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Monday, December 13, 2004

The Courage to Change the Things That Should Be Changed

The famous Serenity Prayer was written by the liberal Lutheran Pastor and theologian, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, who was born in Wright City, Missouri. This prayer gained notice by its inclusion in 1944 in an army chaplains' field book, and later became nearly synonymous with AA. The original version of this prayer is:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.


Notice the strength of the original third verse, compared to the modern version: "courage to change the things we can".

Dr. Niebuhr was a pacifist during the First World War, a Socialist, and a theologian of the Social Gospel, but became alarmed by the rise of the Nazis. He gave up his pacifism and was horrified by the general lack of concern in the civilized world of this new power of evil, and the unthinking pacifism of his fellow Liberals. Of course, Liberals do not take evil seriously.

We live in an era where great evil is celebrated by the media and defended by the law. We live in the new "Culture of Death" that promotes abortion, suicide, pornography, euthanasia, and eugenics, while becoming ever more harshly aggressive against our Christian patrimony. Taking the trends of these laws and the philosophy behind them, and extrapolating them to the future, one can predict that our future could be very bloody indeed.

Sadly, perhaps a majority of citizens in the civilized world don't bother themselves to change the path our world is on. Conservatives and Traditionalists have been complaining for so long that they are ignored. Will our Liberal brethren realize the vast injustices that may come to pass, before it is too late?

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