Reason, Tolerance and Christianity (Freethought Library)

This important book contains three spirited debates - "Rome of Reason", "Controversy on Christianity", and "The Limits of Toleration" - between the great American freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) and leading Christian churchmen and statesmen of his own day, including Cardinal Edward Manning and William Gladstone.

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was perhaps the most famous American of his day. As an enlightened freethinker and pioneer of humane, rational, and agnostic views, Ingersoll was a tireless advocate of rational thought, who battled superstition and hypocrisy wherever he found it. This dedicated popularizer would regularly address huge audiences, opening their minds to ideas that often provoked guarded whispers in private. Ingersoll was a man far ahead of his time, advocating such progressive causes as agnosticism, birth control, voting rights for women, the advancement of science, civil rights, and freedom of speech. His advocacy of such iconoclastic ideals made a lasting impression on his own and later generations. Although Robert Ingersoll lived before the development of the Secular Humanist Movement, there is no doubt that he qualifies as one of the great heroes of the Humanist Pantheon.