Ignorant Ingersollic Ingenuity pt1
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Or, the Argument by Outrage Perfected
James Patrick Holding
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Robert Ingersoll probably did not originate the tactics of bigotry, chauvinism, and disregard for scholarship used by certain skeptics today -- but he almost certainly did a great deal towards making these tactics socially acceptable.
One purpose of the Rogue's Cemetery is to show just how little certain skeptical arguments and tactics have changed over the years, and Ingersoll provides us with plenty of examples of this -- in spades. In fact he is far worse than any modern skeptic on several counts. One easily sees in the works of Ingersoll concerned with the Bible foreshadowings of the likes of Farrell Till, C. Dennis McKinsey, and others; but the shadow is cast by a giant. Ingersoll was far worse than any of these men: Far more of a bigot, far more of an ignoramus. Till and McKinsey are Miss Manners rolled together with Einstein compared to this fellow.
That's my polemical summary judgment; now to the data and qualifications. I have chosen to briefly examine (by the unwitting graces of the Secular Web, which seems to have all of Ingersoll's material online) two specific works by Ingersoll. One is entitled "About the Holy Bible"; the other, "A Few Reasons for Doubting the Inspiration of the Bible". Oh, and one last summary judgment: If Ingersoll knew anything about Biblical languages, archaeology, literature, etc. (even for his time period), then Donald Duck is President. :-)
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General Tactical Report
How did Ingersoll operate? We discover very quickly that many of his tactics are still in use by skeptics today, and by way of introduction, we will use comments from the first of the two works we have under consideration, "About the Holy Bible".
Tactic #1 -- Be a Bigot! Consider the following statements by him, beginning with one explaining "the origin of the Bible":
A few wandering families -- poor, wretched, without education, art or power, descendants of those who had been enslaved for four hundred years, ignorant as the inhabitants of Central Africa, had just escaped from the desert of Sinai...
At that time these wanderers had no commerce with other nations, they had no written language, they could neither read nor write. They had no means by which they could make this revelation known to other nations, and so it remained buried in the jargon of a few ignorant, impoverished and unknown tribes for more than two thousand years.
The men who did the selecting (of the NT books for the canon -- JPH) were ignorant and superstitious. They were firm believers in the miraculous. They thought that diseases had been cured by aprons and handkerchiefs of the apostles, by the bones of the dead. They believed in the fable of the Phoenix, and that the hyenas changed their sex every year.
My regular readers will easily recognize a few things that are just plain wrong in the above paragraphs which Ingersoll, writing in the time he was, can't really be blamed for. Scholarship of the period did suppose the Hebrews had no written language or literacy at the time; while this was to some extent true (there was without doubt a written language, very highly developed, and literacy was very low, though not non-existent), it was not a conclusion drawn based on evidence, but on the lack thereof -- and also based on bigoted views of ancient peoples held by scholars of the 19th century (what I have elsewhere called the "Ancient People are Stupid" [APAS] paradigm). Commerce with other nations, while obviously limited by the constraints of travel and communication, did exist. Ancient people were not as dumb as the scholars of the 19th century surmised -- they just didn't have modern technology at their disposal.
But I want the reader to especially note the polemic. Ingersoll uses the word ignorant and stresses poverty and "barbarity" as often as most people take a breath. He was careful to stress the enslavement of the Israelites, knowing well that his readers would equate slavery with ignorance (this in spite of the fact that slaves are no less intelligent on the average than anyone else). Nor, note well, was he ashamed of the occassional racist overtone (viz.: "the inhabitants of Central Africa"). He stressed a few of the absurd things that some of the canon selectors believed, and begged the question of the possibility of the miraculous enormously, in order to tar them with the brush of ignorance and bypass the intelligence that they did possess. Ingersoll was very much a product of his times: Ancient and "primitive" peoples were looked down upon by much of the scholarly elite of the 19th century as less than capable, savage, and backwards, utterly incapable of anything resembling civilized discourse, believers in superstition who could not even tie their own shoes or sweep a floor without directions. One would never know that ancient peoples were capable of preserving material orally quite accurately -- or that they were no less intelligent as a whole than those who live today. The method played well in Ingersoll's century, when the educated agreed with him. Today, much of what he wrote would be too outrageous to pass muster in public discourse; but while the implicit racism and much of the bigotry has disappeared, much of it also remains in the tactics of skeptics today: Witness Farrell Till's comments about "desert nomads" and Steven Carr's assumption that the enemies of the Ninevites would be too stupid to build a dam. Political correctness and modern awareness has changed the range of responses available, but otherwise, little has changed. The APAS paradigm remains alive and well today.
