One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of moral responsibility in relation to laws, distinguishing between just and unjust laws.
Martin Luther King Jr. articulates a profound view on the relationship between law and morality. He asserts that individuals are not only bound by legal obligations to follow just laws but also possess a moral duty to resist and disobey laws that are unjust. This perspective encourages critical thinking about the nature of legality and justice, suggesting that true righteousness emerges when one stands against oppression and injustice, aligning one's actions with ethical principles rather than mere compliance.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about civil disobedience during a social justice seminar.
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.
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.
Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
The question is not, "Do you know you are a sinner?" the question is this, "As you have heard me preach the Gospel, has God so worked in your life that the sin you once loved you now hate?"
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