The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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You do not have to look very deeply into this "Wisdom-drama" to
find out whose wisdom it is. Confess your own ignorance and your
own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred
Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon
and respite--in exchange for fresh meat. Here are verses from a
psalm of the ancient Babylonians, which "heathen" chant is
identical in spirit and purpose with the utterances of Job:
The Sin that I have wrought, I know not;
The unclean that I have eaten, I know not;
The offense into which I have walked, I know not....
The lord, in the wrath of his heart, hath regarded me;
The god, in the anger of his heart, hath surrounded me;
A goddess, known or unknown, hath wrought me sorrow....
I sought for help, but no one took my hand;
I wept, but no one harkened to me....
The feet of my goddess I kiss, I touch them;
To the god, known or unknown, I utter my prayer;
O god, known or unknown, turn thy countenance, accept my
sacrifice;
O goddess, known or unknown, look mercifully on me! accept
my sacrifice!
Salve Regina!
And now let the reader leap three thousand years of human
history, of toil and triumph of the intellect of man; and instead
of a Hebrew manuscript or a Babylonian brick there confronts him
a little publication, printed on a modern rotary press in the
capital of the United States of America, bearing the date of
October, 1914, and the title "Salve Regina". In it we find "a
beautiful prayer", composed by the late cardinal Rampolla; we are
told that "Pius X attached to it an indulgence of 100 days, each
time it is piously recited, applicable to the souls in
purgatory."
O Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, cast a glance from Heaven, where
thou sittest as Queen, upon this poor sinner, your servant.
Though conscious of his unworthiness.... he blesses and exalts
thee from his whole heart as the purest, the most beautiful and
the most holy of creatures. He blesses thy holy name. He blesses
thy sublime prerogatives as real Mother of God, ever Virgin,
conceived without stain of sin, as co-Redemptress of the human
race. He blesses the Eternal Father who chose you, etc. He
blesses the Incarnate Word, etc. He blesses the Divine Spirit,
etc. He blesses, exalts and thanks the most august Trinity, etc.
O Virgin, holy and merciful . . . be pleased to accept this
little homage of your servant, and obtain for him also from your
divine Son pardon for his sins, Amen.
And then, looking more closely, we discover the purpose of this
"beautiful prayer", and of the neat little paper which prints it.
"Salve Regina" is raising funds for the "National Shrine of the
Immaculate Conception", a home for more priests, and Catholic
ladies who desire to collect for it may receive little books
which they are requested to return within three months. Pius X
writes a letter of warm endorsement, and sets an example by
giving four hundred dollars "out of his poverty"--or, to be more
precise, out of the poverty of the pitiful peasantry of Italy.
There is included in the paper a form of bequest for "devoted
clients of Our Blessed Mother", and at the top of the editorial
page the most alluring of all baits for the loving hearts of the
flock--that the names of deceased relatives and friends may be
written in the collection books, and will be transferred to the
records of the Shrine, and these persons "will share in all its
spiritual benefits". In the days of Job it was with threats of
boils and poverty that the Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in
the case of this blackest of all Terrors, transplanted to our
free Republic from the heart of the Dark Ages, the wretched
victims see before their eyes the glare of flames, and hear the
shrieks of their loved ones writhing in torment through uncounted
ages and eternities.
Fresh Meat
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought
earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor
compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig
and the bear--he was vegetarian when he could not help it. The
advocates of the reform insist that meat as a diet causes muddy
brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never suspect
this from a study of history. What you find in history is that
all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest and
cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the subject classes living
in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they
rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty, our
millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and turkeys,
and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save
everything for the summer-boarder or the buyer from the city. It
would not be too much to say of the cultural records of early man
that they all have to do, directly or indirectly, with the
reserving of fresh meat to the masters. In J. T. Trowbridge's
cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told
by the cannibal priest how idol-worship has ameliorated the
morals of the tribe--
For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropophagous,
'Tis rare that human flesh goes down
The low-caste man's aesophagus!
