Return to Religion

GOD: VOICE OF HUMAN NATURE a believer in any particular faith. “There are moments when I do stop and pray to God. But my mind boggles if you ask me who God is or what kind of image He has. I’m confused, perplexed, and confounded. But I refuse to let that confusion be the dominant force in my life.” (Span, Dec 1984, p. 26) Some of the main arguments of the article are that a century that saw the Gulag, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the spread of nuclear arms had caused some who used to champion rationalism and science to humble themselves. Since their ‘secular gods’ had failed, it argued, they were beginning to view ‘more traditional gods’ with a new curiosity. The article quoted Robert N. Bellah, Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, as saying: “There is a reaction against extreme individualism and self, a preoccupation with and a search for roots with a capital R, which takes people back to religion.” The article further said it would have been hard to imagine a similar revival 20 years earlier. A few years before, it was claimed that ‘God is dead.’ But things had changed. The article stated, “God is not pronounced dead easily. Science and religion are not viewed as necessarily incompatible, and logical attempts to disprove God’s existence are somewhat arcane.” The article commented, “All of this would have surprised our intellectual predecessors.” The article has quoted Alan Dershowitz (then aged around 45 years), a professor of law at Harvard Law School, as saying that it was ironic that his generation should be the