ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the place of religion, art, and avocation as devices for providing a certain satisfying integration or balance in the personality. Religion was the focus or hub of life’s activities. Religion, art, avocations, and much of recreation all represent a culturization of phases of thought and action as particular means of adaptation. Whether a field of activity, just because it is sponsored by a church and becomes slightly emotionalized, is religious in a strict sense depends on people definition of religion. In religion we replace the world of predictability of events with a world of indeterminate satisfactions—wish fulfillments without work, joys contemplated from infancy but denied by the exigencies of earning a living—in short, of comforts without pain or hardship. The compensatory nature of art has often been the subject of comment. The appeal of and satisfaction in more private avocations and creative activities doubtless rest upon early psychological conditioning.
