Word: beliefs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dilemma of the Code" [Jan. 3]: While in Korea in 1950, I had rather serious thoughts about my ability, if I were captured, to abide by our Code of Conduct. General Woodward's action has now provided considerable support for my belief that any man can be persuaded to rationalize the placement of his signature on a fallacious document. The enemy need only find the proper stimulus...
Powell disavows the label of racist, or racialist as some Britons say. "What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief," he explains. "So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is no." Moreover, he scoffs at the claims of his critics that his volatile choice of words encourages racist reactions in his listeners. Instead, he argues, "I am a safety valve." Powell has even conceded that immigrants are "no more malevolent...
...done no more than to establish that we must all make individual choices for specific cases with no help from abstract principles--because for all his analysis of the two systems of ethics he was unable to provide us with this abstract principle. He relies ultimately on a belief in the basic goodness of man to hope that right choices will be made rather than wrong ones. We must all and in fact do, draw in some mysterious way on our instincts and on the values of civilization and humanity (which must perforce not be empty terms if this analysis...
...these phenomena can be explained away in Marxian or Freudian terms, but he argues simply that a transcendent reality-in a word, God-is a much better, and sociologically more sensible, explanation. From these starting points of inductive faith, theologians can then examine anew the fabric of traditional belief...
Testing the Traditions. Such a confrontation with traditional belief would require heroic generosity from theologians, he admits. Not only must they be ecumenical, willing to examine and learn from other traditions, but they should also be thoroughly objective with regard to their own faith, winnowing the wheat from the chaff without worrying about the chaff. All a priori assumptions must thus be avoided, even so basic an assumption as one that places Christ at the starting point of its theology before examining Christian tradition in the light of other intellectual disciplines. "Theology," insists Berger, "must begin and end with...