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"This book is not specifically addressed to Christians who are firmly established in their faith and have nothing more to learn about its beliefs. It is written for the waverers, both inside and outside; that is to say for those who, instead of giving themselves wholly to the Church, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it.
As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal."
Thus it is that those whose education or instinct leads them to listen primarily to the voices of the earth, have a certain fear that they must be false to themselves or diminish themselves if they follow the Gospel path.
So the purpose of this essay — on life or on inward vision — is to prove by a sort of tangible confirmation that this fear is unfounded, since the most traditional Christianity, expressed in Baptism, the Cross and the Eucharist, can be interpreted so as to embrace all that is best in the aspirations peculiar to our times."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French Jesuit priest, philosopher, and a paleontologist present at the discovery of Peking Man.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal".
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I am far from denying the destructive and disintegrating forces of passion. I will go so far as to agree that apart from the reproductive function, men have hitherto used love, on the whole, as an instrument of self-corruption and intoxication. But what do these excesses prove? Because fire consumes and electricity can kill are we to stop using them? The feminine is the most formidable of the forces of matter. True enough. "Very well, then," say the moralists, "we must avoid it." "Not at all," I reply, "we take hold of it." In every domain of the real (physical, affective, intellectual) "danger" is a sign of power. Only a mountain can create a terrifying drop. The customary education of the Christian conscience tends to make us confuse tutiorism with prudence, safety with truth. Avoiding the risk of transgression has become more important to us than carrying a difficult position for God. And it is this that is killing us. "The more dangerous a thing, the more is its conquest ordained by life": it is from that conviction that the modern world has emerged; and from that our religion, too, must be reborn.