Word: godly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, Secretary Acheson mended his diplomatic manners. Said he: "Mr. White's question was whether ... I was following [the Duchess'] admonition, and whether I intend to continue to follow it in the future. The implication was that he hoped to God that was not the case. I have advised him that any similarity between my answers to any living person, and Mr. Lewis Carroll's advice, was purely coincidental and highly regrettable...
Mystic Meditations. He describes the praying mantis, "or, as they say in Provence, lou Prégo Diéou, the Pray-to-God," with keen observation and lively imagination. "Her long pale green wings, like spreading veils, her head raised heavenwards, her folded arms, crossed upon her breast, are in fact a sort of travesty of a nun in ecstasy." The travesty is complete when the mantis makes her kill: "With the sharpness of a spring, the toothed forearm folds back on the toothed upper arm; and the insect is caught between the blades of the double saw . . . Thereupon...
Writing "On the Meaning of Contemporary Atheism," Maritain sharply differentiates between the various manifestations of Godlessness. There are the "practical atheists, who believe that they believe in God but who in reality deny His existence by each one of their deeds-they worship the world, and power, and money. Then there are the pseudo-atheists, who believe that they do not believe in God but who in reality unconsciously believe in Him, because the god whose existence they deny is not God but something else. Finally, there are absolute atheists, who actually deny the existence of the very God...
Faith in Reverse. The absolute atheists, says Maritain, are represented today chiefly by the academic high fashion of existentialism and the militant mission of Communism. For them, he says, the casting aside of God is "a basic act of moral choice." It is, in other words, an act of faith in reverse which, in pretending to deny religion, "is a full-blown religious commitment." But it is a tragic failure. Example: the Communist, whose atheism begins as a declaration of independence, plunges into a new slavery "to a worldly demiurge crazy for human minds to bend and bow and yield...
Absolute atheism, writes Maritain, "deprives God and mankind of some potential saints, in making their attempts at heroic freedom a failure, and turning their effort to break with the world into a total and servile subservience to the world." Conversely, saints have been the greatest revolutionaries. Maritain contends that for centuries the world's temporal progress was fostered by the saints. It was only during the last hundred-odd years, when the results of the industrial revolution were bringing mankind more & more to social thinking and social action, that the saints dropped from the lead and the atheists took...