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.This strikes us again and again.The mere existence of crafts-persons and petty-citizenshas never sufficed to generate an ethical religiosity, even of the most general type.WePDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.comhave seen an example of this in India, [60] where the caste taboo and the belief intransmigration of soul influenced and stereotyped the ethics of the crafts-person strata.Only communal religion, especially one of the rational and ethical type, couldconceivably win followers easily, particularly among the petty-citizens, and then, givencertain circumstances, exert a lasting influence on the conduct of life of these groups.This is what actually happened.(E.5) Slave And PropertylessFinally, the strata of the economically most disprivileged, such as slaves and free day-laborers, have hitherto never been the bearers of a distinctive type of religion.In theancient Christian communities the slaves belonged to the petty-citizen.The Hellenisticslaves and the servants of Narcissus mentioned in the Letter to the Romans [61] wereeither relatively well-placed and independent domestic officials or service personnelbelonging to very wealthy persons.But in the majority of instances they wereindependent crafts-persons who paid tribute to their master and hoped to save enoughfrom their earnings to effect their liberation, which was the case throughout Antiquity andin Russia in the nineteenth century.In other cases they were well-treated slaves of thestate.The religion of Mithra also included numerous adherents from slaves, according to theinscriptions.The Delphic Apollo (and presumably many another god) apparentlyfunctioned as a savings bank for slaves, attractive because of its sacred inviolability, andthe slaves bought "freedom" from their masters by the use of these savings.This might bePaul's image of the redemption of Christians through the blood of their savior that theymight be freed from enslavement of the law and sin.[62] If this is true, [63] it shows howmuch the missionary of early Christianity aspired for the unfree petty-citizen whofollowed an economically rational conduct of life.On the other hand, the lowest stratumof the slave in the ancient plantation was not the bearer of any communal religion, or forthat matter a fertile site for any sort of religious mission.Handicraft journey-persons have at all times tended to share the characteristic religiosityof the petty-citizen, since they are normally distinguished from them only by the fact thatthey must wait a certain time before they can set up their own shop.However, theyshowed even more of an affinity toward various forms of unofficial sectarian religiosity,which found particularly fertile soil among the lower occupational strata of the city, inview of their difficult conditions of everyday life, the fluctuations in the price of theirdaily bread, their job insecurity, and their dependence on brotherly help.Furthermore, thesmall crafts-persons and craft recruits were generally represented in the numerous secretor half-tolerated communities of "poor people" which took the forms of communalreligion of revolutionary, pacifistic-communistic and ethical-rational character, chieflyfor the technical reason that wandering handicraft recruits are the available missionariesof every mass communal religion.This process is illustrated in the rapid expansion ofChristianity across the huge area from the Orient to Rome in just a few decades.PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.comInsofar as the modern employed worker have a distinctive religiosity it is characterizedby indifference to or rejection of religion, as are the modern well-propertied people.Forthe modem employed worker, the sense of dependence on one's own life is characterizedby a consciousness of dependence on purely social relationships, market conditions, andpower relationships guaranteed by law.Any thought of dependence upon the course ofnatural or meteorological processes, or upon anything that might be regarded as subject tothe influence of magic or providence, has been completely eliminated.[64] Therefore, therationalism of the employed worker, like that of the well-propertied people with the fullpossession of economic power, of which indeed the employed worker's rationalism is acomplementary phenomenon, cannot in the nature of the case easily possess a religiouscharacter and certainly cannot easily form a religion.Hence, in the sphere of employedworker's rationalism, religion is generally replaced by other ideological substitutes.The lowest and the most economically unstable strata of the employed worker, for whomrational conceptions are the least conceivable, and also the propertyless people orimpoverished petty-citizen who are in constant danger of sinking into the propertyless,are nevertheless readily susceptible to being influenced by religious missionaryenterprise.But this religious propaganda has in such cases a distinctively magical formor, where real magic has been eliminated, it has certain characteristics which aresubstitutes for the magical-orgiastic dispensation of grace.Examples of these are thesalvational ecstasy of the Methodist type such as the Salvation Army.Undoubtedly, it isfar easier for emotional rather than rational elements of a religious ethic to flourish insuch circumstances.In any case, ethical religion scarcely ever arises primarily in thisgroup.Only in a limited sense is there a distinctive "class" religiosity of disprivileged socialstrata
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