A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions....A ny religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.
Interpretation
A true religion must address social issues that affect people's lives.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes that genuine religious belief should be coupled with action towards improving social and economic conditions. It critiques religions that focus solely on spiritual matters without addressing the tangible hardships faced by individuals in society, suggesting that a faith that neglects social justice is not fulfilling its true purpose.
In practice
During a sermon on social responsibility, you might reference this quote to motivate action within the community.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
What we do know absolutely is that human lives are worth more than grapes and that innocent-looking grapes on the table may disguise poisonous residues hidden deep inside where washing cannot reach.
they go and set up free-will with the heathen philosophers and say that a man's free will is the cause why God chooseth and not another, contrary to all scriptures.
Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.
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