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"True religion is anqualified worship of the unqualifiedly good; faise religion is either worship of an instrumentality of life, or worship of self," Reinhold Niebuhr, professor of Applied Christianity, and the Union Theological Sexinary, New York City, told a congregation that packed Memorial Church yesterday morning.
The author of "Moral Man and Immoral Society" and "an Interpretation of Christian Ethics" denounced Nazism as a false religion, combining worship of an instrumentality, the corporate state, with collective self-worship, the Nazi race creed.
Among faise religions the Reverend Dr. Niebuhr classed "the worship of truth, which has always degenerated into the worship of your particular kind of truth; and the worship of humanity, which has always degenerated into the worship of your particular kind of humanity."
Characterizing the Nazi persecution of the Jews as "cruelty and brutality, for a previous example of which you will have to go even further back than the Middle Ages," he described all faise religions as "devotion to a finite object, which becomes fanaticism."
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