Robert Ingersoll, a Thinking Human Being

How 'Bout Some Truth?
My dad once told me, I was a little nipper at the time, that a man named Robert Green Ingersoll was the smartest man who ever lived and a fine orator to boot. I never forgot that name. I even took a preference for Ingersoll watches when my dad once offered to buy me a watch and I told him I wanted an Ingersoll and he said that was a pocket watch and did I still want it and my step-grandfather, an old Dutchman bastard born and raised in New York City who everybody in the family hated, including my grandmother, but damn he was a fascinating storyteller and had been a professional boxing referee at Saint Nicholas Arena and I was enthralled by his stories of New York City and he's the reason I eventually came to this enormous apple of a metropolitan society and that old bastard had a heavily carved silver (his grandfather had operated a silver mine in Durango, Mexico) pocket watch that was like an appendage to the old man, he was in his seventies when he married my grandmother, my mother's adventurous mother the poet, and he was always unconsciously taking that great watch out of his watch pocket and fiddling with it, opening the outer lid and looking at the watch face, then winding it a bit, flipping the lid closed and putting it back in his watch pocket--men in those days had watch pockets in their trousers and also in their vests, which every man who wore a suit wore, a vest under the suit jacket-- and, yeah, that's what that little pocket is on your Gap jeans up just under your belt loops in the front there (the Gap started originally by buying out Levi Strauss in San Francisco) is for, not change, but a pocket watch--and for all those reasons, I ended up being a little kid who carried an Ingersoll pocket watch around with me all day and kept it by my bed at night--its black dial glowing in the dark--yep, they used a highly carcinogenic phosphorus in those days so you could tell time in the dark. Time has always been the cross on which all human beings are crucified. By the bye, man the animal invented time, not the lion or the monkey who only know night and day, their need for water, food, passion, and then rest being the way they clock their days, which are also their nights.

It wasn't until I was a naive searcher of wisdom, I was in college, a freshman, and the first place I headed in the big library I suddenly had access to as a college student was the card catalog to look up "Robert G. Ingersoll." I was shocked.

My dad had been brought up a Wesleyan Methodist, a very liberal protestant domination especially popular with folks from over Gawjah and North Carolina way, where my father's family had come from. My mother's father was an open atheist--he didn't believe in nuthin' comin' out the mouth of any man, especially a scalliwag who called himself a preacher. Bah-humbug was my real grandfather's attitude, and he was not a New York City native, but a central Texas native who had aspirations of being a race car driver--he owned one, too, an EMF--and he raced it at tracks on Galveston Island and later over in the Beaumont area, where he died in the late 19-teens of catarrh disease (TB I think is what it really was) and while he was dying, he coughed so much and spat up so much phlegm and blood, they kept him on a back screen porch--I mean TB was contagious as hell--and right before he gave up the ghost, my grandmother called in a preacher for a little last minute help with the High Holy Ones, like last rites, dig, and when the preacher approached my grandfather he asked him, "You Old Wolf, you're dying and your wife and family are concerned--have you found Jesus Christ as your personal savior yet?" to which my grandfather replied, "Why, you lost him?"

The family loved that tale and they told it at every family reunion that happened on his side of the family and laughed about it like loons and then as the laughter was fading out, my grandmother would sigh and say, "I hope the good Lord took him in anyway; he was a such a good man; I can't see Jesus not wanting him around...." I thought to myself: hell, he knew there was no god, no Jesus, and he knew there was no F-ing afterlife--death to him was a challenge, why he loved racing fast cars--and when I started driving at 14, I immediately had trouble observing the legal speeds and was constantly driving way too fast, especially in tight situations.

After my mother lost a child and became a Jesus freak, though in a kind way and not an enforcing way, my dad simply went along with her and he became a confident Christian; yep, he made me read the Christian Bible (American Standard Version--my dad's favorite Christian Bible, King James's Gawd-inspired translation written in "American" English, my dad's favorite language, and mine, too--American English that accepts whatever way you want to express yourself, in pidgin, patois, Cargo, whatever your way of speaking English--"Let's vamoose this burg, comrades"). And my dad prided himself as a great Christian debater and later became one of the main songleaders at their church and the church he and my mother finally attached themselves to was a rather liberal little branch of a pure American Christian sect called The Church of Christ and this branch was a Louisville, Kentucky, branch started by a German reformer (Lutheran) type who was a great old man and as a kid when he'd come and stay with us in the summers I loved being around him and listening to his German accent--he sounded like Eric Hoffer now that I think of it, and he never talked any religion with me, just encouraging me to read and study and develop my language skills, and this old brother first introduced me to fried fresh-caught river catfish at the Hilltop Restuarant on the Brazos Rivers just west of Ranger, Texas--"Brazos River Catfish," and I ate several fillets that day and every time I eat catfish now I think of that old German teacher--he never called himself a preacher, and I got along with him fine even though by then I was a little budding atheist.

So how surprised was I to find upon looking Robert Ingersoll up in the library card catalog to find him listed as "America's leading Atheist...." Whoaaaa. This guy is who my dad taught me was the smartest man ever in the world--America's leading Atheist! OK, dad; you've turned me on, because by then, I was a devout Atheist, though more an existentialist really than an Atheist since it's not just God I don't believe in, its all instincts made legends, same as old Bob Ingersoll, because soon I was reading all his essays and then I, too, saw what my believing dad meant by calling this guy the smartest man alive or who ever lived--Ingersoll was already dead when my dad told me about him.

"Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn,; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver."

