Download The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought AudioBook Free
A biography that restores America's primary 19th-century champ of reason and secularism to our still contested 21st-century general public square. Through the Gilded Get older, which observed the dawn of America's long lasting culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the fantastic Agnostic". The nation's most famous orator, he lifted his voice with respect to Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the parting of cathedral and status with a vigor unmatched since America's ground-breaking generation. When he passed on in 1899, even his religious enemies recognized that he might have aspired to the united states presidency got he been inclined to cover up his opposition to religion. To the question that keeps its controversial electric power today - was the United States founded as a Christian nation? - Ingersoll clarified an emphatic no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the author of Freethinkers: A BRIEF HISTORY of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual custom extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the present generation of "new atheists". Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America's often-denigrated and ignored secular history encompasses issues, which range from women's privileges to evolution, as potent and divisive today as these were in Ingersoll's time. Ingersoll emerges in this family portrait among the indispensable public characters who keep an alternative version of background alive. He dedicated his life to that greatest secular notion of all - liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious as well.
