This book - Scientology: The Fundamentals Of Thought is excellent for beginners.          IS SCIENTOLOGY A RELIGION? Much of the debate of the religiosity of Scientology hangs incorrectly on the inability of many to understand what a religion is. How can one decide if a group is a religion if one does not understand the meaning of the word being used to categories the group. People have asked what am I, where have I come from, and where am I going, where do I fit into the cosmos of things, for as long as they thought. All religions have come from an attempt to answer this questioning. Most religions have been built on the earlier knowledge of the spirit of earlier religions to answer these questions. I would dare say all religion has and will do so in the future too. Scientology is an answer to these questions.  It is a very good and exacting answer. So why is it attacked with name calling? For a start this kind of attack is not new. Religion tends to be categorized into two main camps, They are the revealed religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here someone says they are revealing the word of the higher power and creator of the cosmos - God. Then there is the natural religion, which has a man or men working out themselves what is man, and how he fits into the cosmos and what is the higher power, and so on. Historically, in the West, the first group has always tried to stamp out the second group. The West has grown up mainly with the powerful revealed religions. There were once the Hellene religions of Rome and Greece but they were eventually convinced they were pagan (Latin meaning peasant) and were stamped out. They were a form of natural religion. Then there was the Gnostic religion, again meaning knowledge, and again leaning to be a Christian natural religion, and again stamped out. In the middle ages the Cathars, a Christian religion that also leaned to knowledge of the spirit, and that spread all over Europe, it was stamped out. Much of the stamping out was by simply killing enough of their members. Well, Scientology is very much along the natural religious line. The great religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, that number billions, are also natural religions. In India and Nepal, where I have been many times, there is no question to the religiosity of Scientology. And there is no name calling either. Such questioning is only in the West which has a tradition of revealed religions rather than natural religion. I hope this sheds some new light on this debate. Thank you.