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Robert Ingersoll asks “Which Way”

May 12, 2012

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Robert Ingersoll, the most popular lecturer of the nineteenth century, presented a new freethought lecture called “Which Way” in the 1880s.  It brings up some interesting points for our day.

His primary question is threefold “How shall we civilize the world?  How shall we protect, life, liberty, property and reputations?  How shall we do away with crime and poverty?”  There was hope in the late nineteenth century that these questions might find answers.  The events of the last one hundred and thirty years suggest otherwise.

Ingersoll points out the lack of success of “the churches” in answering these questions.  He spends a lot of time on the God portrayed in Genesis.  Did this God advise or instruct his new human beings?  No, he just said “You shall not eat of this tree.”  Did he forgive and comfort when they sinned?  No, he punished them. 

He asks, “Are we to be governed by a Supernatural Being, or are we to govern ourselves?”  The answer is obvious to him. “I take the democratic side,” he says.  That “Supernatural Being” is a figure called on by tyrants and despots, princes and popes, to support the status quo.  

Ingersoll doesn’t go as far as we might today to show how the God those rulers called on to maintain their power was made after their own image.  He doesn’t need to because not just some, but most of his audience had been raised to believe that Genesis is history; that the punishing God is the only option.  In Ingersoll’s day good people still believed that the fear of hell helped to preserve social order.  Ingersoll disagrees: 

There is no reforming power in fear.  You can scare a man, maybe, so bad that he won’t do a thing, but you can’t scare him so bad he won’t want to do it.  There is no reforming power in punishment or brute force.

That’s one lesson we as a community have not learned to this day.  We also have made no progress, perhaps have even gone backward, in this:

You may ask me what I want.  Well, in the first place I want to get theology out of government.  It has no business there.  Man gets his authority from man, and is responsible only to man.  I want to get theology out of politics.  Our ancestors in 1776 retired God from politics, because of the jealousies among the churches, and the result has been splendid for mankind.  I want to get theology out of education.  Teach the children what somebody knows, not what somebody guesses. 

Robert Ingersoll was intensely patriotic.  I believe he would be quite discouraged to see how little progress our nation has made in these matters since his time.  Which way should we turn to find a solution to our present situation?

 

May Days

May 5, 2012

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I have a theory about Cinco de Mayo.  I believe its popularity is partly due to its proximity to May 1, the spring cross-quarter day.

Cross quarter days mark the half-way points between solstices and equinoxes, which are also the events which mark our sun-based seasons: winter begins about December 21, on the winter solstice, spring on the equinox in March, and so on.  I’ve made a clumsy sketch of this.

The cross-quarter days, October 31, February 2, May 1 and August 1, midpoints in the sun’s move from equal day/night to longest or shortest day, to equal day/night again, have been celebrated since ancient times.  For some these were the beginnings of seasons, for others a time to move cattle or start crops, for still others a time of purification.

Given the contemporary enthusiasm for Halloween, I’m surprised that I didn’t make the connection for Cinco de Mayo sooner.  Halloween is a multiply corrupted holiday, having begun as Samhain in its Celtic manifestation, and been converted to “All Hallows Eve” by the Christian church, which cannily placed its festivals on traditional dates whenever possible.  Current celebrations ignore both the connection to All Saints Day and the purification and preparation for winter qualities of earlier usage.

The original May Day (Beltane to current Wiccans) was the beginning of summer.  People celebrated fertility with flowers and Maypole, and for herders it included moving herds to their summer pasture.

While Christians have often fretted over confusion with ancient practices, freethinkers should see no problem with celebrating the cycle of the year.  Though we may have no crops to plant or cattle to move, we are still made of the stuff of earth and should be aware of its turning.

But if you missed May 1, enjoy Cinco de Mayo, a festival built on a small battle victory, which happened to fall at a time when our bodies’ link to the earth tells us it’s a time to celebrate.

What do freethinkers celebrate?

April 18, 2012

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There seem to be a shortage of atheist/freethought holidays. A recent blog comment suggested that there is nothing between April Fool’s Day and Be a Pirate Day in September. 

While the word “holiday” has unfortunate origins, now largely ignored, I do think atheists, agnostics and freethinkers should find occasions to celebrate during the year.  One hundred years ago, gatherings were held on January 29, Thomas Paine’s birthday.  I don’t know how many still honor this occasion.

Robert Ingersoll, the most successful freethought lecturer of the nineteenth century, was immediately raised to “sainthood” beside Thomas Paine upon his death in 1899.  No miracles were needed.  January 29 was often celebrated as a “Paine-Ingersoll” event. 

Ingersoll declared himself to be agnostic, but he was in fact a humanist before the word came into popular usage.  The following quotation is typical:

“Reason, Observation, and Experience―the Holy Trinity of Science―have taught us that happiness is the only good, that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so.”
(From “On the Gods”)

Why not honor Ingersoll on his own birthday, August 11?  Perhaps in those pre-airconditioning days of the early twentieth century August was an off time to hold a celebration.  Now, I think, an August “holiday” would be a good idea.

Another option would be to establish “Atheist Family Day” on July 17.  When Ingersoll died on that date in 1899 his wife and daughters took immediate action to preventthe  fraudulent claims of deathbed conversion which plagued every freethinking hero.  Ingersoll’s family was united in supporting the cause of freethought.

