Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Philosopher Stace, to be sure, uses "the devil" in a purely metaphorical context...
...Devil Laughs. "Religion," Philosopher Stace begins, "is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the inconceivable . . . Either God is a mystery or He is nothing at all." Stace holds that God is such a mystery that any attempt to reason about him, e.g., to prove that God is the Creator of the Universe, is doomed to fail. "To ask for a proof of the existence of God is on a par with asking for a proof of the existence of beauty . . . If God does not lie at the end of any telescope, neither does...
Stace rejects any literal interpretation of religious belief: "The devil* laughs with joy when he finds that the saint takes his beliefs to be facts, because he knows that he has then an easy prey." His reasoning, which sometimes runs through pretty deep water, is that an Infinite God can have no connection with the natural order of things, since everything in the universe or connected with it must by definition have some limitations of time or space...
Touchy Subject. In Douglasville, Ga., as H. L. Parr started to sketch a picture of the devil his minister had asked him to make for a church meeting, a rip-roaring electric storm broke out, lightning struck a cable post, knocked out Parr's switch box, put out his lights and tore up his water pump...
...Hero. His amnesty proposal provoked the most serious opposition. Self-righteous Communists denounced it as "immoral"; Gaullist Deputy André Diethelm called it "a pact with the devil." Pinay fought back. From his notes in a big cardboard folder he drew some startling statistics. Example: French peasants and the petit bourgeois have hoarded more than 15 times as much gold as there is in the Bank of France. The obvious reasons: 1) Frenchmen distrust their own paper currency, which seems to buy less every day; 2) many wealthy Frenchmen have avoided paying taxes for so long that they no longer...