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.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 3 of 3 exceeding the limits of a limited human life. Belief in the purposefulness of the world and the meaning of history have not been proven scientifically to their fullest extent. 27. In millennia old human practice, rational knowledge and moral values have always supplemented each other, for which reason the contemporary believer considers his religious feeling a supplement to his rational knowledge. Furthermore, this feeling does not prevent major scientists from achieving the highest possible peaks in the natural sciences. 28. Therefore, in itself science is unable to suppress the religious feelings of a sincere believer. A religious faith can be defeated only by another 'faith' (or by something of the same nature). In this case the word 'faith' should be understood in the broad meaning of the term. It could be some kind of ethical view, such as early Confucianism; in general, it could be any emotional-irrational component of human nature, which makes it possible to satisfy that which was already described as a religious feeling. It could fill but not crush it. In that case, however, the atheists must add to their 'scientific atheism' some kind of 'atheism of the heart,' which is addressed to the metaphorical part of the human awareness (it is true that today the specific forms of the latter, to the best of my knowledge, are unknown to anyone). Naturally, a feeling in itself is not morality and morality is not in itself religion. However, unquestionably there is a tie, a profound one at that, between them. 29. Let us go back to the question of the correlation between rational and irrational knowledge and consider how to strengthen the moral principle in contemporary life. This has become an urgent need both in our country and in the West. However, the way of restoring to morality its proper place in social life is by no means clear. 30. Of late there has been frequent talk, in this connection, of the need to humanize contemporary life. In my understanding, this means somewhat to restrain the "'rational'" and technocratic motivation and give some space to spirituality in shaping the behavior of the individual and of society as a whole. Although the term "'spirituality'" is being used today even more frequently than is necessary, it lack a universally accepted definition. Actually, a strict terminology here may be unnecessary, for this is not a concept of rational logic. It was claimed in the past that the spirit is the wedge of the soul. In such a case spirituality implies the highest and most refined aspects of the soul. In my view, such statements could be accepted as a kind of, albeit not excessively precise, indication of the general meaning of the concept of spirituality. 31. Many are those who are hoping to strengthen the spiritual
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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.