The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation — John Shaqi
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
I go on to another building, which I am told is a library
containing volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters, published
under the auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and
find endless vistas of shelves, also several thousand current
magazines and papers. I consult these--for my legs have given out
in the effort to visit and inspect all phases of the
Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that hardly a week passes
that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if
I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and
ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies,
the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. There
are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed by
Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters,
whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters,
whose preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There
are Yogi Bootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk;
Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green and purple auras; Mormon
Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and
Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite, Holy Roller and Holy
Jumper, Come-to-glory negro, Billy Sunday base-ball and Salvation
Army bass-drum Bootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand
varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and
transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme
Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters
with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift"
and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden
Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar
per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian
professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at
several thousand dollars per year each. There are the Nietzschean
Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves to the Superman, and the
art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan Bootstrap-lifters, who lift
themselves down to the Ape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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