Word: skepticism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Skeptic Russell also speaks far more respectfully of medieval scholastics such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam than he does of the modern West's fashionable philosophers, most of whom, in their different ways, have abdicated man's proudest aspiration, which is to know what is what. Marxist and pragmatist agree that truth depends not on what is said, but on who says it-and why and when and with what results-so that for Americans who have accepted the notions of William James and John Dewey, no less than for Nikita Khrushchev, truth...
Catholicism is different from most of the religions represented at Harvard--different in its stress on tradition and dogma, and also in its claim to catholicity. There is an undeniable fascination for the agnostic of a positive faith--an attraction which may be disliked but cannot be denied. Skepticism may pose a threat to the Catholic's faith, but Catholicism, on the other hand, is an open threat to the skeptic, because it holds forth hope...
...easy to be an atheist, a skeptic. My hope is that students will dare to be emotionally honest, instead of falling into an easy blase attitude...The most individualistic thing to do on the Harvard campus now would be to become a religious...
...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 only in an appalling kind of apathy...
...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...