I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the
cave-man to find the first lover of the flesh-pots who put a
taboo upon meat, and promised supernatural favors to all who
would exercise self-control, and instead of consuming their meat
themselves, would bring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or
altar, where the god might come in the night-time and partake of
it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few religions of record in
which such devices do not appear. The early laws of the Hebrews
are more concerned with delicatessen for the priests than with
any other subject whatever. Here, for example, is the way to make
a Nazarite:
He shall offer his offering up to the Lord, one he lamb of the
first year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb
of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram
without blemish for peace offerings, and a basket of unleavened
bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, and wafers of
unleavened bread anointed with oil, and their meat offerings.
And the law goes on to instruct the priests to take certain
choice, parts and "wave them for a wave offering before the Lord:
this is holy for the priest." What was done with the other
portions we are not told; but earlier in this same "Book of
Numbers" we find the general law that
Every offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel,
which they bring unto the priest, shall be his. And every man's
hallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any man giveth to the
priest, it shall be his.
In the same way we are told by Viscount Amberley that the priests
of Ceylon first present the gifts to the god, and then eat them.
Among the Parsees, when a man dies, the relatives must bring four
new robes to the priests; if they do this, the priests wear the
robes; if they fail to do it, the dead man appears naked before
the judgment-throne. The devotees are instructed that "he who
performs this rite succeeds in both worlds, and obtains a firm
footing in both worlds." Among the Buddhists, the followers give
alms to the monks, and are told specifically what advantages will
thereby accrue to them. In the Aitareyo Brahmairiarn of the
Rig-Veda we read
He who, knowing this, sacrifices according to this rite, is born
from the womb of Agni and the offerings, participates in the
nature of the Rik, Yajus, and Saman, the Veda (sacred knowledge),
the Brahma (sacred element) and immortality, and is absorbed into
the deity.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma,
or juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god.
Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the
sacred juice is that of the grape, and the priest is not allowed
to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered "reverently to
consume it." In as much as the priest is the sole judge of how
much good sherry wine he shall consecrate previous to the
ceremony, it is to be expected that the priests of this cult
should be lukewarm towards the prohibition movement, and should
piously refuse to administer their sacrament with unfermented and
uninteresting grape-juice.
Priestly Empires
In every human society of which we have record there has been one
class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of
wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much
smaller class which has done the directing. To belong to this
latter class is to work also, but with the head instead of the
hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of life, to live in
the best houses, to eat the best food, to have choice of the most
desirable women; it is to have leisure to cultivate the mind and
appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and distinctions, to give
laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered
and regarded--in short, to have Power. How to get this Power and
to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of men from
the beginning of time.
The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is
uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed
with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force
alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and
therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when
resistance is paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the
race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and
even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly
empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs....
Such was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by reserving to
themselves the business of instruction, were enabled to mould the
young and plastic mind according to their own wills, and to train
it early to implicit reverence for religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this
teaching:
To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the
maintenance of the priests. The estates were augmented by the
policy or devotion of successive princes, until, under the last
Montezuma, they had swollen to an enormous extent, and covered
every district of the empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices,
whereby the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its
divinities:
At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the
prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose,
were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long.
The ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives
are said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the
priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:
The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the
original legal tribunal was the place where the image or symbol
of the god stood. A legal decision was an oracle or omen,
indicative of the will of the god. The power thus lodged in the
priests of Babylonia and Assyria was enormous. They virtually
held in their hands the life and death of the people.
And of the business side of this vast religious system:
The temples were the natural depositories of the legal archives,
which in the course of centuries grew to veritably enormous
proportions. Records were made of all decisions; the facts were
set forth, and duly attested by witnesses. Business and marriage
contracts, loans and deeds of sale were in like manner drawn up
in the presence of official scribes, who were also priests. In
this way all commercial transactions received the written
sanction of the religious organization. The temples
themselves--at least in the large centres--entered into business
relations with the populace. In order to maintain the large
household represented by such an organization as that of the
temple of Enlil of Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of
Marduk at Babylon, or that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings
of land were required which, cultivated by agents for the
priests, or farmed out with stipulations for a goodly share of
the produce, secured an income for the maintenance of the temple
officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded to the
furnishing of loans at interest--in later periods, at 20%--to
barter in slaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaging labor
for work of all kinds directly needed for the temples. A large
quantity of the business documents found in the temple archives
are concerned with the business affairs of the temple, and we are
justified in including the temples in the large centres as among
the most important business institutions of the country. In
financial or monetary transactions the position of the temples
was not unlike that of national banks. . . .
