Word: beliefs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...believe that correct ethical principles are grounded on religious faith, and that a genuine knowledge of man's moral obligations necessarily involves a belief...
...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 sense...
...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 Hellenistic Greek of the New. The idea of God as an ineffable opaque Presence, as the principle causality, or as "the Ground of Being" and "Being-in-Itself" would...
...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 an 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 shortcomings...