Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 May 1989, is an English translation of an essay by academician Boris Raushenbakh from the Moscow journal Kommunist. The essay argues that people need both rational scientific knowledge and metaphorical, emotional knowledge, and that these connect to morality and religious feeling. It also criticizes crude atheist propaganda and calls for restoring moral principles. The only mention of UFOs is a passing remark that some people turn to belief in flying saucers.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 3 of 3 proclaiming morality but also for providing practical education and support of morality. I am referring to the sacrament of repentance. The believer must regularly confess his sins (i.e., his violation of the laws of morality), not only should he commit immoral actions but even should he think about them. Sometimes the penitent would be punished by the church. It is important to note that there are no witnesses to the confession and that the priest does not dare to make this secret public. Therefore, conditions are created for the penitent to be maximally truthful, without which a true moral upbringing is impossible. In principle, it requires a secluded talk with an authoritative person. This circumstance has been well understood not only by Christianity but also by other religious and ethical doctrines in which student and teacher are a constant pair, who talk, as we used to say, heart to heart. 40. In our present life there is virtually no such mechanism for developing and upholding morality. The sacrament of repentance cannot be replaced by self-reports or by the discussion of immoral actions at large meetings. The concept of the class honor has virtually disappeared. Some people write about worker's honor but, unfortunately, usually this means nothing (although in the past worker's honor was found everywhere and did not allow a true master to do hack work. Incidentally, I began my own labor career at the start of the 1930s as an apprentice joiner at one of Leningrad's aviation plants, and I well remember the way old hereditary workers were literally pressured into "'fulfilling the plan'" at all cost. This was accomplished, above all, at the cost of low quality work and loss of criteria of professional honor. Today a great many people, in committing an immoral act, experience a feeling of happiness rather than remorse (such as, for example, pilferers who have stolen with impunity something from their place of work). 41. I believe that humanizing will yield the desired results only when it is based on already accepted and practiced common moral principles. How to achieve this today? For the time being, there is no specific answer but an answer must be mandatorily found, for it is this, as we mentioned at the beginning of this article, that will determine the future not only of our socialist society but also of civilization as a whole. 42. Contemporary life, with its exaggerated aspiration to rely above all on rational knowledge and, as a result, with its scornful attitude toward what I described as irrational, intuitive and emotional knowledge, is causing dangerous deformations in the behavior of the human community. As we consider the problems of the optimal combination of rational with other knowledge as guiding impetus in our activities, we unwittingly reach the following conclusion:
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.