Hearing the Voice of Freethinking Robert Ingersoll

By Gary Berg-Cross

You may have heard that WASH is holding its annual banquet in Lynchburg, VA this year on May 25. All are welcome to come. You don't need to be a WASH member to attend. Details and registration are available at:
http://washbanquet2013.eventbrite.com/

It’s a chance to join other secularists in what many call the "belly" of the fundamentalist beast.  It’s an easy label since Lynchburg is the home of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's evangelical Liberty University and Thomas Road Baptist Church. WASH will be e serving an excellent buffet with a cash bar and food for thought.  Our speaker will be Dr. J. Anderson Thomson and the topic will be the cognitive science of religious belief.

I’m sure that Robert Ingersoll would attend if he were alive today, but I’m glad to see his ideas and life abroad in the land. Bill Moyers had a show on in March 2013 called Fighting Creeping Creationism. The 2^nd part of the show, which you can see via the link above, was a wide-ranging conversation with journalist and historian Susan Jacoby who expounded on the role secularism and intellectual curiosity have played throughout America’s history from its founders on.

This is a topic explored in her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought. Jacoby is the perfect person to play the role of bringing Ingersoll,  “mover and shaker” of the early Republican Party, back into mainstream discussion.  Seven score years ago Ingersoll did the same secular resurrection for Tom Paine.

For most of us Ingersoll, like Paine is largely forgotten today although earlier he was listened to on topics of the separation of church and state, Darwin’s theory of evolution,  women's rights and much more.

His Centennial Oration gives one a feeling about the timely relevance of his thought:

THE Declaration of Independence is the grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed by the representatives of a people. It is the embodiment of physical and moral courage and of political wisdom....

Such things had occasionally been said by some political enthusiast in the olden time, but, for the first time in the history of the world, the representatives of a nation, the representatives of a real, living, breathing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that king-craft had raised between man and man. They struck down with one immortal blow that infamous spirit of caste that makes a God almost a beast, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed, all that had been done by centuries of war — centuries of hypocrisy — centuries of injustice.

What more did they do? They then declared that each man has a right to live. And what does that mean? It means that he has the right to make his living. It means that he has the right to breathe the air, to work the land, that he stands the equal of every other human being beneath the shining stars; entitled to the product of his labor — the labor of his hand and of his brain.

What more? That every man has the right to pursue his own happiness in his own way. Grander words than. these have never been spoken by man.”

 

If you would like to hear more about Ingersoll’s “controversial” ideas come to the  Ingersoll Oratory contest in Dupont Circle starting at noon June 30^th, 2013. There’s a lot of great oratory to chose from, the great Ingersoll  delivered more than 1,200 speeches to packed houses across the country in the late 1800s. His arguments were usually succinct, thought provoking, insightful and still speaks to contemporary issues.
Fifteen speakers will select their favorite pieces to orate some of these ideas.  Susan Jacoby will be there as one of the judges making it a great event for secular DC.

Also of note, WASH board member Steven Lowe offers walking tours of Ingersoll’s life in DC. Upcoming are morning walks June 20th and 29th.

 

Sunday, June 23, 10 am: short version** - meet at SW corner 13th & E St. NW

Saturday, June 29, 9:30 am: long version* - meet at 450 F St. NW

*Long Version: a 1.5 mile walk lasting 2 hours, visiting 11 locations.

- Meet at 450 F Street NW.( the Building Museum/Judiciary Square METRO street level)

 

These take you through the oldest parts of Washington, D.C., to visit the sites where Ingersoll lived, worked, or spoke.

