There are good, humanitarian people everywhere - occasionally even in the Church.

When I started going to church, my first memories are of the minister getting up and accusing us of being full of sin, though he didn't say why; then they would pass the collection plate, and I got it in my mind that this had to do with purification of the soul, that we were being invited to buy expiation from our sins. So I gave it all up. It was too nonsensical.

Long ago, when I was a very young girl, I said that I wanted to go everywhere, see everything, taste everything. hear everything, touch everything, try everything before I died. There isn't anything you can name that a woman can do that I haven't done. I don't intend to stand by and be a spectator. I want to be right in there in the midst of it, right up to my nose - totally involved in the community, in the world, in the stream of history, in the human image.

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.

But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion.

I can't pinpoint a period in history or a place in the universe where religion has actually helped the welfare of man.

I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view - which is what, along with my reason, entitles me to refute it. You can't rationally reject something until you know all about it.