Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/241

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CHRISTIANITY AND LABOR
239

materialists, or at least agnostics, to whom it would never occur to profess any creed, no matter how liberal it. might be."

Toyohiko Kogawa, the secretary of the Japan Labor Federation, says: "Labor considers the Church too otherworldly. It thinks it has no concern with the interests of labor; and that the Church has lost her aim in this world and is looking up only into heaven. And labor forgets where to go, loses its sense of direction. So labor; stops thinking about religion, and religion stops thinking about industry. The Church has no principle of economics, and labor has no religious aspiration."

The opinions of these men who are daily in contact with the problem of social justice the world over surely furnish a tremendous amount of information regarding both the unconcern of religion upon the furtherance of social justice and its actual negative and harmful influence. The devout Sherwood Eddy, a sincere and noble exponent of social justice, is forced to exclaim: "But I saw that there would be much more opposition from professing Christians if I preached a gospel of social justice, than ever there had been from so called 'heathen' nations in calling them to turn from their idols. Indeed, Mammon is a much more potent idol, it is more cruel, smeared with more human blood, than Kali of Siva. They sacrifice goats to Kali and we shudder; we sacrifice men to Mammon and justify our 'rights.' In simple fact, though they are not worthy of mention, I have met with more opposition and misrepresentation, ten times over, in 'Christian' America, than I ever met in fifteen years in India, or in repeated visits to China, Turkey, or Russia." (Sherwood Eddy: "Religion and Social Justice")

Religious philosophy is slave philosophy; it teaches of a God who is personally interested in the individual and who will reward present misery with future bliss. The