Category: Great Minds

Classic voices of freethought Mark Twain’s ‘Letters From the Earth’ America’s best-kept secret about Mark Twain (1835–1910) is that he was an agnostic with a strong contempt for religion. His critiques of supernatural-ism and religious dogma are scathing, as this selection shows. In “Letters From the Earth,” he asks us to imagine that Satan visits …

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), America’s leading agnostic, was a far more thoughtful, moral, and humane freethinker than most of his religious critics ever realized. He did indeed attack the fallacies of religion and supernaturalism at every turn—but also promoted reason, science, freedom, and humanism. In the following excerpt from his famous essay “The Gods,” he …