The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic InterpretationSinclair, Upton
Religion
The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation
Sinclair, Upton
Christianity -- Controversial literature
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire.
You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the
pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under
the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time
whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly
the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all
sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the
privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt
court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the
newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept
and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have
been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as
they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps,
you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the
august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your
petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave
like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of
like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
Birth Control
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated
curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which
might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these
weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be
mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the
slams of our great cities---the degenerate, the defective, the
insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There
exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing
the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their
hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a
simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind
and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead
of as animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums
of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified,
poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after
another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and
seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until
finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up
and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women,
in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the
primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr.
Wm. J.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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