Word: almost
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Apart from their greater concern with preserving religion in the family, the Radcliffe respondants diverged from Harvard in their more marked devotion to religious practices, specifically individual prayer and attendance of religious services. Yet almost surprisingly, the girls are no more inclined than the men to "regard active connection with a church or synagogue as essential to religious life." Of those students who indicated some belief in divine presence, only 30 per cent at either college consider church connection necessary for a full religious life...
While most of the Harvard-Radcliffe differences occur in the areas of religious practice or of family life, rather than belief, there is a moderate divergence on the question of belief in immortality. Although an almost equal proportion believe in "the continued existence of the individual soul," fewer girls are ready to deny immortality. Only 16 girls answer an outright "no" to immortality for every 20 Harvard men who deny a belief...
...that their "moral concern has grown more intense in the absence of any assurance of God's existence or of an after-life." However, the attitude of the atheistagnostic group toward undertaking the risks of world government was the same as for the undergraduates as a whole--evenly divided almost exactly--except that, out of the thirty people who responded that they were indifferent to the whole issue, ten were agnostics and one an atheist! On one of the most crucial questions of the twentieth century, it appears, the "enlightened skeptic" exceeds his believing brethren only in an appalling kind...
...temple of his values can stand without trembling though the old granite foundation has utterly crumbled. He is deluding himself. Either the edifice must be abandoned for a new structure that we cannot as yet even dream of, or else the old building must be bolstered by new materials almost inconceivable...
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes the fate of this world immensely the more serious; it could be a spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate here: "a higher history than all history hitherto." Yet the orthodox often talk as though the death of the soul would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. Quite to the contrary, must be the nonbeliever's reply: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul...