Word: atheism
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...plan, drawn up by the party's Ideological Commission, is perhaps the most thorough in Soviet history. The commission will set up a new Institute of Scientific Atheism, offer courses in the subject at Russian universities starting this fall. Atheism will be taught more intensively at party training cen ters and in special courses for teachers, doctors and journalists. Already start ed are competitions for the best atheist plays, films, paintings and photographs (one entry shows believers gloating over a collection plate). To counter act the emotional appeal of church feasts, the party will give greater emphasis to Russia...
...Church of Ireland, Lewis tossed off the remnants of his childhood faith at prep school, professed no belief at all through World War I and Oxford. No sudden illumination brought him back to the church; it was, he claimed, sheer logic that drove him step by step from atheism to taking Anglican communion again in 1930. "I'm not in the least the religious type," he wrote after his conversion. "I want to be let alone to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give...
Never in English. God is, of course, still in the theological vocabulary-except perhaps to some followers of Paul Tillich who prefer the phrase "Ground of Being." Tillich has provided a whole glossary of terms for modern theological table talk, including "religious atheism"; many more come from such equally fertile German word-coiners as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whenever possible, theological jargon words are used in their German form. Heilsgeschichte, for example, is more learned than salvation history, and it is definitely one up to say Angst instead of anxiety or Wissenschaft instead of discipline. Says...
...EXISTENTIAL. The atheism of French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre sees God as merely a projection of the human psyche. Whether God exists or not, Sartre believes, changes nothing in the concrete condition of man. But Sartre "must be pained to see some of the results of his cogitations" in the put-on atheism of Left Bank beatniks...
...SPIRITUAL. The atheism that most directly challenges Christianity deserts faith in God for what it believes to be higher spiritual values. To Friedrich Nietzsche, the Christian teaching that good men would receive their reward from God in an eternity of happiness in heaven tended to destroy man's will to power, and exalted the meek and humble losers of life instead of world-conquering supermen. Albert Camus searched Christian theology in vain for the fulfillment of man's fate, found more satisfactory standards in his own tragic ponderings on human responsibility and solidarity...