Robert Ingersoll On the Outsider Test for Faith

Before I argued for it Ingersoll did.

Christians take it for granted that their religion is true, that there can be about that no doubt, no mistake. They begin to examine the religions of other nations. They take it for granted that all these other religions are false.

They are in a frame of mind to notice contradictions, to discover mistakes and to apprehend absurdities. In examining other religions they use their common sense.

They carry in the hand the lamp of probability.

The miracles of other Christs, or of the founders of other religions, appear unreasonable—they find that they are not supported by evidence. Most of the stories excite their laughter. Many of the laws seem cruel, many of the ceremonies absurd.

These Christians satisfy themselves that they are right in their first conjecture—that is, that other religions are all made by men.

Afterward the same arguments they have used against other religions were found to be equally forcible against their own.

They find that the miracles of Buddha rest upon the same kind of evidence as the miracles in the Old Testament, as the miracles in the New—that the evidence in the one case is just as weak and unreliable as in the other. They also find that it is just as easy to account for the existence of Christianity as for the existence of any other religion, and they find that the human mind in all countries has traveled substantially the same road and has arrived at substantially the same conclusions. [From Volume XI of the works of Ingersoll.]

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My book, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True,should be available in a couple of weeks or so. Be among the first to get it.