Let me add here as a tangent that Ingersoll also made use of a similar tactic when confronting modern peoples. He states, for example, that it is "admitted by intelligent and honest theologians" that Moses did not write the books ascribed to him. Note how one is thereby put down as dumb and dishonest if they disagree with Ingersoll's point of view! Not a whit of critical evaluation is performed of each side's arguments; it is merely assumed that those whom Ingersoll agrees with are correct. This tactic was used heavily by Steve Allen in his books.
Tactic #2 -- It's a Conspiracy! Like many skeptics today, Ingersoll explained the origin of the Biblical text in terms of some plot to control others. Thus:
For the purpose of controlling his followers (Moses) pretended that he was instructed and assisted by Jehovah, the god of these wanderers.
We know that the idea of inspiration was of slow growth, and that the inspiration was determined by those who had certain ends to accomplish.
Is there any real proof of these conspiracies? Of course not -- they are products of Ingersoll's imagination, a way of him explaining away things that actually happened. Today we still put up with the likes of Eisenmann and Theiring, explaining away the Biblical record in terms of a clever conspiracy that only now we have uncovered. Ingersoll was neither as creative nor as outrageous, but the tactic was basically the same in principle.
Incidentally, Ingersoll also had a modern version of this notion:
Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible. The preachers dare not, because they would be driven from their pulpits. Professors in colleges dare not, because they would lose their salaries. Politicians dare not. They would be defeated. Editors dare not. They would lose subscribers. Merchants dare not, because they might lose customers. Men of fashion dare not, fearing that they would lose caste. Even clerks dare not, because they might be discharged. And so I thought I would do it myself.
So automatically, there is no way you could present a reasoned defense of the Bible -- if you do, you are just part of the conspiracy! That's called the "poisoned well" technique, and while it is viable as a polemic tactic where conspiracy theorists are concerned (and I use it myself at times), it only works on those already committed to the cause -- we need not ascribe such statements any value whatsoever.
Tactic #3 -- The Argument by Outrage. I don't have to tell you too much here: Always, always, Biblical "cruelties", especially those connected with the righteous judgment of a holy God and the corporate responsinbility of the people, are held up as "obscene", "blasphemous", etc. and repeated in a way guaranteed to tweak the emotions and shut off the brain completely. So:
Is it well to teach children that God tortured the innocent cattle of the Egyptians -- bruised them to death with hailstones -- on account of the sins of Pharaoh?
I really doubt if Ingersoll was personally concerned with and pain suffered by the Egyptian cattle -- chances are he had little concern about animal suffering as a whole: He certainly didn't wander the forest on weekends applying band-aids and antiseptic to the beasts of the field. But incidents like these are great comfort for those looking for an excuse to think their own well-deserved judgment to be unfair and cruel. This is the namby-pamby God that Ingersoll preferred -- one that didn't care at all about sin, had no rights over His creation, and offered us songs, dances and tonic for our miseries.
Tactic #4 -- The Argument by Incredulity. Quite naturally, anything that is miraculous -- such as predictive prophecy -- is dismissed out of hand. Sometimes a touch of insult is added upon those who believe in miracles. We saw this a bit in a comment in #1 above; consider these also:
Can we believe that Elijah brought flames from heaven, or that he went at last to Paradise in a chariot of fire?
In every case above, it is simply a given that if you can believe any of these things, something is wrong with you. This plays well to those who already agree with Ingersoll that the miraculous is impossible: It builds their confidence up to have a "laundry list" of miracles, but the cumulation of effect is merely a polemical tactic. It does not add to the question of the possibility of the miraculous to list miracles and hold them up as incredible, any more than listing them in praise proves that miracles can indeed take place. Do not fall for the cumulative effect of such laundry lists. (Modern skeptics, at least, seem to have abandoned this tactic where the miraculous is concerned, though they still use it for "argument by outrage". Plays on the emotions, especially where your own skin might be concerned, never run out of steam.)
Tactic #5 -- Dismissal Scholarship. Take a look at these statements by Ingersoll and ask yourself: Who else profiled on this page are we reminded of?
No one knows the author of First and Second Kings or First and Second Chronicles; all we know is that these books are of no value.
