Word: absurder
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...collective school prayer (all "inherently public in nature") and not on help for the poor, racial discrimination or even murder (where "the church can persuade the individual"). To argue that the more collective the issue is, the more right the church has to try to influence public policy, is absurd. If anything, the reverse is true. Such attempts to justify a double standard give sophistry a bad name. Why not admit the obvious? That different churches with different conceptions of morality and different social priorities will try to shape the larger society in different ways, and that one should...
...Archbishop go loo far? It is, of course, absurd to tell the church to stay out of politics, if politics is defined as that universe of activity in which people collectively decide what the public good is and how to pursue it. The church teaches moral principles and values, and these inevitably spill over into public affairs, sometimes into actual policy, like civil rights and nuclear arms. But political partisanship-choosing sides in elections, endorsing or vetoing candidates-is another matter altogether...
There are elements of absurdity in such a controversy, and yet it derives quite directly from a broader question that is not absurd at all: When does human life begin? At the moment of conception, say many conservatives, both religious and secular. The Rev. Donald McCarthy, of the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center in St. Louis, argued sweepingly before the congressional hearings that there is "no evidence of a threshold, a starting point other than fertilization itself, for the beginning of human nature." This is a standard argument against abortion, but McCarthy used it to endow...
Actually, unlike others who share this absurd Walter Mitty daydream, I had done something about it. A month before the Games I had gone to the Olympic Training Center under the shadow of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs to be tested in the Sports Physiology laboratories there to see if by chance there was a particular Olympic event for which I was a perfect physical specimen to suit...
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week dismissed the Soviet campaign as "completely absurd defamation." Officials in Bonn say the blasts from Moscow will in no way affect the Honecker visit. The Soviet attacks may reflect the Kremlin's desire, as a Soviet official put it to a West German diplomat in Moscow recently, "to treat the West Germans the same way we treat the Americans." But they also give voice to deep-rooted fears that Germany will one day be reunited and become hostile to the Soviet Union. Said a Western diplomat: "They are putting down a marker...