“The doctrine of eternal punishment is the infamy of infamies. As I have often said, the man who believes in eternal torment, in the justice of endless pain, is suffering from at least two diseases—petrifaction of the heart and putrefaction of the brain.”
A Christmas Sermon (1890)
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Robert G. Ingersoll 439
Union United States Army officer 1833–1899Related quotes
Letter II
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: I know but one man, of more than miserable intellect, who in these modern times has dared defend eternal punishment on the score of justice, and that is Leibnitz; a man who, if I know him rightly, chose the subject from its difficulty as an opportunity for the display of his genius, and cared so little for the truth that his conclusions did not cost his heart a pang, or wring a single tear from him. And what does Leibnitz say? That sin, forsooth, though itself be only finite, yet, because it is against an Infinite Being, contracts a character of infinity, and so must be infinitely punished. It is odd that the clever Leibnitz should not have seen that a finite punishment, inflicted by the same Infinite Being, would itself of course contract the same character of infinity.
“Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made.”
Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 173
My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 75.
What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."
Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 150
No. 76, preached to the Earl of Carlisle, c. autumn 1622
LXXX Sermons (1640)
September 1, 1896, reported in Homer Croy, He Hanged Them High (1952), p. 218.