Last year the The American Conservative published an article about the US war in Vietnam. Reading it reminded me of the speech Martin Luther King Jr gave in 1967, exactly one year before he was murdered : “Why I Am Opposed To The Vietnam War.” That speech, which may have cost him his life, is as relevant today as it was then, more so than his 1963 I Have A Dream Speech, the latter being more susceptible to expropriation by those who defend the inequality and militarism going on right now.
We shouldn’t romanticize King; he was a flawed human being like the rest of us. But he had extraordinary clarity about the problems of racism, classism, and militarism. As a fallible human being, he could have been right about key social issues, yet wrong about his Christian faith. That is maybe a matter of debate. But whichever is the case, King’s work inspires me to become a better atheist.
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