Robert Green Ingersoll

I realized that I haven't properly introduced my favorite atheist yet. He is Robert Green Ingersoll and his biography can be found here.

There is also a wikipedia entry for this great orator and thinker here. Ingersoll was man with ideas ahead of his time. He was an opponent of religion and superstition, a supporter of human rights, of women's rights and of science back in the days when the world was entirely superstitious and imprisoned by religion. He was not a philosopher in the mold of Ayn Rand nor of Bertrand Russel but his writings carried the force of logic and reason and can be hard hitting and concrete. He is a lawyer, after all.

A collection of his oratories and writings can be found here. If you can read only one of Ingersoll's speeches you can do no better than to read his famous assault against religion: The Gods.