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After the Civil War, Ingersoll embarked upon a career as a lecturer, touring the United States to make his thoughts on religion, women's rights, and humanism known to all. Some Mistakes of Moses, one of the most popular of these lectures, is a critical examination of the "Pentateuch" (the first five books of the Bible). Ingersoll passionately believed that the alleged divine origins of the Bible were not sufficient reason for a suspension of critical judgement. His diatribe against Old Testament religion is a call for rationality, a quality sorely missing in this time of political upheaval in the world in the name of religion.Ingersoll greatly feared that when the Bible was read as truth rather than as a collection of fables, mankind would destroy itself in its attempt to follow the teachings of Moses to the letter. Ingersoll fervently believed that the most important belief one can have is belief in man. "Theology is a superstition - Humanity is a religion" - this was the credo of Robert G. Ingersoll. Now, a new generation of readers can thrill to Ingersoll's brilliant and witty rhetoric, just as great thinkers Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Eugene V Debs, and others did almost one hundred years ago.

THIS 40 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll: Political V9, by Robert G. Ingersoll. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766172783.

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 (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular 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. His most important works are gathered in this 12-volume collected edition, first published posthumously in 1901. Volume IV features Ingersoll's lectures on: [ "Why I Am an Agnostic" [ "How to Reform Mankind" [ "The Foundations of Faith" [ "Superstition" [ "The Devil" [ and more