Word: skepticism
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...faculty as to the nature of a Catholic's religion. And this is frequently compounded by an insufficient awareness in Catholics themselves of the implications of their position as members of the Church and at the same time students of the University. This dual misunderstanding often leads to the skeptic's sneer at the intellectual vacuity of Catholicism, and breeds in some Catholics a shy defensive attitude, or even a position of religious relativism...
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...
Ripe for Laughs. In a red plaid sports cap and corduroy trousers full of holes, the bird man was soon out on Commonwealth Avenue collecting crowds in skeptic ranks. In his hands he carried what looked like two thin aluminum cricket bats. Around his neck was a lanyard from which dangled a long aluminum tube. The trees were ripe with starlings; Mount Vernon was ripe for a laugh...
...undergraduates as a whole--evenly divided almost exactly--except that, out of the thirty 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 immortal, and by Whose will good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since...