Images

Ingersoll quotes: https://www.facebook.com/ingersollorator?group_id=0

Quote on religious divisions: http://choiceindying.com/2013/02/02/robert-ingersoll-the-great-agnostic/ and http://skepticalteacher.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/happy-birthday-to-robert-green-ingersoll-the-great-agnostic/

 

For an Excerpt see: The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Healthy, Religious & Scientific Thoughts in the Last Years of Life

By Gary Berg-Cross

I’m a big fan of the Washington Post’s Health and Science section which appears every Tuesday. True this is a compromise from the purely science section of earlier days, but health articles are often interesting too. Of course there is often controversy about the claims. This week in Free for All there Michele Leonardi pointed out that the Health and Science section’s article on purported risk of hormone replace for post-menopausal women was at odds with the statements in Section A of WAPO. 

My own feeling of incongruity in this week’s Health and Science section was an article on Older and Wiser that featured an interview with 80 year old Rev. Joan Brown Cambpell. As the interview makes clear Campbll was awarded the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award, which promotes tolerance and public dialogue on controversial issues, and she published a book, “ Living into Hope: A Call to Spiritual Action for Such a Time as This .” Hope was the part of this interview but the main focus was “how a woman of the cloth deals with aging.” I guess this qualifies for the Health section, which often discusses aging and prolonging life. A popular topic among the Baby Boomers that are entering retirement and experiencing mixtures of joy and diminishing capabilities in grandparenthood. An aging is an important topic for policy. Health economists report that 90% of health spending goes on the last 10% of lives. Such topics are good for attracting WAPO readership - death is the fate of every human, but the way we handle this journey has been a human obsession well covered in writing since at least Egyptian times. Their myths explain the origin of death and have been found among many other cultures. Clearly, reflection on death and on life after death belongs to the oldest layers of religion and usually serves some comforting function. But then again so does morphine.

The interview with Campbell started with “Has your faith changed as you have aged?”

The answer was one of those perambulating trips which on the one hand said “I have become much less concerned about the literal nature of the Bible — from whence it came, from how it came. “ But the Reverend also claimed, without support from the above, that:

“is a source of truth and guidance in our lives. It is a God-blessed document. I don’t doubt that. I am very much a God believer.”

From there she went to the only connection to science that I could find, a glancing reference to Carl Sagan:

“One of my great experiences in life is becoming friends with Carl Sagan. He would say, “You are so smart; why do you believe in God?” And I would say to him, “Carl, you are so smart; why don’t you believe in God?” We had great discussions about if I could prove there was God. Of course, you can’t.”

This idea of lack of proof of claims and a reliance on feeling of knowing runs throughout the interview such as the answer to the Q of what happens after death:

“I don’t know what is beyond us. I would not want to deny that there is something beyond us, but we don’t know. Will I be reunited again with my father? Will I see my mother again? I don’t know. I feel my mother. She is in my life in many ways.”

Campbell also displays one of the phenomena discussed in an my post on Confirmatory Biases and earlier posts on Belief & the sense of knowing and a valuing of certainty rather than curiosity about explanations.

“I am not hooked to a magical something, but I do think there is a presence. I don’t know what it is. I don’t stew about it a lot.”

It is well known that there are studies that find some relation of Religion and the Quality of Life in the Last Year of Life (see Idler et al). Differences in quality of life for those who are religiously involved in that last year compared with those who are not appear in studies. As reported in the Idler study, they had better self-rated health, fewer depressive feelings, and were observed by the interviewer to find life more exciting compared with the less religious. Largely this is attributed to social and community factors. Deeply religious respondents were more likely to see friends, receive strength and comfort from religion reported poorer self-rated health. Those who attended religious services often were most likely to have attended holiday parties, even after adjusting for health status. All things that people in more secular societies, but community oriented societies like Norway, are achievable without religious commitment.

Campbell’s positions sounds somehow moderate, certainly by evangelical stereotypes. And much of what she said we directly experiential and reflective of such things as the fears of aging and finding some good threads in it.  Yes, we can be more secure in who we are and what we've accomplished. But I find it a largely rationalized, if humanistically flavored, discussion which largely ignores many aspects of what the Rev. likely preached through her life. We can still ask in the 21^st century what we are doing discussing geriatrics inspired by Bible stories, medieval doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegories as the basis of morality and a life.