DEFINITION OF RELIGION: – Religion as it is generally taught all over the world, is found to be based upon faith and belief and in most cases consists only of different sets of theories; that is why we find religions quarreling with each other.

These Theories are again based upon belief. If you analyze the various religions of the world, you will find that they are divided in to two classes; those with a book and those without a book. Those with book are stronger and have large number of followers. Those without book have mostly died out or have very few followers. Yet in all of them we find one consensus of opinion: that the truth they teach are the results of the experiences of particular persons. At the present time these experiences have become obsolete, and therefore we have to take these religions on faith.

Self Realization:- From childhood onwards we have been taught to pay attention only to things external, but never to things internal; hence most of us have nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism. The goal of all the teachings is to show how to concentrate the mind; then how to discover the innermost recesses of our own minds; then how to generalize its contents and form our own conclusions from them.

Religion:- Of all the forces that have worked and are still working to mold the destinies of the human race, none, is more potent than that whose manifestation we call religion. All social organizations have a background, somewhere, the workings of that particular force and the greatest cohesive ever brought in to play among human units has been derived from this power. It is obvious to all of us that in very many cases the bonds of religion have proved stronger than the bonds of race or region or even of descent. It is well known fact that persons worshipping the same God, believing in the same religion, have stood by each other with much greater strength and constancy than people of merely the same descent or even than brothers.

Religion has strength through Discipline

Religion has strength through Community

Religion has strength through Action

Three Theories: 1. Spirit theory of religion – Ancestor worship – the idea of double.

1. Evolution of the idea of the infinite – Which the religion originates in the personification of the powers of nature.

2. Human struggle to transcend the limitations of the senses. None of us has yet seen an ideal human being, and yet we are told to believe in him.

None of us has yet seen an ideally perfect man and yet without that ideal we cannot progress. Thus one fact stands out from all these different religions; that there is an ideal abstract unity, which is put before us in the form of either of a person, or of an impersonal being or of a law or of a presence or of an essence. We are always struggling to raise ourselves up to that ideal.

The lowest types of humanity in all nations find pleasure in the senses, while the cultured and the educated find it in the thought, in philosophy, in the arts and sciences. Thus religion as study seems to be absolutely necessary. It is the greatest motive power that moves the human mind. No other ideal can put into us the same mass of energy that the spiritual can. Religion must be studied on a broader basis than formerly. All narrow limited fighting ideas of religions have to go. All sectarian ideas and tribal or national ideas of religion must be given up. That each tribe or nation should have its own particular God is a superstition that should belong to the past. As the human mind broadens, its spirituals ideas broaden too. The time has already come when a man can not record a thought without its reaching to all corners of the earth, by merely physical means of computer we can come in touch with the whole world.

So the future religions of the world have to become universal and wide.