And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned professor
said more in that last sentence than he himself intended, for his
lectures were delivered in that temple of plutocracy, the
University of Pennsylvania, and paid out of an endowment which
specifies that "all polemical subjects shall be positively
excluded!"
Prayer-wheels
These priestly empires exist in the world today. If we wish to
find them we have only to ask ourselves: What countries are
making no contribution to the progress of the race? What
countries have nothing to give us, whether in art, science, or
industry?
For example, Gervaise tells us of the Talapoins, or priests of
Siam, that "they are exempted from all public charges, they
salute nobody, while everybody prostrates himself before them.
They are maintained at the public expense." In the same way we
read of the negroes of the Caribbean islands that "their priests
and priestesses exercise an almost unlimited power." Miss
Kingsley, in her "West African Studies", tells us that if we
desire to understand the institutions of this district, we must
study the native's religion.
For his religion has so firm a grasp upon his mind that it
influences everything he does. It is not a thing apart, as the
religion of the Europeans is at times. The African cannot say,
"Oh, that is all right from a religious point of view, but one
must be practical." To be practical, to get on in the world, to
live the day and night through, he must be right in the religious
point of view, namely, must be on working terms with the great
world of spirits around him. The knowledge of this spirit world
constitutes the religion of the African, and his customs and
ceremonies arise from his idea of the best way to influence it.
Or consider Henry Savage Landor's account of Thibet:
In Lhassa and many other sacred places fanatical pilgrims make
circumambulations, sometimes for miles and miles, and for days
together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their
bodies.... From the ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long
strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so
many flying prayers when hung up--for mechanical praying in every
way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of having to learn by
heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the
entire prayer-book into a prayer-wheel, and revolve it while
repeating as fast as you can four words meaning, "O God, the gem
emerging from the lotus-flower.". . . . The attention of the
pilgrims is directed to a large box, or often a big bowl, where
they may deposit whatever offerings they can spare, and it must
be said that their religious ideas are so strongly developed that
they will dispose of a considerable portion of their money in
this fashion.... The Lamas are very clever in many ways, and have
a great hold over the entire country. They are ninety per cent of
them unscrupulous scamps, depraved in every way and given to
every sort of vice. So are the women Lamas. They live and sponge
on the credulity and ignorance of the crowds; it is to maintain
this ignorance, upon which their luxurious life depends, that
foreign influence of every kind is strictly kept out of the
country.
The Butcher-Gods
In this last sentence we have summed up the fundamental fact
about institutionalized religion. Wherever belief and ritual have
become the means of livelihood of a class, all innovation will of
necessity be taken as an attack upon that class; it will be
literally a crime--robbing the priests of their age-long
privileges. And of course they will oppose the robber--using
every weapon of terrorism, both of this world and the next. They
will require the submission, not merely of their own people, but
of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival priestly castes
will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of mankind
is a sickening record of torture and slaughter in the name of ten
thousand butcher-gods.
Thus, for example, we read in the Hebrew religious records how
the priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a fetish
called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this
fetish and wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god.
And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked
into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty
thousand and three score and ten men; and the people lamented,
because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great
slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to stand
before this holy Lord God?
This terrible old Hebrew divinity said of himself that he was "a
jealous god". Throughout the time of his sway he issued through
his ministers precise instructions for the most revolting
cruelties, the extermination of whole nations of men, women and
children, whose sole offense was that they did not pay tribute to
Jehovah's priests. Thus, for example, the chief of his prophets,
Moses, called the people together, and with all solemnity, and
with many warnings, handed down ten commandments graven upon
stone tablets; he went on to set forth how the people were to set
upon and rob their neighbors, and gave them these blood-thirsty
instructions:
When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou
goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee,
the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the
Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the
Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when
the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite
them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with
them, nor shew mercy unto them: ... But thus shall ye deal with
them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images,
and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with
fire. For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord
thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself,
above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
The records of this Jehovah are full of similar horrors. He sent
his chosen people out to destroy the Midianites, and they slew
all the males, but this was not sufficient, and Moses was wroth,
and commanded them to kill all the married women, and to take the
single women "for themselves". We are told that sixteen thousand
single women were spared, of whom "the Lord's tribute was thirty
and two!" In the Book of Joshua we read that he had an interview
with a supernatural personage called "the captain of the Lord's
host", and how this captain had given to him a magic spell which
would destroy the city of Jericho. The city should be accursed,
"even it and all that are therein, to the Lord"; every living
thing except one traitor-harlot was to be slaughtered, and all
the wealth of the city reserved to the priestly caste. This was
carried out to the letter, except that "Achan, the son of Carmi,
the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took
of the accursed thing"--that is, he hid some gold and silver in
his tent; whereupon the army met with a defeat, and everybody
knew that something was wrong, and Joshua rent his clothes and
fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the Lord, and
got another message from Jehovah, to the effect that the guilty
man should be burned with fire, "he and all that he hath."
