The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition by Upton Sinclair (microsoft ebook reader txt) ๐
A thousand banners caught the sun, And cities smoked along the plain, And laden down with silk and gold And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
Kemp.
* * *
#The Priestly Lie#
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness--that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only
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It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion. Those peoples which are wholly under the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans, Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos and Turks, who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the way are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick MacGill:
The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said the priest. "What is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single grain, how long would it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll say. But that time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand, counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did not pay Farley McKeown his lawful [43] debts, his lawful debts within the letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.
There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture; the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one for agricultural co-operation and the other for political independenceโboth of them definitely and specifically non-religious. This same thing has been true of the movements which have helped on happier nations, such as the republics of France and America, which have put an end to the power of the priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the mind of the child without its parents' consent.
This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city where I write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing, screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their neighbors. The police officers [44] testified that the accused claimed to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling", about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming, and found tied to a bed-post, being whipped by a man. She belonged to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft. Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake had been madeโit was another woman who was the witch. And again in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news item, telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found on his pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his neighbors to witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signifyโhe would buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the war!
And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"
[45]
CONTENTS
The Church of Good Society
the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.
Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense driftsโ
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls.
Sterling.
[46] [47]
The Rain Makers
I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be the Church in which I was brought up. Heading this statement, some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the volumeโnot as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of income and a shield to privilege.
In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer", I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my "economic interpretation" of the phenomenonโthe fact that the heavenly bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has any utmost precision of barometer [48] been able to drive the priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and dignified of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I study with care the passage wherein the clergyman appears as controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened caution of phraseology; the church will not repeat the experience of the sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing water, and then could not make them stop! The spell invokes "moderate rain and showers"; and as an additional precaution there is a counter-spell against "excessive rains and floods": the weather-faucet being thus under exact control.
I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer", and note the remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of the emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized to deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim the credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked, there is a blanket order upon Providence: "Graciously hear us, that those evils which the craft or subtilty of the devil or man worketh against us, be brought to nought!" I am reminded of the idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could never understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for allโby wishing that everything he wished might come true!
Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are amiable; but now and then you come upon one which is sinister in its implications. The volume before me happens to be of the Church of England, which is even more [49] forthright in its confronting of the Great Magic. Many years ago I remember talking with an English army officer, asking how he could feel sure of his soldiers in case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him that the men had relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse to shoot them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had worked out its technique with care. He would never think of ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first start the spell of discipline to work, he would march them round the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood moving to military music; then, when he gave the order, in they would go. I have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with which he illustrated their goingโI could hear the grunting of bayonets in the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in England has made necessary the perfecting of such military technique; also, you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a religious sanction for it. After the job has been done and the bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church, and the officer kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman raises his hands to heaven and intones: "We bless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased Thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately raised up among us!"
And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killersโhe even takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office Records of the British Government I read (vol. 40, page 17) how certain miners were on strike against low wages and the "truck" system, and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself at the head of the yeomanry [50] and the Greys. He wrote the Home Office a lively account of his military operations. All that remained was to apprehend certain of the strikers, "and then I shall be able to return to my Clerical duties." Later he wrote of the "sinister influences" which kept the miners from returning to their work, and how he had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.
The Babylonian Fire-god
So we come to the most important of the functions of the tribal god, as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial
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