robert Ingersoll and American freethought
Sample text
Although the Finger Lakes area was predominantly agricultural, it also participated in the late 1820s and 1830s in the new commercial prosperity generated by the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and therefore to New York City and Europe. The canal was the greatest engineering feat of the first half of the American nineteenth century and served as the vital connection between the western frontier and the eastern seaboard for most of the 1800s. Without the Erie Canal, it would have taken much longer for the young American republic to exploit the politically imaginative leap of the Louisiana Purchase.
I read about rudimentary bones and muscles,” he confided. “I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. ”12 Although Ingersoll opposed organized religion in general, his specific targets were believers and clerics who wanted to impose their convictions on their fellow citizens and stifle inquiry that challenged faith. If he could not quite convince his audiences that all religion was superstitious myth, he did convince many to seek out a form of religion that did not require them to renounce the insights of contemporary science or non-mythological history.
They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. 1 Of course, this view of the founders’ intentions is far from universally accepted in the United States today. It is unlikely that any American politician with national ambitions would dare describe the secular spirit and letter of the Constitution so forthrightly in the twenty-first century.
The great agnostic : Robert Ingersoll and American freethought by Susan Jacoby
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