the woman taken in adultery he forgave. But hypocrisy seems to be regarded as a virtue today.
There must inevitably be homosexuals among the clergy of all denominations, as there are in every other walk of life. I call on them, and on all clergy who are sufficiently sym-
pathetic to read the pages of ONE, to get together to work out a positive pastoral approach to this whole prob lem. In the homosexual world are thousands who are hungering for spiritual comfort: we clergy desper-. ately need clear guidance if we are not to send them away empty.
James Barr
On Organized Religion
T
oday, the Thought and Art of the
world suffer from a truly splendid system of censorship designed via the Apostles' Creed to protect us from the horrors of sinful reality and executed to send us in carload lots to prison, impotency, or the psychoanalyst's chambers. The great argument of organized religion is as hollow as it is big: "We must be right. Look at the good organized religion has accomplished. If you take it away, what will be left to guide the poor ignorant and the ignorant poor?"
O
ne might think systems of government, law, morals and social behavior had never developed before the year One, when we all know that communities of cow-worshippers, pig-scorn-
10
ers, blood-guzzlers and so forth have always functioned normally and lived peacefully within trading distance of one another so long as one group didn't get hungry or fancy the other for entertainment purposes as lion food. One is almost tempted to believe that the laws of economics, if not art, are nearly as important to mankind as the laws of God. As for the good that organized religion has accomplished, try balancing it with religious wars, persecution, frustration, poverty, and plain degrading beholdeness to other more powerful mortals, possessed. too often with the instincts of brutes. The excesses of faith have broken up as many homes as the excesses of alcohol, dope, or vice. We must not ask organized religion to annihilate itself however, as it does us, but