Word: belief
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gaping Limitations. It could be said for Omar Bradley, the old infantryman, that he had not made the mistake. He had preached an infantryman's belief in the foot soldier. "Air power, like every other weapon," he wrote, "has gaping limitations for war as we shall know it for many years to come . . . We shall once more be forced to gain the inevitable victory over our dead bodies-those of our soldiers on the ground...
Comely, black-haired Martha Minnen kept no peacocks, but she had other eccentricities. To her neighbors in the tiny village of Witgoor in the Kempen region of Flanders they smacked strongly of witchcraft. There were her cats, for instance. "It's just beyond belief," said one Witgoor villager, "the number of black cats you see around Martha's house at night." Then there were the sparrows. Why should a woman want to give a neighbor's children a nest of baby sparrows...
Pacifism, as a religious belief, seems to be declining in the U.S., according to Vernon H. Holloway, associate professor of religion and philosophy at Ohio's Denison University...
...also quite wrong, says Niebuhr, to oversimplify Communism as the individual's subordination to the state. Theoretically, Communism is committed to the belief that the state will "wither away," once the evil institution of property is abolished. This illusion is the characteristic error of Communism. "Communism is so cruel and so fanatical because it has a completely erroneous conception of human nature. Living by the illusion that the abolition of a social institution will redeem man of all sin, it naturally feels justified in using any means which will attain this...
...more fortified in its fanatical illusions by the belief that nations, oligarchies, commissars and all historical forces on the side of its revolution are by definition virtuous, while those [on the other side] are by definition 'fascists,' 'imperialists' and 'warmongers' . . . There is a certain pathos in the fact that these illusions are merely a 'hard' variety of the soft illusions which Christian and secular sentimentalists hold who talk so endlessly about the 'dignity of man' without any Christian understanding of the total problem of human existence...