Sentences with phrase «fact of human existence»

In his book The Hills Beyond, Thomas Wolfe declared: «The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.»

With respect to the insatiability of desires, we do not simply observe this as a fact of human existence always and at all places.

In its place he must put the vital, living knowledge that «the fundamental fact of human existence is man with man.»

It is a fundamental fact of human existence: communicating with others while respecting differing views is a necessary life skill.

He offered a forceful «Christian» view of man, comparing this view with others that fail to take into account all the facts of human existence — Greek classical views in the ancient world, and naturalism in the modern world.

The availability of pornography and the near universality of its consumption are today facts of human existence, at least in the West, and are likely to remain so.

Certainly the hard facts of human existence justify our search for security.

Not exact matches

Every people has its culture, whether primitive or advanced, and this culture is discerned in the folkways and moral standards, forms of family life, economic enterprises, laws and modes of dealing with lawbreakers, forms of recreation, religion, art, education, science, and philosophy that constitute the social aspects of human existence as contrasted with the bare biological fact of living.

According to catholic teaching, the existence of hell, of a state of eternal damnation, is an article of faith (as indeed, given free will and evil, it is a logical necessity); but that some human beings are or will be in fact damned is not an article of faith (though again logically it must be regarded as a possibility): hence Pere Teilhard's prayer further on in this passage.

We observe that evil has no boundaries — the very existence of torture, and the fact that human rights organisations believe that over 80 % of the world's governments practice some form of it, shows that humans are not just content to be a little bit evil, but are most willing to be CREATIVELY evil, concocting new ways to inflict pain and suffering onto others.

Though people may describe themselves by using terms like «gay» or «queer» which are commonly used in today's culture, as Christians who believe in man created in the image of God, we should ask if these cultural terms are, in fact, true ontological categories of the human person, in accord with the blueprint of human existence.

This Higher Power is one of the most amazing facts in human existence.

Our Western culture, in fact, is primarily «left hemispheric» in its application of rational thinking to almost every facet of human existence: science, economics, politics, education, religion, law (the French word for law, droit, comes from «right hand,» the hand that rules and is controlled by the left hemisphere).

And what he seems concerned to emphasize in this recent article is that (assuming the truth of the Christian understanding of existence) the Christian revelation embodies a view of life that objectively represents the meaning of human existence, so that if a person is indeed to grasp in a reflective way what the meaning of life in fact is he or she must understand it precisely in the way represented by the Christian witness.

We must remember that Whitehead is not a metaphysician seeking to describe the ultimate facts of existence (so WM 17 - 20), but a realist philosopher of science remarking on uniquely human matters such as perception and freedom.

Try wrapping your mind around the fact that there isn't a single shred of evidence to support the existence of ANY of the thousands of gods humans have worshiped throughout history.

If refusal to face squarely the fact of death is found so widely in these days, so also is loss of belief in a continuation of human existence, beyond death, in what used to be called the «after - life» It is indeed true that among conventionally - minded church - people and many others there is a vague feeling that when the body dies the «soul» goes on.

In this chapter I have attempted to present an understanding of our human existence which is true to the facts, so far as we know them, which makes sense of and gives sense to our experience, and which indicates what is meant when we speak, as we do, of the worth and value in our lives.

There was the antidualistic motive: belief that some such actualities are without any experience of their own, when joined to the fact that the human existence with which philosophic thought must begin is just a series of experiences, makes it impossible to think of these extremes as contrasting but connected instances of one basic kind of actuality.

If the evidence required us to assume that the earliest beings we call human did in fact embody this structure of existence, then we would have to posit exceedingly high levels of mentality in our prehuman ancestors, assuming that for hundreds of thousands of years they must have far more closely approximated our contemporary existence than does any now existing nonhuman member of the simian family.

It is remarkable that this simple fact of human life fits in so closely with the pattern of the Christian interpretation of existence — so remarkable that we may be pardoned if we believe that it is not really accidental at all, but providential.

Here we may pause to reflect on the fact that in human experience it is much easier to believe in human survival than it is in the finiteness of human existence.18 The almost universal belief in an «after - life» which developed from primitive man onwards was only to be expected.

The salient features of Niebuhr's doctrine of sin, then, are the universality of sin, sin's existence as an objective fact in human experience, sin's tendency to perpetuate and aggravate itself, a meaningful sense in which there is bondage of the will, and the inability of man to extricate himself from the situation of unbelief.

The fact that a crucial discontinuity exists between the purely animated envelope of the Earth and its thinking envelope (i.e. between the Biosphere and the Noosphere), which is manifest in the fundamentally different proceedings of Life on either side of this gap between the two layers, naturally does not mean that the Human sprang into existence among the Living in an immediate state of completeness.

But we may also interpret the facts as supporting the belief that there are within limitations real possibilities for the exercise of human freedom in the reconstruction of the orders of existence.

