Morality Without Godby Robert G. Ingersoll
Question. How would you convey moral instruction from youth up, and what kind of instruction would you give? Answer. I believe, in the main, in the Christianity which I suppose Christ taught, that is, in kindness, gentleness, forgiveness. I do not believe in loving enemies; I have pretty hard work to love my friends. Neither do I believe in revenge. No man can afford to keep the viper of revenge in his heart. But I believe in justice, in self-defence. As to morality - morality is born of the instinct of self- preservation. If man could not suffer, the word "conscience" never would have passed his lips. Self-preservation makes larceny a crime. Murder will be regarded as a bad thing as long as a majority object to being murdered. Morality does not come from the clouds; it is born of human want and human experience. The industrious man knows that the idle has no right to rob him of the product of his labor, and the idle man knows that he has no right to do it. It is not wrong because we find it in the Bible, but I presume it was put in the Bible because it is wrong. I believe children should be taught to investigate and to reason for themselves, and that there are facts enough to furnish a foundation for all human virtue. We will take two families; in the one, the father and mother are both Christians, and they teach their children their creed; teach them that they are naturally totally depraved; that they can only hope for happiness in a future life by pleading the virtues of another, and that a certain belief is necessary to salvation; that God punishes his children forever. Such a home has a certain atmosphere. Take another family; the father and mother teach their children that they should be kind to each other because kindness produces happiness; that they should be gentle; that they should be just, because justice is the mother of joy. And suppose this father and mother say to their children: "If you are happy it must be as a result of your own actions; if you do wrong you must suffer the consequences. No Christ can redeem you; no savior can suffer for you. You must suffer the consequences of your own misdeeds. If you plant you must reap, and you must reap what you plant." And suppose these parents also say: "You must find out the conditions of happiness. You must investigate the circumstances by which you are surrounded. You must ascertain the nature and relation of things so that you can act in accordance with known facts, to the end that you may have health and peace." In such a family, there would be a certain atmosphere, in my judgment, a thousand times better and purer and sweeter than in the other. The church generally teaches that rascality pays in this world, but not in the next; that here virtue is a losing game, but the dividends will be large in another world. They tell the people that they must serve God on credit, but the devil pays cash here. That is not my doctrine. My doctrine is that a thing is right because it pays, in the highest sense. That is the reason it is right. The reason a thing is wrong is because it is the mother of misery. Virtue has its reward here and now. It means health; it means intelligence, contentment, success. Vice means exactly the opposite. Most of us have more passion than judgment, carry more sail than ballast, and by the tempest of passion we are blown from port, we are wrecked and lost. We cannot be saved by faith or by belief. It is a slower process: We must be saved by knowledge, by intelligence - the only lever capable of raising mankind. I think that conditions have a vast deal to do with morality and goodness. If you wish to change the conduct of your fellowmen, the first thing to do is to change their conditions, their surroundings; in other words, to help them to help themselves - help them to get away from bad influences, away from the darkness of ignorance, away from the temptations of poverty and want, not only into the light intellectually, but into the climate of prosperity. It is useless to give a hungry man a religious tract, and it is almost useless to preach morality to those who are so situated that the necessity of the present, the hunger of the moment, overrides every other consideration. There is a vast deal of sophistry in hunger, and a good deal of persuasion in necessity. Question. What do you think of the statement that a general belief in your teachings would fill all the penitentiaries, and that in twenty years there would be a hell in this world worse than the one expected in the other? Answer. My creed is this: 1. Happiness is the only good. 2. The way to be happy, is to make others happy. Other things being equal, that man is happiest who is nearest just - who is truthful, merciful and intelligent - in other words, the one who lives in accordance with the conditions of life. 3. The time to be happy is now, and the place to be happy, is here. 4. Reason is the lamp of the mind - the only torch of progress; and instead of blowing that out and depending upon darkness and dogma, it is far better to increase that sacred light. 5. Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain reason should be enthroned as king. 6. Every man must bear the consequences, at least of his own actions. If he puts his hands in the fire, his hands must smart, and not the hands of another. In other words: each man must eat the fruit of the tree he plants. I can not conceive that the teaching of these doctrines would fill penitentiaries, or crowd the gallows. The doctrine of forgiveness - the idea that somebody else can suffer in place of the guilty - the notion that just at the last the whole account can be settled - these ideas, doctrines, and notions are calculated to fill penitentiaries. Nothing breeds extravagance like the credit system. Most criminals of the present day are orthodox believers, and the gallows seems to be the last round of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven. Religion and morality do not necessarily go together. Mr. Talmage will insist to-day that morality is not sufficient to save any man from eternal punishment. As a matter of fact, religion has often been the enemy of morality. The moralist has been denounced by the theologians. He sustains the same relation to Christianity that the moderate drinker does to the total abstinence society. The total-abstinence people say that the example of the moderate drinker is far worse upon the young than that of the drunkard - that the drunkard is a warning, while the moderate drinker is a perpetual temptation. So Christians say of moralists. According to them, the moralist sets a worse example than the criminal. The moralist not only insists that a man can be a good citizen, a kind husband, an affectionate father, without religion, but demonstrates the truth of his doctrine by his own life; whereas the criminal admits that in and of himself he is nothing, and can do nothing, but that he needs assistance from the church and its ministers. Christianity has produced no greater character than Epictetus, no greater sovereign than Marcus Aurelius. The wickedness of the past was a good deal like that of the present. As a rule, kings have been wicked in direct proportion to their power - their power having been lessened, their crimes have decreased. As a matter of fact, paganism, of itself, did not produce any great men; neither has Christianity. Millions of influences determine individual character, and the religion of the country in which a man happens to be born may determine many of his opinions, without influencing, to any great extent, his real character. There have been brave, honest, and intelligent men in and out of every church. What Would You Substitute For The Bible As A Moral Guide? Written for The Boston Investigator. You ask me what I would "substitute for the Bible as a moral guide." I know that many people regard the Bible as the only moral guide and believe that in that book only can be found the true and perfect standard of morality. There are many good precepts, many wise sayings and many good regulations and laws in the Bible, and these are mingled with bad precepts, with foolish sayings, with absurd rules and cruel laws. Before we can truthfully say that the Ten Commandments constitute a moral guide, we must add and subtract. We must throw away some, and write others in their places. I like the Song of Solomon because it tells of human love, and that is something I can understand. That book in my judgment, is worth all the ones that go before it, and is a far better moral guide. There are some wise and merciful Proverbs. Some are selfish and some are flat and commonplace. I like the book of Ecclesiastes because there you find some sense, some poetry, and some philosophy. Take away the interpolations and it is a good book. You can, by selecting passages from different books, make a very good creed, and by selecting passages from different books, you can make a very bad creed. On the whole, the Old Testament cannot be considered a moral guide. At the same time, we must remember that the Old Testament is a natural production, that it was written by savages who were slowly crawling toward the light. We must give them credit for the noble things they said, and we must be charitable enough to excuse their faults and even their crimes. I admit that there are many good things in the New Testament, and if we take from that book the dogmas of eternal pain, of infinite revenge, of the atonement, of human sacrifice, of the necessity of shedding blood; if we throw away the doctrine of non-resistance, of loving enemies, the idea that prosperity is the result of wickedness, that poverty is a preparation for Paradise, if we throw all these away and take the good, sensible passages, applicable to conduct, then we can make a fairly good moral guide, - narrow, but moral. Of course, many important things would be left out. You would have nothing about human rights, nothing in favor of the family, nothing for education, nothing for investigation, for thought and reason, but still you would have a fairly good moral guide. What is morality? In this world we need certain things. We have many wants. We are exposed to many dangers. We need food, fuel, raiment and shelter, and besides these wants, there is, what may be called, the hunger of the mind. We are conditioned beings, and our happiness depends upon conditions. There are certain things that diminish, certain things that increase, well-being. There are certain things that destroy and there are others that preserve. Happiness, including its highest forms, is after all the only good, and everything, the result of which is to produce or secure happiness, is good, that is to say, moral. Everything that destroys or diminishes well-being is bad, that is to say, immoral. In other words, all that is good is moral, and all that is bad is immoral. What then is, or can be called, a moral guide? The shortest possible answer is one word: Intelligence. We want the experience of mankind, the true history of the race. We want the history of intellectual development, of the growth of the ethical, of the idea of justice, of conscience, of charity, of self-denial. We want to know the paths and roads that have been traveled by the human mind. These facts in general, these histories in outline, the results reached, the conclusions formed, the principles evolved, taken together, would form the best conceivable moral guide. Again I say: Intelligence is the only moral guide. Source: Dresden Edition, Vol. 5, pp 20-24.Source: Dresden Edition, Vol. 7, pp 210-214,526. word ct. 2057
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