http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_richard__060822_talking_right_3a_a_gui.htm Martin Luther King was a conservative. Just ask the conservative Heritage Foundation's Matthew Spalding. "Dr. King embraced not multiculturalism but the Western tradition of knowledge, wisdom and faith, reaching back through the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Locke, and Martin Luther to Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato. And he firmly embraced this nation and its commitment to ideals rooted in that great tradition."
Let's see. How was again that Aristotle and Plato were reintroduced to the west after theocrats turned out the lights of knowledge for that little period known as the dark ages? That's right. Muslim scholars preserved the ancient Greek wisdom bureaucratic theocracy ruled irrelevant. If the west had not benefitted from exposure to other cultures and if there had not been open-minded thinkers like Galileo there would have been no renaissance and no age of enlightenment.
Nor would there have been born the vision of liberalism wherein each person has the God-given rights to pursue happiness and liberty as opposed to being mere pawns to serve the nobles of state and church. If America's original conservatives had gotten their way, we would still be bowing to the king, paying taxes on our tea and swearing an oath of allegiance to the official church in order to hold office.
As to the liberal ideals this nation is rooted in, let George Washington explain that regarding the religion of immigrants that for Washington "If they are good workmen, . . . they may be Mohammedans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or they may be atheists."
Martin Luther King certainly had the same vision. After all, in 1967 Dr. King nominated Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Rev. King wrote that he did "personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam . . . "cruelly separated from his own people while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the sanity and security of the entire world." Dr. King wrote that Vietnam's history was full of "exploitation by outside powers and corrupted men of wealth . . ." He also said that applying Thich Nhat Hanh's ideas for peace "would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity." So much for Dr. King being a conservative opposed to multiculturism.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
