Word: soul
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...believe in immortality, if this is taken to mean the continued existence of the individual soul as a surviving entity after the end of organic life...
...theologizing as one of its most essential modes, and concentrated on the truth value of factual propositions. And it was Luther who proclaimed "the priesthood of all believers," declaring that each man has the right of genuine personal judgment before God on the most intimate matters relating to his soul. Protestant Christianity seems to have had built into it, from the first, a relentless central drive toward absolute sincerity in the acceptance of literal truth--a condition that has evidently proved self-undermining so far as the faith of a large number of Harvard undergraduates is concerned. And the factor...
...poll also unearthed a couple of statistical correlations which may faintly suggest the first dim stirrings of full self-consciousness in the unbelievers' souls. Both were connected with the highly hypothetical but heuristically significant choice between war and American surrender "if the United States should find itself in such a position that all other alternatives were closed, save a world war with the Soviet Union or surrender to the Soviet Union." Among the godless, American surrender as the proper alternative was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three...
...Death of the Soul...
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes politics immensely the more serious; it could be the spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate: "a higher history than all history hitherto." The orthodox have always talked as if losing the hope of immortality would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. But their opponents might well reply that quite the opposite is true: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul, one's hopes...