And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah,
and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his
sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his
sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought them
unto the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled
us? the Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned
him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned
him with stones.
We have no means of knowing what was the character of the
unfortunate inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the
Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of
the victims of Jehovah. To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew
priests that they sacrificed their children to their gods; but
then, consider what we should believe about the Hebrew religion,
if we took the word of rival priestly castes! Consider, for
example, that in this twentieth century we saw an orthodox Jew
tried in a Russian court of law for having made a sacrifice of
Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a
considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of Russia. We
know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and
all of the scientific knowledge of Spain; that the Huguenots had
most of the conscience and industry of France; and we know that
they were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes
of the Middle Ages.
The Holy Inquisition
Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval
times, so that we may know what we ourselves have escaped. In the
fifteenth century there was established in Europe the cult of a
three-headed god, whose priests had won lordship over a
continent. They were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt;
they sold to the rich the license to commit every possible crime,
and they held the poor in ignorance and degradation. Among the
comparatively intelligent and freedom-loving people of Bohemia
there arose a great reformer, John Huss, himself a priest,
protesting against the corruptions of his order. They trapped him
into their power by means of a "safe-conduct"--which they
repudiated because no promise to a heretic could have validity.
They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that
a priest who committed crimes could not give absolution for the
crimes of others; and they held an auto de fe--which means a
"sentence of faith." As we read in Lea's "History of the
Inquisition":
The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the
Emperor) and his nobles, the great officers of the empire with
their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes. While mass
was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was kept waiting at the
door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a
table on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments.
After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the Bishop of
Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day
would confer on him immortal glory, the articles of which Huss
was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he believed
in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in
polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his
persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of
this he continued to utter protests. The sentence was then read
in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written
errors and those which had been proven by witnesses. He was
declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not
desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be
burned, and himself to be degraded from the priesthood and
abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him in
priestly garb and warned him to recant while yet there was time.
He turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he
could not confess the errors which he never entertained, lest he
should lie to God, when the bishops interrupted him, crying that
they had waited long enough, for he was obstinate in his heresy.
He was degraded in the usual manner, stripped of his sacerdotal
vestments, his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure was to be
disposed of, an absurd quarrel arose among the bishops as to
whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the tonsure be
destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross was
cut in his hair. Then on his head was placed a conical paper cap,
a cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the
inscription, "This is the heresiarch."
The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he
was conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis at
their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates,
and cardinals. The route followed was circuitous, in order that
he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which
his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there
was none to look for, but he sought comfort on high, repeating to
himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon
us!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell on his knees
and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that
he would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle was
formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been
providently empowered to take advantage of final weakening, came
forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your
unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly
hear your confession; but if you will not, you know right well
that, according to canon law, no one can administer the sacrament
to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am
not a mortal sinner." His paper crown fell off and he smiled as
his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers,
and when they were brought to him he thanked them for their
kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than
jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German,
telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold,
and he was cut short. When bound to the stake, two cartloads of
fagots and straw were piled up around him, and the palsgrave and
vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could
save himself, but only repeated that he had been convicted by
false witnesses on errors never entertained by him. They clapped
their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the
fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the
living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and
blowing the flames and smoke into his face checked further
utterances, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move
while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy
was over; the sorely-tried soul bad escaped from its tormentors,
and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him
the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more
composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No
faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle.
Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the
executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be
reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.
With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and
thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was
dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the
spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which
they reverenced as relies of their martyr. The next day thanks
were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured
Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen
cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the
clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had
delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left
Constance, feeling that his work was done.
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