Monday, February 4
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday criticized his church's position against the death penalty, saying that Catholic judges who believe capital punishment is wrong should resign.
The devout Roman Catholic said after giving it "serious thought" he could not agree with the church's stand on the issue.
The Vatican under Pope John Paul II has been strongly anti-death penalty, and the pope has personally appealed to leaders to commute death sentences. In 1999, he said capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide are part of a "culture of death."
Scalia told Georgetown students that the church has a much longer history of endorsing capital punishment.
"No authority that I know of denies the 2,000-year-old tradition of the church approving capital punishment," he said. "I don't see why there's been a change."
By the way, Joseph is, of course, the brother of Ralph. Both are the children of the late Jennifer Lash, a writer who penned a very nice little book called On Pilgrimage about her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the wake of cancer treatments.
According to Behe, he does not infer design from what we do not know, but rather, from what we do know. “To Darwin, the cell — and every microbiological function — was an unknowable black box; that is, it did neat and interesting functions, but nobody knew how it actually worked. Now that it is possible to look into this box, it is necessary to try and apply Darwin’s theory to it.”
And the results? Surprising.
Last year alone there were three withering studies of self-esteem released in the United States, all of which had the same central message: people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country's biggest, most expensive social problems.
What's next? A front page story in the NYTimes about the connections between abortion and breast cancer?
Nah.
Anyway, read this article. If you're a teacher or someone who has to deal with administrators, counselors and others telling you to always put "self-esteem" at the center of your concern for children or youth, copy this and force them to read it.