But there are many people who regard the desire to be happy as a very low and degrading ambition. These people call themselves spiritual. They pretend to care nothing for the pleasures of "sense." They hold this world, this life, in contempt. They do not want happiness in this world--but in another. Here, happiness degrades--there, it purifies and ennobles.
These spiritual people have been known as prophets, apostles, augurs, hermits, monks, priests, popes, bishops and parsons. They are devout and useless. They do not cultivate the soil. They produce nothing. They live on the labor of others. They are pious and parasitic. They pray for others, if the others will work for them. They claim to have been selected by the Infinite to instruct and govern mankind. They are "meek" and arrogant, "long-suffering" and revengeful.
They ever have been, now are, and always will be the enemies of liberty, of investigation and science. They are believers in the supernatural, the miraculous and the absurd. They have filled the world with hatred, bigotry and fear. In defence of their creeds they have committed every crime and practiced every cruelty.
They denounce as worldly and sensual those who are gross enough to love wives and children, to build homes, to fell the forests, to navigate the seas, to cultivate the earth, to chisel statues, to paint pictures and fill the world with love and art.
They have denounced and maligned the thinkers, the poets, the dramatists, the composers, the actors, the orators, the workers--those who have conquered the world for man.
According to them this world is only the vestibule of the next, a kind of school, an ordeal, a place of probation. They have always insisted that this life should be spent in preparing for the next; that those who supported and obeyed the "spiritual guides"--the shepherds, would be rewarded with an eternity of joy, and that all others would suffer eternal pain.
These spiritual people have always hated labor. They have added nothing to the wealth of the world. They have always lived on alms--on the labor of others. They have always been the enemies of innocent pleasure, and of human love.
These spiritual people have produced a literature. The books they have written are called sacred. Our sacred books are called the Bible. The Hindoos have the Vedas and many others, the Persians the Zend Avesta--the Egyptians had the Book of the Dead--the Aztecs the Popol Vuh, and the Mohammedans have the Koran.