* See Psalm 37:1-40.
2. It is perfectly right and legitimate that we should consider as “good” the manners, which our parents have taught us, that we should hold sacred social norms, and rites handed down to us by the tradition of our culture. However, what we must forever guard against, with all the power of rational responsibility, is our natural inclination to regard the social rites and norms of other cultures as inferior. The dark side of this behavior (psuedo-speciation), as it were, is that it makes us consider the members of pseudo-species other than our own as not human, as many primitive tribes are demonstrably doing, in whose language the word for their own particular tribe is synonymous with “Man.” From their viewpoint it is not, strictly speaking, cannibalism if we eat fallen warriors of an enemy tribe. The moral of the natural history of pseudo-speciation is that we must learn to tolerate other cultures, to shed entirely our own cultural and national arrogance, and to realize that the social norms and rites of other cultures, to which their members keep faith as we do to our own, have the same right to be respected and to be regarded as sacred. Without the tolerance born of this realization, it is all too easy for one man to see the personification of all evil in the [God] of his neighbor, and the very inviolability of rites and social norms which constitutes their most important property can lead to the most terrible of all wars, to religious war.
3. See Isaiah 60:1-22.
4. See Leviticus 19:17, 18; I John: 2:1-29.