WHAT IS

D. B. Vest

discusses five key questions which can help you determine what religion is and how it can contribute to your life.

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RELIGION?

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That is Religion?' That's the first question. We must answer it before we can go on to the second: 'What has Religion to do with the isophyl?' Most people would say, 'The last person religion wants to have anything to do with is the isophyl. Hasn't religion, whenever it caught sight of him, killed him?' That's all too true. (Torquemada, the horrible Inquisitor General of. Spain, burnt alive over ten thousand persons, a third of whom it is said were burnt on the charge of homosexuality.) But this religion of hate and horror, blood and torture is not the only religion. Indeed, it is a perversion of the original religion, the true religion, because that basic religion was and is exactly what the word religion means. Religion means to re-bind. (A ligature means G binding.) All religions begin it is that which gives them their start by being love religions. They have their first and great success success because they show people how they may love one another. But then, instead of winning new members by love, they begin to try to make people submit by force. They also start having 'party purges'. Small, bitter, power-loving minorities turn themselves into heretic hunters. Those who won't submit to the threat are, when possible, tortured and killed.

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o wonder rationalists and scientists are suspicious of religion and feel it should be opposed. The common fruits of the religious tree have for too long been cruelty and obscurantism, the refusal to show mercy or to respect truth. But the rationalists and scientists have been wrong when they said, 'we don't need religion and can get on without it.' The real religion is necessary to man. For as Pascal, the great mathematician, said, 'The heart has reasons which the mind doesn't know'. That means we have, beside our surface thinking mind, a deep mind that knows by feeling. Religion, this being together in a small group that feels unlimited liability for each member, is so necessary to our happiness and indeed our sanity that people, in hope of finding this, will join churches whose creeds they can't believe and whose intolerances they detest. For the core of religion (as was said by Royce, California's most famous philosopher) is 'devotion to a beloved community'.

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