An Oration on the Life and Services of Thomas Paine by Robert Green Ingersoll

Author:Robert Green Ingersoll [Ingersoll, Robert Green]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature, Classics
ISBN: 4064066099930
Google: A6jyswEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 59624538
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and is still in force in the District of Columbia. Laws like this were in force in most of the colonies, and in all countries where the Church had power.

In the Old Testament, the death penalty was attached to hundreds of offences. It has been the same in all Christian countries. To-day, in civilized governments, the death penalty is attached only to murder and treason; and in some, it has been entirely abolished. What a commentary upon the divine humbugs of the world!

In the day of Thomas Paine the Church was ignorant, bloody and relentless. In Scotland the "Kirk" was at the summit of its power. It was a full sister of the Spanish Inquisition. It waged war upon human nature. It was the enemy of happiness, the hater of joy, and the despiser of religious liberty. It taught parents to murder their children rather than to allow them to propagate error. If the mother held opinions of which the infamous "Kirk" disapproved, her children were taken from her arms, her babe from her very bosom, and she was not allowed to see them, or to write them a word. It would not allow ship-wrecked sailors to be rescued from drowning on Sunday. It sought to annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious, heartless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: "The Kirk holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy." And this same Scotch Kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the moral grandeur to say, "The world is my country, and to do good my religion." And this same Kirk abhorred the man who said, "Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system."

At that time nothing so delighted the Church as the beauties of endless torment, and listening to the weak wailings of damned infants struggling in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century, a boy by the name of Thomas Aikenhead, was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for having denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, and for having, on several occasions, when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm. Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was found guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of the scaffold and covered with stones.

Prosecutions and executions like this were common in every Christian country, and all of them were based upon the belief that an intellectual conviction is a crime.

No wonder the Church hated and traduced the author of the "Age of Reason."

England was filled with Puritan gloom and Episcopal ceremony. All religious conceptions were of the grossest nature. The ideas of crazy fanatics and extravagant poets were taken as sober facts. Milton had

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