What that sentence did, however, was to make me starkly conscious of the fact that not only do men die but that I, in my concrete actual human existence, faced death too.

To Jesus the kingdom of God was the universal, eternal, righteous reign of God, only partially accepted amid the world's evil yet a present fact, a sphere of human existence to be entered and furthered by moral obedience in love to the will of God.

The fact that humans don't agree perfectly on something in no way implies the existence of something else that does do it perfectly.

But the fact is that in human existence our highest freedom is found not in our self - will or our attempts to be on our own but in the opening of that existence to the divine reality.

This does not present us with facts of the past in their bare actuality, nor does it lead to encounter with human existence and its interpretation, but, as a sacramental event, it re-presents the events of the past in such a way that it renews them, and thus becomes a personal encounter for me.

And the fact is that two Catholic priests, Gregor Mendel, O.S.A., and Georges Lemaitre, were pivotal figures in creating two of the most important scientific enterprises of the twenty - first century: modern genetics, which is giving humanity previously unimaginable powers over the human future; and modern cosmology, which is giving us glimpses of the universe in the first moments of its existence.

It ignores the most profound human problem, the problem which is raised by man's awareness of the fact that he is cast into a given existence.

In fact, most if not all of the relevant evidence, as the previous example illustrated, counts against the idea that physics can in principle provide a complete account of the physical world, especially given the existence of human and other animals in it.

Shame is a universal human phenomenon, and in a certain sense it is a necessary response to the facts of social existence.

Readers familiar with the history of Western theology may recall that one of its most troublesome problems has been that of how to reconcile the fact of human freedom with the existence of God.

This fact of our experience is not always given the attention it deserves, and many times descriptions of humankind are produced that suggest a quasi-morphological portrayal, as if human existence were like counting the spots on some insect or were like a diagram of a dead cat as it is studied in a biological laboratory.

Our nuclear knowledge brings to the surface a fundamental fact about human existence: we are part and parcel of the web of life and exist in interdependence with all other beings, both human and nonhuman.

Notwithstanding the fact that whatever human meaning we may discover would be inseparable from the meaning of the cosmos, it is still necessary for us to focus our quest for the meaning of revelation on the question of the significance of our own existence as a distinctly historical species.

The reality of death as a fact: the inescapable element of decision and the consequences in searching appraisal: the social or communal nature of human existence, coupled with the honest recognition that no man is in and of himself a perfect agent of the purpose of God and the love of God: the joy of fulfillment with one's brethren in the imperishable reality of God: and the terrible character of evil — these were values which the older scheme somehow affirmed and expressed.

But the fact that technological and social revolutions which did have the potential and promise of producing a world community with richer and filler human life for all humanity, resulted in the intensification of mass poverty, social oppression, war and ecological destruction, have led many to consider self - sufficient Secular Humanism as inadequate to understand or deal with the tragic dimensions of the human selfhood and social existence.

If he is to be described at all, the dynamic quality of his existence must be recognized and grasped, even if it is also the fact that through all the changes there are persistent qualities which preserve his identity as human.

Finally, it is necessary to underline the existential value of religious symbolism, that is, the fact that a symbol always aims at a reality or a situation in which human existence is engaged.

We may wish to suspend judgment on the ultimate meaning of human existence, but in actual fact we find ourselves compelled to act as if certain things were true and certain values more important than others.

In fact all aspects of human existence are closely related to the religio - cultural life.

The majority of religious symbols reveal the World in its totality or one of its structures (night, water, heaven, stars, seasons, vegetation, temporal rhythms, animal life, etc.), or they refer to situations constitutive of all human existence, that is to say, to the fact that man is mortal, is a sexual being, and is seeking what today we call «ultimate reality.»

Even talk about a possible survival can not deny that patent fact, once we have understood the total organic, psycho - somatic, nature of our human existence.

This was its linking belief in God with belief in posthumous careers for human persons, in spite of the fact that, in the Book of Job for instance, although the divine existence is there taken for granted, there is not a whisper about Heaven or Hell, or about posthumous rewards or punishments, or any other prolongations of a person's experiencing after death.

The fact of evil in the world and in human experience raises serious questions for any Christian discussion, as much about human existence as about the reality and activity of God who in Christian faith is affirmed to be nothing other than «pure unbounded love.»

It is quite another order of knowledge that discloses, for example, the «lunar destiny» of human existence, the fact that man is «measured» by the temporal rhythms illustrated by the phases of the moon, that he is fated to die but, quite like the moon which reappears after three days of darkness, man too can begin his existence anew, that in any case he nourishes the hope in a life after death, assured or ameliorated through an initiation ritual.

In fact, it will be uncomfortable with the tendency of the whole «values» approach, both as description and as prescription, to impose an abstracting ideology of rationalism on the dynamic, sentient character of human existence.