History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
Daniel J. BoorstinRead
What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that society constructs the concept of God for its own benefits rather than acknowledging a divine power.
Daniel J. Boorstin's quote reflects on the notion that rather than acknowledging God as a genuine force in nature, society creates the idea of God to maintain a cohesive and ordered community. In this view, God transforms from a spiritual essence into a mere representation, serving the interests of social order and morality rather than existing as an objective reality.
In practice
Discussing beliefs in a philosophy class to illustrate the societal implications of religious constructs.
History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.
At times we can be self-absorbed. Lord, help us to open our hearts to others and to serve those who are most vulnerable.
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.
And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
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