The Profits of Religion | Page 7

Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced choir below, In service high and anthem clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstacies, And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
So builds itself up, in a thousand complex and complicated forms, the Priestly Lie. There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with more or less heartiness--and each is a mighty fortress of Graft.
There will be few readers of this book who have not been brought up under the spell of some one of these systems of Supernaturalism; who have not been taught to speak with respect of some particular priestly order, to thrill with awe at some particular sacred rite, to seek respite from earthly woes in some particular ceremonial spell. These things are woven into our very fibre in childhood; they are sanctified by memories of joys and griefs, they are confused with spiritual struggles, they become part of all that is most vital in our lives. The reader who wishes to emancipate himself from their thrall will do well to begin with a study of the beliefs and practices of other sects than his own--a field where he is free to observe and examine without fear of sacrilege. Let him look into Madame Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine", or her "Isis Unveiled"!--encyclopedias of the fantastic inventions which terror and longing have wrung out of the tortured soul of man. Here are mysteries and solemnities, charms and spells, illuminations and transmigrations, angels and demons, guides, controls and masters--all of which it is permissible to refuse to support with gifts. Let the reader then go to James Freeman Clarke's "Ten Great Religions", and realize how many billions of humans have lived and died in the solemn certainty that their welfare on earth and in heaven depended upon their accepting certain ideas and practicing certain rites, all mutually exclusive and incompatible, each damning the others and the followers of the others. So gradually the realization will come to him that the test of a doctrine about life and its welfare must be something else than the fact that one was born to it.
The Great Fear
It was not the fault of primitive man that he was ignorant, nor that his ignorance made him a prey to dread. The traces of his mental suffering will inspire in us only pity and sympathy; for Nature is a grim school-mistress, and not all her lessons have yet been learned. We have a right to scorn and anger only when we see this dread being diverted from its true function, a stimulus to a search for knowledge, and made into a means of clamping down ignorance upon the mind of the race. That this has been the deliberate policy of institutionalized Religion no candid student can deny.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it--and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. "The fear of divine anger", says Prof. Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In the words of Tabi-utul-Enlil, King of ancient Nippur: Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven? The plan of a god is full of mystery--who can understand it? He who is still alive at evening is dead the next morning. In an instant he is cast into grief, in a moment he is crushed.
And that cry might be duplicated from almost any page of the Hebrew scriptures: the only difference being that the Hebrews combined all their fears into one Great Fear. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," we are told by Solomon of the thousand wives; and the Psalmist repeats it. "Dominion and fear are with Him," cries Job. "How then can any man be just before God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? Behold, even the moon hath no brightness, and the stars are not pure in His sight: How much less man, that is a worm? And the son of man, which is a worm?" He goes on, in his lyrical rapture, "Sheol is naked before Him, and Destruction hath no covering. . . . The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at His rebuke. . . . The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter