Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2948

A penned note by SHM reflecting on his impression of Heath’s religious views.

April 9, 1964

The dogma is no religion. Religion is poetry and poetic myth. Sometimes we get anxious and /confused?/ and take our poetry literally. (Worse yet, that weakness is sometimes systematized and encouraged by men to take advantage of one another by duplicity.) But that is not religion. Dogma and all such narrowness is the contrary of religion; it is the pathology of religion. Religion is all that inspires and opens us out to a greater fullness and fulfillment of life.

  The popular mind tends to identify contraries — in religion, inspiration and dogma; in society, freedom and force, social and anti-social.