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| Auguste Comte's Progress Myth => "Science" Solve-All |
"It is useless to judge a religion from the point of view of the politician or the social reformer. We shall never create a living religion merely as a means to an end, a way out of our practical difficulties [as proposed by all secular humanists: e.g. Comte, Marx, and the American Democratic Party today]. For the religious view of life is the opposite to the utilitarian. It regards the world and human life sub specie æternitatis. It is only by accepting the religious point of view, by regarding religion as an end in itself and not as a means to something else, that we can discuss religious problems profitably. It may be said that this point of view, by regarding religion as an end in itself and not as a means to something else, that we can discuss religious problems profitably. It may be said that this point of view belongs to the past, and that we cannot return to it. But neither can we escape from it. The past is simply the record of the experience of humanity, and if that experience testifies to the existence of a permanent human need, that need must manifest itself in the future no less than in the past."
"Stages in Mankind's Religious Experience (1931)" in Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, La Salle, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1978, 168.
According to Dawson man never "outgrows" his need for God and ultimate answers. Man is essentially in need of God, his Author and End. Man is relational, his ultimate meaning consists in his unavoidable relation to His Creator and Lord.
"Thus, although God is not myself, nor a part of my being, 'yet the relation of dependence that my life, my powers, and my operations bear to His Presence is more absolute, more essential, and more intimate than any relation I can have to the natural principles without which I could not exist... I draw my life from His Living Life...; I am, I understand, I will, I act, I imagine, I smell, I taste, I touch, I see, I walk, and I love in the Infinite Being of God, within the Divine Essence and substance...'" Ibid., 170.
The Religious Problem
"...[M]an is capable of separating himself alike from God and from nature, of making himself his last end and living a purely self-regarding and irreligious existence.
"And yet the man who deliberately regards self-assertion and sensual enjoyment as his sole ends, and finds complete satisfaction in them--the pure materialist--is not typical; he is almost as rare as the mystic. The normal man has an obscure sense of the existence of a spiritual reality and a consciousness of the evil and misery of an existence which is the slave of sensual impulse and self-interest and which must inevitably end in physical suffering and death. But how is he to escape from this wheel to which he is bound by the accumulated weight of his own acts and desires? How is he to bring his life into vital relation with that spiritual reality of which he is but dimly conscious and which transcends all the categories of his thought and the conditions of human experience? This is the fundamental religious problem which has perplexed and baffled the mind of man from the beginning and is, in a sense, inherent in his nature." Ibid., 172.