Word: sin
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Incitement to Sin? The U.S. taxpayer is willing to swallow a camel-size defense tax, but a gnat-size affront will still make him gag. Such a gnat was the rule requiring husbands & wives to file joint returns, in the proposed 1941 tax bill. The House Ways and Means Committee hoped thereby to raise $323,000,000 in extra revenue. But a wave of public resentment against compulsory joint returns has swept down on the House. To many a defender of women's rights, the rule looks like a devilish device to sell married women down the river into...
...Sin, But Self-Faith
...have had the privilege of Felix Frankfurter's friendship for 30 years, and I have never found him touched by the conceit you say characterizes him. Not that that is a sin; it is usually a mark of self-faith. Besides, if your charge were true, how would it affect his usefulness on the Supreme Bench, of which, you admit, he is its deepest scholar ? ... HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE
...Niebuhr's "conversion" is a sign of the times. In the easy '20s sin was becoming an archaism, like the devil's tail and angels with six wings. Calvin Coolidge's preacher was against it, but liberal clergymen were accepting the Platonic conception of sin as ignorance, echoing the words of Socrates that no man knowingly does that which is wrong. The doctrine of progressive evolution had helped explain away the existence of evil in a God-made world; humanity seemed to be getting better and better; and righteousness was somehow just around the corner...
...these chaotic '40s Dr. Niebuhr is not alone in doubting the goodness of man and the certainty of progress. To him sin is not ignorance, but pride and self-righteousness. He finds the good fully balanced by the evil in humanity, sees hope only if man admits his unworthiness and throws himself on God for help. Convinced that modern civilization is bad and "careening at the present moment to almost certain destruction," he terms the assumption that evolution is tending ever upwards superficial and unwarranted, calls a halt to theology's capitulation to science...