--Robert G. Ingersoll

Great stuff--Good Lawsy Lord, a thinking man, something it's hard to find these days. And I mean thinking in terms of reasoning, transcending the common and coming out into the light of a scientific way of growing in wisdom, a wisdom that leads you to a happy open-minded life. The above is just great thinking, see? The opposite of Ingersoll's reasoning about religion is total fantasy.

And then one day I started reading Ingersoll's Why I'm an Agnostic, written in 1896, and suddenly I came across this paragraph and God-damn, that was me, too; God-damn, no wonder I took to this dude back when I was nipper and associated his name with a timepiece you carried in your pocket; and I read this again and I realized where we American existentialists come from, we antiauthoritarians, from writers like Tom Paine, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Evander Spooner, and Robert Green Ingersoll...here's what I read:

From my childhood I had heard read, and read the Bible myself.
Morning and evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were
said. The Bible was my first history, the Jews were the first
people, and the events narrated by Moses and the other inspired
writers, and those predicted by prophets were the all important
things. In other books were found the thoughts and dreams of men,
but in the Bible were the sacred truths of God.

 Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no
love for God. He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder,
so anxious to kill, so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with
all my heart. At his command, babes were butchered, women violated,
and the white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God
visited the people with pestilence -- filled the houses and covered
the streets with the dying and the dead -- saw babes starving on
the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears,
the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new made graves, and
remained as pitiless as the pestilence.

 This God withheld the rain -- caused the famine, saw the
fierce eyes of hunger -- the wasted forms, the white lips, saw
mothers eating babes, and remained ferocious as famine.

 It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or
worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really
civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in
abhorrence and contempt.

Amen, Amen, Brother Ingersoll. I, too, just never could believe all that bullshit--and I call it what it is in American English, total bullshit, and, using my intellectual sense, Hemingway called it his "shit detector," I could spot bullshit from several leagues away. I constantly asked my mother highly antagonistic questions about Jesus--one bad one I remember one time--remember I and old Bob Ingersoll were young tots when we started seeing the emancipated light--asking mother how God impregnated this young married Jewish girl--I mean God did her in a field between her job and her home--with a seventy-five-year-old carpenter, so wasn't that wrong? Wasn't that adultery? Agggghaaaa! My mother almost had a choking fit. She thought about washing my mouth out with soap for saying such heretical things. "You wanna go to hell when you die?" "Yes, mother, I do; I mean, could it be any worse than West Texas?--remember that sign that used to say 'Welcome to the Hottest Part of Texas; Where the Devil Vacations and Gets a Tan.'"

And ladies and gentlemen, here's where you go to peruse the complete works of Robert Green Ingersoll, the smartest man whoever lived (according to my father).

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/\

Such wisdom; from the House of Wisdom--they make so many books available on line.

thegrowlingagnosticwolf
for The Daily Growler

Dumbocrats Sell Us All Out to Our Little Napoleon--Except, Folks, Our Government's Been Spying on Us Ever Since World War II When the CIA Was Formed by Allen "Domino Theory" Dulles, Aristocrat Brother of Aristocrat John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Dipstick-Rich-Boy Secretary of State
So Dumbocrats capitulated and gave Georgie Porgie Nutjob Bush the privilege of having our telephone companies, our cell phone companies, our ISPs, our CABLE companies, Yahoo, Google as spying agents for our intelligence apparatuses--the CIA, FBI, NSI, Homeland Insecurity, Alberto Gonzales's office--these agents setting up data-mining places all over our communications systems and literally downloading and saving and categorizing every move we make on our communications devices, every word we speak, every word we type, every book we order on Amazon.com, every movie we buy, every software we buy, every horse we bet on, every sex site we wonder onto--this way, we are all guilty of something that smacks of terrerism, which to this gang means any antiauthoritarian attitude against Georgie Porgie, Unka Dick, AT&T--'cause ya see, as official agents of the Feds, We the People can't sue AT&T, Verizon, Google, Yahoo, for invading our privacy--and we have a right to privacy--but not under Chancellor Bush--"He's beginning to look a lot like Hitler...." If not Hitler, certainly Napoleon. Check his haircuts out these days. Oh no, this white man ain't givin' up no power, folks, mark our word. Bush and his whole bunch of crooks are now protected from lawsuits--these bastards hate lawsuits--remember Bush said he was doing away with frivolous lawsuits--and so did Slick Willie say that, too--so now, We the People have no rights to sue anybody anymore, no healthcare companies, no communications companies, nobody in the Executive Office, nobody in the Justice Department. When do you think Bushy Baby will announce he's taking over dictatorially--and then announce just how FUCKED all of us are?

We heard a pundit asking why Bush had spent 400 million dollars in stealing the 2004 election--Kerry, a filthy rich bastard, too, spent 385 million knowing all along he was gonna lose--and this pundit was asking why these already filthy rich men were willing to spend that much money for a 200,000 buck a year job. The guy didn't recall that right off the bat Bush lost 43 trillion dollars--nobody remembers that--plus the surplus old Slick Willie had cooked the books to come up with--that money just disappeared, folks--where do you think it went?

The rich don't get rich by being honest.

Our leaders, Dumbos or Repugs, are scared to living death of Georgie Porgie and his WAR machine--remember, Bush controls the armed forces, the arms, the nuclear stockpile, most of the biggest of our police departments, our fire departments, all investigating companies--like Blackwater--they are all under Commander and Chief Georgie Porgie Bush--they are willing to DIE for him; to come back without any legs or arms for him; they are willing to murder, rape, torture, and massacre for him--and stand at attention when he comes among them.

Wow, what's that we hear, a guillotine being built--except this time it's us peasants who are going to lose our heads.

theagonisticstaff
for The Daily Growler

Remember Baghdad When You're Making Your Vacation Plans!