If these options don’t appeal to you, perhaps you have other ideas about what and when freethinkers should hold celebrations.

Where Is Hell?

April 2, 2012

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Holy Week seems like an appropriate time to ponder the existence of hell, something I stopped believing in decades ago.

It was harder to let go of the idea of hell a century ago.  Some seemed to think that there had to be a hell if there was to be a heaven.  Others thought the threat of hell was needed to maintain social order.  Such people didn’t like John Emerson Roberts when he started preaching against dogma.

Roberts was a successful Baptist preacher until some questioned his orthodoxy.  He may have believed his congregation agreed with him when he made statements like these in 1884:

Why do you punish your child?  To save him from greater wrongs and greater punishments.  Is not God our Father?  . . .”Whom he loveth, he chasteneth”

Against the theory of endless punishment, the universal moral sentiment stands unitedly arrayed.

But this did not satisfy his congregation.  In the end he said, “hell begins where sin begins, and is where sin is.  hell is no postponed catastrophe; it is here now.”  And the congregation cancelled his contract.  For more on John Emerson Roberts see the Books page.

Can Freethinking Be Taught?

March 21, 2012

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I don’t know whether anyone is trying to teach freethinking these days.  Both of my examples are from the past.  I suspect, however, that the authority factor between student and teacher makes it difficult.

My first example is from an era when freethought was not encouraged at all.  In the education of John Emerson Roberts, in the 1870s, the focus was on orthodoxy.  There was no acknowledgement of Darwin.  And the method?  Here is what one textbook author said about how to study:

            Let the lesson which was recited on one day be invariably reviewed on the day succeeding. . . . .As soon as any considerable progress has been made in the work, let review from the beginning be commenced. This should comprehend for one exercise as much as had been previously recited in two or three days; . . . As soon as the whole portion thus far recited has been reviewed, let a new review be commenced, and continued in the same manner; and thus successively until the work is completed. . . .(Francis Wayland, Elements of Moral Science)

What a dreadful way of learning to think!  Yet, my own education was not much better.  I made it through the Ph. D. in Classical Archaeology without learning to think for myself.  Later I learned about alternative theories about goddesses and lost history.  But this was little more than replacing a new “orthodoxy” for the old.

Dr. Roberts changed his ideas as he continued to read new material after he left school.  When did I become a freethinker?  I’m still trying to pinpoint that change – it was a slow process.

More on Dr. Roberts’s new ideas to come.  And for more on the man himself, see Books page.

Are Poets Freethinkers?

March 9, 2012

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You already know the answer: every creative artist has to keep an open mind about the “rules” of his craft.  Some of the rules for poets that come to mind are these:

Avoid gerunds (-ing words)

Don’t use question marks in poems

Haiku must have seventeen syllables.  (There are in fact two camps on this one.  It depends on which website you go to.)

Poetry is supposed to rhyme.  (This one only comes from the audience these days.)

Nobody uses metaphor any more.  Of course I consider this one a minority opinion, but it was spoken by a teacher of poetry.

All these I consider optional.  There is only one doctrine to which I still cling:

There is always another way to say it

Advice for Today

March 1, 2012

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In working with history, especially the history of ideas, I am often struck by how much has changed: how what was taken as truth turned out to be false, how optimism gave way to pessimism, how what looked like a cure turned out to be a curse.  Now and then, one comes across a statement that holds value.  John Emerson Roberts said this in 1895:

People sometimes ask, with an implied reproach, ‘What do liberals believe?’ as if truth were something that could be minted and stamped and carried about in an ecclesiastic wallet and shown to prove how rich one is. The first step in the higher life of the soul is to give up the hope of having any absolute criterion of truth.

And didn’t he choose a vivid metaphor!

See the Books page for more on John Emerson Roberts, Kansas City’s Freethought Preacher.

What Is Freethought?

February 17, 2012

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Freethought is a historical movement.  It had its greatest influence on society at large in the era of Robert Ingersoll, who died in 1899.  It was primarily an effort to get people to think for themselves instead of accepting the doctrines of conventional churches.  Freethinkers despise any idea which they find to be contrary to reason.

Freethought does not only question specific dogmas.  It is also an approach to issues of life in general.  Here’s my working definition:

Freethought questions every frame or box.  When presented with opposites, it is on the alert for a “third way.”  It is built on the recognition that any answer considered final is likely to gel into dogma.

It’s interesting to ponder how that gelling process is similar to the way metaphors become clichés.

A Freethinker’s Metaphors

February 11, 2012

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John Emerson Roberts, freethought preacher (see Books) believed in clear thinking.  He believed that encouraging people to think for themselves was his mission, his contribution to society.  He lifted up free thinking against all doctrine, all dogma.  He could not lecture without metaphor.  Sometimes he even mixed his metaphors, as in the following example:

“The brain is the sun. Civilization is its light. Thought is the mother of progress. The mother must be free in order that the child may be well-born.”  (Roberts, Lecture on Ingersoll, 1902.)

Light is a popular metaphor among freethinkers.  Robert Ingersoll used it extensively.  Motherhood was a beloved concept of the latter half of the nineteenth century.  There is more to say on both of these.

Why Freethought and Metaphor?

February 8, 2012

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To begin with, these are the focus of my two kinds of publications: a freethought biography and books of poetry.

Beyond that, they are two ways the creative mind should address the world: always looking beyond dogma and ever on the lookout for unexpected parallels.

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