TWO CONFLICTING VIEWS OF HUMAN DESTINY

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence . . . . Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation." (from ch. 2 of Transposition and Other Addresses)

"Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one.

"(1) The Fool's Way. He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if he only tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then this time he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after . . . . They spend their entire lives trotting from . . . continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is the real thing at last, and always disappointed.

"(2) The way of the Disillusioned "Sensible Man." He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. 'Of course,' he says, 'one feels like that when one is young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the rainbow's end.' And so he settle down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of him which used, as he would say, 'to cry for the moon . . . .' It would be the best line we could take if man did not live forever. But suppose the infinite happiness really is there waiting for us?

"(3) The Christian Way. The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing . . . .  I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.' "

(from bk 3., ch. 10, Mere Christianity)

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"Earlier religions and belief-systems were largely adaptations to cope with man's ignorance and fears, with the result that they came to concern themselves primarily with stability of attitude. But the need today is for a belief system adapted to cope with his knowledge and his creative possibilities; and this implies the capacity to meet, inspire, and guide change . . . . The primary function of any [belief] system today must be to utilize all available knowledge in giving guidance and encouragement for the continuing adventure of human development.

"I am here treating religious systems as social organs whose function is to adjust man to his destiny. No previous system could perform this function with full adequacy, for the simple reason that no previous age had sufficient knowledge to construct an adequate picture of the drama of destiny or of its protagonist, man. The present epoch is the first in which such a picture could begin to take shape.

"This is due to the fact that scientific investigation has now for the first time begun to cover the entire range of phenomena involved in human destiny. More specifically, the present is the first period in the long history of the earth in which the evolutionary process, through the instrumentality of man, has taken the first steps towards self consciousness . . . .

"What needs stressing, however, is that, from the angle of evolutionary humanism, the flowering of the individual is seen as having intrinsic value, as being an end in itself. In the satisfying exercise of our faculties, in the pure enjoyment of our experience, the cosmic process of evolution is bringing some of its possibilities to fruition. In individual acts of comprehension of love, in the enjoyment of beauty, in the inner experiences of peace and assurance, in the satisfactions of creative achievement, however, humble, we are helping to realize human destiny.

"Above all, the individual should aim at fullness and wholeness of development. Every human being is confronted with the task of growing up, of building a personality out of the raw materials of his infant self. A rich and full personality, in moral and spiritual harmony with itself and with its destiny, and whose talents are not buried in a napkin, and whose wholeness transcends its conflicts, is the highest creation of which we have knowledge, and in its attainment the individual possibilities of the evolutionary process are brought to supreme fruition.

"But if the individual has duties towards his own potentialities, he owes them also to those of others, singly and collectively. He has the duty to aid other individuals toward fuller development and to contribute his mite to the maintenance and improvement of the continuing social process, and so to the march of evolution as a whole. . . My faith is in the possibilities of man . . . ."

(from Religion without Revelation, pp. 186-212. 1957.)