Robert Green Ingersoll
"The Great Agnostic"
Robert Green Ingersoll was a 19th century American author, attorney and orator. He was known for promoting agnosticism, humanism and the superiority of reason over religion as a means of discovering truth. In addition to questioning the existence of God, Ingersoll held other views that were not mainstream in American public opinion at the time: he opposed slavery, supported voting rights for women and was against the death penalty.
Ingersoll Quotes
For my part I glory in the fact, that here in the New World, in the United States, liberty of conscience was first guaranteed to man, and that the Constitution of the United States was the first great decree entered in the high court of human equity forever divorcing church and state - the first injunction granted against the interference of the ghosts. This was one of the grandest steps ever taken by the human race in the direction of Progress.
Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires, and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world.
We are taught that liberty of speech should never be carried to the extent of contradicting the dead witnesses of a popular superstition.
All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention — of barbarian invention — is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition—then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity.