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You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the “children of light.” Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Children Liberalism Social Understand
[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Group Men Vices
The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Church Congregational Mean Race
If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Judgment Religion Wrong
That’s why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn’t believe this.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Answers Believe Problem
All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Humans Intention Sin
We judge the Russians because they’re living under despotism and we don’t like it, but we’ve gotten into a fix now where we’re living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Common Judging Predicaments
I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular; and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, “Judge not lest you be judged.”
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Judging Religious Thinking
Justice requires that we carefully weigh rights and privileges and assure that each member of a community receives his due share. Love does not weigh rights and privileges too carefully because it prompts each to bear the burden of the other.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Asure Community Justice Love Prelivege
We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Communism Order Risk War
Adam Smith’s was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation… But the “children of darkness” were able to make good use of his creed.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Children Community Real
At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Approximately Complete Leat Mind
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Change Prayer Wisdom
I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don’t think that that’s what’s primarily the matter with them. What’s primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Belief Confused Thinking
The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Inhumanity Limit Man Measure
The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn’t interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Country Giving People Religious

You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.

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You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.

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