IV. IS SCIENTOLOGY A RELIGION?(...)

These elements of belief, practice, and ritual do not stand in splendid isolation but come together in the life of religious community to create its distinctive way of life or culture. Hindus, then, are people who share a complex of beliefs, practices, and rites that serve to facilitate their way of life, a way that has both mundane and supramundane dimensions. The latin root of the term religion, religare, means "to bind together," and here we can see the two-fold meaning of that "binding together." There is the "binding together" of "the human and the divine" through a religion, and the "binding together" of human beings in a religious community.

It is in the light of these considerations that there has emerged in the modern study of religion an understanding of religion as a community of men and women bound together by a complex of beliefs, practices, behaviours, and rituals that seek, through this Way, to relate human to sacred/divine life. It is essential, however, to understand that each dimension of this definition of religion--community, belief, practice, behaviour, ritual, Way, and divine--will be understood (a) within the specific terms of a given religious tradition and (b) with relatively more emphasis to some rather than other elements in a given tradition. Thus, for example, the "community" dimension of religion might receive more emphasis in Orthodox Judaism than it does in Taoism or even in other strands of Judaism. Likewise, the divine might be understood as a Transcendent Reality as in Judaism or as an immanent, though unrealized, Self, as it is in many Hindu schools. But such variations do not invalidate the definition of religion, but simply reflect the variety of religious phenomena that must be covered by a modern. academic account of religion.