Word: beliefs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fact must be stated plainly that the overwhelming majority of Harvard students who possess "the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment," in President Pusey's Baccalaureate phrase--and who profess a belief in what that word signifies--do so in a sense that is far removed from both the letter and the spirit of anything to be found in the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Hellenic Greek of the New. The idea of God as an ineffable opaque Presence, as the principle of causality, or as "the Ground of Being" and "Being-in-Itself...
...paradox of belief in God at the University deepens when one examines the self-declared unbeliever. The most disturbing thing to be said about the Harvard atheist or agnostic is that he does not seem disturbed. He has rejected any positive belief in some of the cardinal propositions that have sustained and nourished his civilization for thousands of years, but on any issue, moral or political, other than the theistic one, he appears indistinguishable from his believing classmates...
According to the poll, he himself will likely tell you that, on the whole, his loss of all traditional religious faith did not substantially alter his ethical principles, nor does he feel at all obliged by his convictions to persuade the pious to abandon their beliefs. Incredibly enough, well over a third of those who either flatly reject all belief in God or else hold that there are no adequate grounds for deciding the question, nevertheless think that "on the whole, the Church stands for the best in human life," though it suffers from certain minor human short-comings...
...godless, American surrender as the proper alternative was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three-to-one. And the group of 215 who chose war included over four-fifths of those who were also willing to affirm a belief in the immortality of the soul (all but fourteen persons), while 35 per cent of the non-believers took the opposite stand in favor of surrender...
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes politics immensely the more serious; it could be the spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate: "a higher history than all history hitherto." The orthodox have always talked as if losing the hope of immortality would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. But their opponents might well reply that quite the opposite is true: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul, one's hopes...