Word: waning
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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...
Sociologist Thomas Luckmann of Frankfurt University predicted that eventually the categories of "belief" and "unbelief" will disappear. "A particular form of religion, institutional specialization, is on the wane," he contended, and as it goes, the distinctions between believers and nonbelievers will fade. One type of person will then evolve his private set of ultimate values; another will find that he can express his best through one of the churches that remain. But Luckmann warns that the surviving churches must understand their true role: not to command belief but to help each person articulate his beliefs from within himself...
...quite come to terms with the astounding fact that a manned capsule will almost surely reach the moon in his lifetime. Researcher Sydnor Vanderschmidt, who has worked on 18 Science covers, twelve of them concerned with space, admits that for her the novelty of space flight had begun to wane-until she began collecting information about the coming moon mission. As she went back over the history of the U.S. space effort, she was reminded of how much has been accomplished in so short a time. And having worked on so many of TIME'S stories about...
Trudeau's other immediate problem is finding a way to exploit the extraordinary burst of nationwide support which followed his election as Liberal leader. Because this kind of enthusiasm is certain to wane as the new P.M. is forced to make unpopular decisions, Trudeau is expected to call a general election at the first opportunity, in hopes of improving on his government's minority position in the House of Commons. Such a move may pay politically, but the burden of an election campaign will certainly add to the already considerable problems facing Canada's unconventional man in his first difficult...
...message that the idea of God is an intellectual bogy that prevents man from claiming his mature heritage of freedom. In the U.S., which probably has a higher percentage of regular Sunday churchgoers than any other nation on earth, the impact of organized Christianity appears to be on the wane. One problem for the future of the churches is the indifference and even hostility toward them on the part of the young. Even those drawn to the person of Christ chafe against outmoded rules, irrelevant sermons, dogmas that apparently have no personal meaning to a generation struggling to understand themselves...