Word: atheistic
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...evidently one of the most severe; many a small town has lost its most promising Baptist in those ordeals, and many a fashionable parish the scion of its most prominent Episcopalian. Freud's Moses and Monotheism or The Future of an Illusion must provoke nearly equal distress; one atheist passes up all alternatives listed on the questionnaire and writes, "God is man's interpretation of what dissatisfies him.... A rejection of God comes through progress towards understanding one's emotional condition." Another similarly explains, "psychological insight: God is a product of man; the most valuable part of religion is ethics...
...scant majority do feel 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 atheist-agnostic 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 30 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...
...these Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates who will not affirm the existence of God, considered as a group, lies in the fact that about 85 per cent of them will not deny His existence, either--that is, they are predominantly agnostics who look equally askance at the theist and the atheist who both say more than they could possibly know. This is reflected in the factors they most frequently check as having principally contributed to their present religious attitude: "the fact that contemporary science does not appear to require the concept of God to account satisfactorily for natural phenomena...
...first, a relentless central drive toward absolute sincerity in the acceptance of literal truth--a condition that has evidently proved self-undermining so far as the faith of a large number of Harvard undergraduates is concerned. And the factor that stands in second place as cause of the atheist heresy is similarly an objection against the theology of the faith, grounded on the ethics of that same faith: Ivan Karamazov's outrage at "the existence of undeserved pain and suffering in the world" prevails as a powerful force among undergraduates still--the paradoxical rejection of God because...
...with those words, one reaches the self-contradictory heart of Harvard unbelief--as also in the atheist admiration of Jesus and the agnostic appreciation of the Church. The undergraduate skeptic seems to have forgotten what was the rock on which the Western moral structure has rested for two millenia, forgotten from what book his ethical principles originally sprang, in Whose name meaning and purpose have overtly or covertly been found in life since time immemorial, and at Whose omnipotent behest good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since...