← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 16519 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-01-31
2005-01-31 09:12 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=27251&vm_id=31]Catholic Exchange[/URL]
1/31/05
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a humdinger of an indispensable speech for people of faith who are wondering when they are ever going to catch a break from their culture.
Summary: bad treatment to be expected. Get used to it.
Addressing the Knights of Columbus Council 969 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Scalia said that belief in biblical Christianity is, well, foolish. "For the son of God to be born of a virgin? I mean, really. To believe that He rose from the dead and bodily ascended into heaven? How utterly ridiculous. To believe in miracles? Or that those who obey God will rise from the dead and those who do not will burn in hell?
"God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and he has not been disappointed ...."
Scalia makes an important point, of course. Basic Christian orthodoxy is outrageously beyond the understanding of a this-world rationality. Born of a virgin, resurrection, supernaturality, a next-world judgment.
Preposterous ... idiocy ... comforting only to the shallow-minded. These are the thoughts of so many of the intellectual elite. One wonders: if this impossible faith were merely a conglomeration of implausible doctrinal assertions, might not people consider believers foolish but only in a quaint, innocuous manner?
But there seems to be today a vehemence, an ugly mean-spiritedness of the mockers when they speak of Christians and their scriptural affirmations ââ¬â how to explain that?
It is not the unpalatable doctrine that has the non-believers shouting invectives through their proverbial foaming mouths. No, it is unpalatable doctrine applied. Christians, you see, believe that the teachings of scripture belong not merely in the church and around dinner tables, but in the marketplace and the state capitols and in the media and even in the Oval Office.
That is what unnerves so many of the academicians, the irreligious power brokers, the old media and politicians post-election. These people, these believers, actually think that their ethical beliefs ought to be adopted by ... everyone.
Gasp.
Scalia told the faithful in Baton Rouge to "have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."
Yes, but know this ââ¬â the most passionate contempt will be reserved for those who, when the darkness seems to be winning, shine the light of God's glory and illuminate the gloomiest situations. Be prepared, at that very point of redemption, for the onslaught of the scorn of which Scalia speaks.
And bask in it.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
2005-01-31 18:45 | User Profile
Scalia's position only fosters fundamentalism and fideistic Christianity. It was only recently that un-reasoned Christianity has been acceptable. Before that not all people were expected to be Aquinas or Jonathan Edwards, but they were expected to acknowledge that there were such men and to defer to them. Both Aquinas and Edwards were scientists (amateur-- although Edwards published on specific scientific subjects), not jurists, and perhaps this is the reason they reasoned things out. Certainly Scalia is familiar with 1 Peter 3:15 and the necessity of advancing apologia (reasons) for our faith. Yes the miracles of the Bible, and specifically Christ, are radical, but so is the miracle of existence, and the flawless formation of this hyper-massive universe.
OTOH, he might be thinking of contemporary Biblical scholars who have sold out completely. These higher critics have as their colleagues many secular Jews and whether it is the BCE/CE designation or the doing down of Jesus of Nazareth and his miracles they all seem to ultimately choose having their stuff published in academic journals over upholding the bare minimum of their fatih.