Lucky for us here in JesusLandAmerica we have a man as wise and insightful as Antonin Scalia sitting on the highest court in the land! In a speech Saturday addressing a Baton Rouge Knights of Columbus chapter, the man some idiotspundits are talking up as the best choice to replace Reinquist as Chief Justice, said “God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools … and he has not been disappointed.”
Now just because I (completely) agree with Scalia on this and many other topics, I don’t confuse that with underestimating his intelligence; he is, no doubt, a very smart man who has decided to accept what’s in his heart (i.e., faith) over his head. So I expect better from him than the kind of victim-based logic as expressed in the cited sentence. And God, per Scalia’s belief system, created all humans and loves all of his creatures yet he made some of us in such a way that we would be such otherwise good people but with no choice but to disappoint him? Free will is one thing but this assertion just boggles me.
[To my friends who are true people of faith, no disrespect intended, but such words from this man cannot go unanswered.]
The Justice also said that “intellect and reason need not be laid aside for religion. It is not irrational to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses who had nothing to gain. There is something wrong with rejecting a priori (deductively) the existence of miracles.”
Again, Scalia makes glaring errors. The first claim contradicts the fundamental nature of faith as defined by Christians: the need to leap across the lack of direct, unsubtle evidence of God. What is faith if not the rejection of reason to embrace the ineffable nature of Him?
None of the books of the Bible, per the best information I’ve seen recently, were written less than 40 years after the death of Jesus and most much later than that, so his assertion of “eyewitness testimony” seems questionable at best and certainly nowhere near the definition used in American legal standards.
Finally, most reasonable (that is, non-extremist) people who reject religion would say their rejection of miracles doesn’t come via deductive reasoning. Not to speak for other than myself but my explanation is that since the claimed miraculous events are so extraordinary and conflict so seriously with my understanding of nature that to believe in their occurence I need more than words written down so many years ago. Catholicism, explicitly referred to by Scalia, instead goes in the opposite direction by using trumped up, nearly ridiculous assertions of miracles to justify the beatification of modern individuals (for example, see the claims for Mother Teresa).
And this is the man we should accept as the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States? I have my own faith, and it tells me that we are wiser–despite all evidence to the contrary–than the re-election of George W. Bush and the overwhelming approval of anti-homosexual marriage might evince, wise enough not to put this man in that job.
BillSaysThis 