Robert Green Ingersoll

The Great Infidels Robert Green Ingersoll

The Great Infidels (A Lecture) was written by American writer, orator, and proponent of Freethought and agnosticism, Robert Green Ingersoll, and originally published in 1881. The work is a lecture composed from his notes posthumously, on the topic of the 'infidel' or 'iconoclast' versus the church. Those he considers infidels are the Roman emperor Julian, Giordano Bruno, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Thomas Paine, David Hume and Baruch Spinoza. Ingersoll argues that the infidels provide far more to the benefit of humanity than any church or priest. Secondly, Ingersoll argues that the priests are so desperate to cover over the faults of their creeds that they lie about the deaths of their most effective critics, fabricating deathbed horror scenes and repentances that never happened. Ingersoll argues that religion, particularly the christian religion, is based upon fear and propagates by spreading fear. He also argues that priests are really mostly after getting and retaining power, using the lowest means to do so.