@georgeob1,
Quote:Just what were your "positive notion" of Jesuit education? How did I violate them?
You are consistently undisciplined in argumentation. That would almost certainly not be the case had your education courtesy of a Jesuit institution continued beyond high school. For example, where Scalia would be eager to define terms critical to an argument/discussion for reasons that ought to be easily grasped, you refuse to do so. You ignore core arguments/claims/questions in posts to which you are responding and instead shift to other issues, irrelevant to what has preceded. Imagine Rush Limbaugh attempting to argue a case before the Supreme Court.
Quote:I had assumed Scalia figured high in your list of "Catholic extremists".
Not high (other than as a consequence of his stature and influence) in relation to others like Leo or Barr but part of the problem. I do consider that he is, in a real sense, slightly insane as a consequence of his theology and as a consequence of his particular personality and how those two things interact. The following is from an interview he gave about a year before he died.
Quote:You believe in heaven and hell?
Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?
No.
Oh, my.
Does that mean I’m not going?
[Laughing.] Unfortunately not!
Wait, to heaven or hell?
It doesn’t mean you’re not going to hell, just because you don’t believe in it. That’s Catholic doctrine! Everyone is going one place or the other.
But you don’t have to be a Catholic to get into heaven? Or believe in it?
Of course not!
Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.
I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, “Who am I to judge?” He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?
Can we talk about your drafting process—
[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.
You do?
Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.
Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.
The notions of God, Satan, Heaven and Hell are ancient cultural artifacts with no empirical or rational basis to accept as true. They are simply taught and believed. They are identical to any other such artifacts which have arisen in any other culture such as the Maori legend that the Earth and the Sky were once in unison but got in a fight and separated from each other. Or eastern ideas of reincarnation. Or the poetic notions found in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Or, of course, Santa Claus.
It's not difficult to understand why humans in the pre-scientific past, with our pattern-seeking minds, would advance such theories in our attempts to understand what's going on. But to continue to hold these ideas with the tenacity that Scalia demonstrates says nothing good about the parts of his mind involved.
He says, in the quote above, that he believes Satan is a "person" because it is a key part of his church's dogma. That's just about the worst possible reason to believe anything.
None of that would be relevant or important to me if his faith and the consequences of it were limited to himself. But that's obviously not the case. Where he, or any other religious figure of any denomination seek to control the lives of others outside their own faith community (ie seeking to make abortion illegal, nationally institutionalizing preference for one particular faith, etc) then they are automatically my enemy.
