The Profits of Religion, Fifth EditionSinclair, Upton
Religion
The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
Sinclair, Upton
Christianity -- Controversial literature
You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or whatever
you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians who have only
your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones who are condemned
to elimination? There has come, let us say, a period of
"overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and therefore you are
starving, you have woven too much cloth, and therefore you are naked,
you have finished the world for your masters, and it is time for you
to move out of the way. As the sociologist from Geneva phrases it,
"Your suppression imposes itself as an imperious necessity." And the
function of the Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process,
by "captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with candle-lights and
images, your ears with sweet music and soothing words; and so you will
perish without raising a finger! "Here," reflects the professor, "we
see how magnificently the teaching of Jesus applies to all classes of
society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the
capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that
troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he carries
with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith
at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar
materialists, like you and me. "Inequality signifies inequality of
capacity," he explains; but the standard whereby we judge this
capacity "cannot be the standard of the moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are
known, but those which govern his moral nature cannot be
known; the moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and
hence is not subject to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as
wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with the
fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for teaching the
Copernican view of the universe; that infallible popes had again and
again condemned this heresy #ex cathedra#. Said the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is
stationary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is
comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these
opposite statements is the very truth #till we know what
motion is#?
#Spook Hunting#
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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