Word: unbeliefs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Religious belief, it would seem, has fallen on bad days. God is dead. Hell has cooled. Man's only heaven is what he can make of earth. Old-fashioned militant atheism may be on the wane, but to some appalled and devout Christians, unbelief seems ascendant, and Antichrist just around the corner. The trouble with the image, according to an international symposium on unbelief last week, is that it is all wrong. "The modern world," declared University of California Sociologist Robert N. Bellah without irony, "is as alive with religious possibility as any epoch in human history...
...away from 1968, when the season celebrating the Saviour's birth is a time of commercial convulsion. Even many of those yearning for piety find Jesus elusive, a shadowy problematical name in history rather than a symbol of ultimate reassurance. Seen through the scrim of contemporary anxiety and unbelief, everything about the Bach-family Christmas seems to be a quaint anomaly...
...like Judaism, it will survive in the form of a scattered few, the hidden remnant. Strangely enough, there are any number of Christians who rejoice at this prospect rather than fear it. This is not because they want to see the fainthearted and the half convinced drift away into unbelief. Rather, they prefer that the choice of being Christian once again become openly, as Kierkegaard puts it, a leap of faith, an adult decision to serve as one of God's pilgrims on the road of life...
...life should be taken too seriously. The world is important but not ultimately so." One reason witty Cox is critical of a Christian atheist like Thomas Altizer is that "there is not a humorous line in his books." Adds Cox: "The recent focus of theology has been on doubt, unbelief, or on the church's mission to the world. All this is very important, but what has been missing is the joy of serving...
...know in what I myself believe. Strange and terrible to say: I believe in nothing, nothing that is being taught by religion, and at the same time I not only hate, but despise unbelief. I don't see how one can live and still less how one can die without faith. I am gradually constructing my own beliefs, yet however firm I may be about them, they are not very firm and not very consoling. When my reason questions, their answer is satisfactory; but when my heart suffers and needs an answer, it receives from them neither support nor comfort...