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To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it; I believe it.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Another Smart Albert...


Tonight while preparing for a short class I was asked to teach at VSU (short notice given but I need the experience so I'm on it and sacrificing Monk dvd time tonight...) I happened across Dr. Albert Schweitzer. I used a quote of his in my presentation for the class, and sense I like to be prepared to give some amount of detail about the person making the quote (if asked), I did what any lady would do when she wants information on a man...I Googled him. Turns out Dr. Albert S. was one bad man (Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and boy did he speak some truths to power! For example, his take on human rights postulated by the European culture:


Oh, this "noble" culture of ours! It speaks so piously of human dignity and human rights and then disregards this dignity and these rights of countless millions and treads them underfoot, only because they live overseas or because their skins are of different color or because they cannot help themselves. This culture does not know how hollow and miserable and full of glib talk it is, how common it looks to those who follow it across the seas and see what it has done there, and this culture has no right to speak of personal dignity and human rights…"


Sounds like the good doctor is commenting on the current state of affairs, huh? Well, here's more. Stumbling upon great stuff like this makes me praise the lord for the ability to read! The final line below really speaks to my feelings on why we must do good work, especially when we keep hearing bad news...


-Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, (January 14, 1875September 4, 1965) was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaisersberg in Alsace-Lorraine, a bilingual Romano-Germanic region which Germany returned to France after World War I. Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of historical Jesus current at his time and the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus who expected the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "reverence for life",[1] expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa) .

Schweitzer considered his work as a medical missionary in Africa to be his response to Jesus' call to become "fishers of men" but also as a small recompense for the historic guilt of European colonizers:[30]


“Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the coloured

peoples] have suffered at the hands of Europeans? … If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the coloured races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible.


Rather than being a supporter of colonialism, Schweitzer was one of its harshest critics. In a sermon that he preached on January 6, 1905, before he had told anyone of his plans to dedicate the rest of his life to work as a doctor in Africa, he said:[31]

"Our culture divides people into two classes: civilized men, a title bestowed on the persons who do the classifying; and others, who have only the human form, who may perish or go to the dogs for all the "civilized men" care.


“If all this oppression and all this sin and shame are perpetrated under the eye of the German God, or the American God, or the British God, and if our states do not feel obliged first to lay aside their claim to be "Christian" — then the name of Jesus is blasphemed and made a mockery. And the Christianity of our states is blasphemed and made a mockery before those poor people. The name of Jesus has become a curse, and our Christianity — yours and mine — has become a falsehood and a disgrace, if the crimes are not atoned for in the very place where they were instigated. For every person who committed an atrocity in Jesus' name, someone must step in to help in Jesus' name; for every person who robbed, someone must bring a replacement; for everyone who cursed, someone must bless.


And now, when you speak about missions, let this be your message: We must make atonement for all the ter­rible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers, crimes that are shrouded in the silence of the jungle night…”

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