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.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 3 of 3 history of the human community this need appeared. In any case, the need for some kind of "'faith,'" consistent with the human mentality, including religious faith, became more complex and stronger in the course of the biosocial evolution. 23. Therefore today the religious feeling of people in developed countries is by no means related to their 'ignorance,' or insufficient enlightenment (in the sense of sciences based on rational knowledge). The satisfaction of this feeling is a natural need for many people with a strongly developed emotionality. Is this not the reason for which there are more frequently believers among members of the artistic intelligentsia than among engineers? 24. However, if a religious feeling is a normal phenomenon for such people, no primitive atheistic propaganda can be effective. Some propagandists of atheism proceed from the fact that faith in God will disappear the moment the people are given a 'intelligible explanation' of the natural scientific picture of the world and proven that religion is the consequence of the lack of scientific knowledge and that it should yield to the pressure of science. However, in the case of a person in whom a metaphorical thinking prevails, the arguments of rational knowledge will appear secondary and unconvincing (we already cited the example of the reciprocal lack of understanding between 'physicists' and 'lyricists'). These arguments to him are insignificant compared with the living feeling of the presence of God, which is so strong that he not simply believes in God's existence but, on the basis of his own feelings, he 'knows' that God exists. Therefore, any rational proof provided by the atheist can only irritate the person who is certain of the veracity of his concepts. 25. Naturally, religion cannot be reduced exclusively to the phenomenon of an irrational component of the mind or, even less so, to the belief that one cannot get rid of it as long as the right hemisphere of the brain retains its functions. Unquestionably, the religious feeling is related to features of the human mentality, such as imagination, and so on. However, theology is also the rational substantiation of religion. And whereas scientific atheism can refute more or less successfully precisely such rational substantiations concerning the existence of God (ontological, gnosiological, teleological, etc.) it is unable to do anything with the need of man to believe. 26. Let us say a couple of words about the meaning which is usually invested in the concept of 'God.' To the contemporary Christian, for example, faith in God means faith in the supernatural, a transcendental reality with personal characteristics, paralleled by faith in the existence of a meaning to individual human life,
Not linked to a story yet.
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.