Word: atheism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...least as candid as she is philosophically stubborn. Her memoirs of girlhood owe most of their charm to the surprising fact that her origins were Catholic, her upbringing puritan. She describes all this with considerable grace, ends with a conversion to Sartre's atheism which seems from her own testimony to be just another straitjacket, but one she can wear with arrogance...
...provided by one of the latest Soviet novels to reach the West (via an Italian translation). The Miraculous Icon is a 19th century moral tale in reverse: hero sinks down and down into the depths of Christianity, is saved in the nick of time by conversion to clear-eyed atheism...
Rodka's rescuer is his faithfully unbelieving schoolmarm, Paraskovia Petrovna, who hales Father Dmitry before District Agitprop Director Kuchin and argues with him en route on behalf of edifying atheism. Director Kuchin is fed up with staging anti-God lectures ("Nobody comes but atheists"); he has his own sophisticated recipe for the conversion of Russia. "We must make it so that the last of the old ones believes no more in the omnipotent, but in us," he says. "And for this we mnst show what we can do. First, a piece of meat in the soup, good clothes...
...think that your atheism or agnosticism has weakened your ethical ideas and made you take moral argument less seriously than do believers...
...spite of the fact that the CRIMSON poll or any other informal survey would indicate that Cambridge's undergraduates consider themselves a fairly pious lot, the nature of that piety raises serious questions as to whether any previous century might not have pronounced it tantamount to atheism. The explicit rejection of "all belief in anything that could reasonably be called 'god,'" as "a fiction unworthy of worship" proved to be the least popular alternative offered by the questionnaire, but a clear plurality of the votes went to "a God about Whom nothing definite can be affirmed except that I sometimes...