(The Bible) is the enemy of Art. "Thou shalt make no graven image." This was the death of Art...Palestine never produced a painter or a sculptor.
Is there anything in Exodus calculated to make men generous, loving and noble?
Not a word in Nehemiah worth reading.
If you guessed Ken Smith, of Ken's Guide to the Bible, award yourself a gold star. With just a hint of bigotry, Ingersoll, like Smith, dismisses all he finds worthless or not understandable, never suspecting whether it might be some deficiency of their own that is the problem, and never mind whether those for whom the material was written found it important; likewise do they tend towards silly and irrelevant complaints like the one about Art (which, incidentally, aside from resting on a fundamental misunderstanding of the command in question, ignores the fact that Palestine produced many artisitic wonders, as well as literary wonders, and at any rate, one can hardly make this sort of judgment for any ancient civilzation, being that so little has survived from them). I have alluded elsewhere to comments like the one above about Exodus: It was apparently Ingersoll's judgment that an "inspired" work ought to be like some sort of health tonic that makes us feel warm inside -- as opposed to being what the Bible is, a truth-mirror that makes us recognize our own lostness.
Ingersoll also engaged the method of bald dismissal, and uncritical acceptance of all he agreed with. We saw a bit of this in Tactic #1; here are some more examples:
We know that Solomon did not write the Proverbs or the Song, that Isaiah was not the author of the book that bears his name, that no one knows the author Job, Ecclesiastes, or Esther or of any book in the Old Testament, with the exception of Ezra.
We know that (the book of Esther) is cruel, absurd and impossible.
...we know that Ecclesiates was written by an unbeliever.
We now know that there were many other gospels besides our four, some of which have been lost. There were the Gospels of Paul, of the Egyptians, of Perfection, of Judas, of Thaddeus, of the Infancy, of Thomas, of Mary, of Andrew, of Nicodemus, of Marcion and several others.
With the possible exception of the authorship of Job and Esther, all of this reflects only the unified consenus of "liberal" scholarship -- which Ingersoll simply accepted uncritically. Not a hint of analysis is done at all. He simply rode the coattails of liberalism to glory and was done with it, just as many modern skeptics today, like Sam Gibson, think it is enough to post the opinions of the likes of Burton Mack, and leave it at that. Note also the "laundry list" of other "gospels" -- simply presented as though by their mere existence they prove something. What of critical evaluation of their contents, their manuscript evidence? It wasn't done by Ingersoll, and it was not done by Larry Taylor of the Jury crew in his article on the canon. Some things just never change.
And finally, we couldn't close without the obvious: Ingersoll was no scholar of the Bible. Here are some minor samples:
Daniel is a disordered dream -- a nightmare. What can be made of this book with its image with a golden head, with breast and arms of silver, with belly and thighs of brass, with legs of iron, and with feet of iron and clay; with its writing on the wall, its den of lions, and its vision of the ram and goat?
What can be "made" of it? Quite a lot, if you are not overwhelmngly ignorant of the history and social context behind it. Elsewhere we have explained each of these items, and shown that far from being a "disordered dream", Daniel is perfectly understandable, easily interpreted (especially the ram and the goat, which are clearly explained!), and in line with what we know of the period. Who is Ingersoll to say otherwise? He is merely an ignorant 19th-century man viewing a 5th-century BC text through the lens of his own prejudices -- a la Steve Allen's dismissal of apocalyptic visions as a "poor way" of communicating things. This is bigotry and ignorance on Ingersoll's part, and nothing more.
We turn now to Ingersoll's evaluations of the teachings of Jesus, one comment in particular that is exemplary. On "turn the other cheek" he says:
Is there any philsophy, any wisdom in this? Christ takes from goodness, from virtue, from the truth, the right of self-defence. Vice becomes the master of the world, and the good become the victims of the infamous. No man has the right to protect himself, his property, his wife and children. Government becomes impossible, and the world is at the mercy of criminals. Is there any absurdity beyond this?
Only someone completely ignorant of the context of this saying could suppose it teaches us to neglect self-defense. As even the most basic commentary tells us, this is a reference to matters of personal insult, not personal assault. But how different is this from Dan Barker's ridiculous manipulation of the Golden Rule? It is hardly different at all -- and even here Ingersoll cannot be excused for ignorance, because even in the 19th century we had a good idea about customs of the time. It is my supposition that Ingersoll, like many critics today, was too insensate and disinterested in establishing the truth to bother looking things up.
To be cont
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