[PDF] The Great Agnostic eBook

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 45,68 MB
Release : 2013-01-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300137257

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A biography that restores America's foremost 19th-century champion of reason and secularism to the still contested 21st-century public square.

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,89 MB
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Freethinkers
ISBN : 9780300205787

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A biography that restores America's foremost 19th-century champion of reason and secularism to the still contested 21st-century public square.

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 10,7 MB
Release : 2013-01-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0300188927

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“Jacoby writes with wit and vigor, affectionately resurrecting a man whose life and work are due for reconsideration” (The Boston Globe). During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America’s enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as “the Great Agnostic.” The nation’s most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state with a power unmatched since America’s revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the US presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its controversial power today—was the United States founded as a Christian nation?—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation of “new atheists.” Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America’s often-denigrated and forgotten secular history encompasses issues, ranging from women’s rights to evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in Ingersoll’s time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as an indispensable public figure who devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all—liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike. “Jacoby’s goal of elucidating the life and work of Robert Ingersoll is admirably accomplished. She offers a host of well-chosen quotations from his work, and she deftly displays the effect he had on others. For instance: after a young Eugene V. Debs heard Ingersoll talk, Debs accompanied him to the train station and then—just so he could continue the conversation—bought himself a ticket and rode all the way from Terre Haute to Cincinnati. Readers today may well find Ingersoll’s company equally entrancing.” —Jennifer Michael Hecht, The New York Times Book Review

Author : Paul Horwitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 40,25 MB
Release : 2011-02-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 019973772X

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"Argues that the fundamental reason for church-state conflict is our aversion to questions of religious truth. By trying to avoid the question of religious truth, law and religion has ultimately reached a state of incoherence. He asserts that the answer to this dilemma is to take the agnostic turn: to take an empathetic and imaginative approach to questions of religious truth, one that actually confronts rather than avoids these questions, but without reaching a final judgment about what that truth is"--Jacket.

Author : Lesley Hazleton
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 39,62 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Agnosticism
ISBN : 1594634130

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"A widely admired writer on religion celebrates agnosticism as the most vibrant, engaging--and ultimately the most honest--stance toward the mysteries of existence." -- Amazon.com.

Author : Robert Ingersoll
Publisher :
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 24,59 MB
Release : 2013-01-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781481938891

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"For while I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself, and my creed is this:Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.This creed is somewhat short, but is long enough for this life; long enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed. But this creed certainly will do for this life."Robert G. Ingersoll Freethought flowered in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, and its best known advocate was Robert Green Ingersoll, a lawyer and Civil War officer, who travelled the continent for 30 years, speaking to capacity audiences. Although his repertoire included lectures on Shakespeare, Voltaire and Burns, the largest crowds turned out to hear him denounce the bible, and religion. As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery, women's suffrage, and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular forward thinking orator and critic of American culture and public life. Legendary as a speaker - he memorized his speeches and could talk for hours without notes - and as a proponent of freethought, Ingersoll is an American original whose words still ring with truth and power today.

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 452 pages
File Size : 28,59 MB
Release : 2005-01-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1429934751

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An authoritative history of the vital role of secularist thinkers and activists in the United States, from a writer of "fierce intelligence and nimble, unfettered imagination" (The New York Times) At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby paints a striking portrait of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with liberal and tolerant religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for reforms opposed by reactionary forces in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow—as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"—Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanists. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.

Author : PZ Myers
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 12,80 MB
Release : 2014-05-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0307739805

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On his popular science blog, Pharyngula, PZ Myers has entertained millions of readers with his infectious love of evolutionary science and his equally infectious disdain for creationism, biblical literalism, intelligent design theory, and other products of godly illogic. This funny and fearless book collects and expands on some of his most popular writings, giving the religious fanaticism of our times the gleeful disrespect it deserves by skewering the apocalyptic fantasies, magical thinking, hypocrisies, and pseudoscientific theories advanced by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. Forceful and articulate, scathing and funny, The Happy Atheist is a reaffirmation of the revelatory power of humor and the truth-revealing powers of science and reason.