UN-FRIENDLY ATHEISTS! Railing About Justice Scalia and ‘Faith Derangement Syndrome’

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently gave the commencement speech at Stone Ridge High School in Bethesda, Maryland where his granddaughter, Megan, was graduating. Scalia’s speech was humorous and upbeat and took aim at the typical coma inducing platitudes normally offered as wisdom to bleary-eyed students.

At one point in the speech, Scalia stated this about the challenges that lay ahead for the graduating class: “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.” Scalia was clearly taking aim at the typical liberal fear provoking, apocalyptical admonitions designed to chain newly minted adults to an all-smothering central government. Now if simple minded yours truly took notice of this, then surely sophisticated liberals did as well, right? Well, take notice they did.

However, instead of offering reasons as to why Scalia’s statement was false, liberal critics attack Scalia’s Christian beliefs. In Philosophy, this is called committing a genetic fallacy — attacking the source of the argument instead of the argument being made. The idea is to attack the person making a claim, discredit them and then any statement they make can just be ignored or dismissed. This is liberal for thoughtful discourse.

Barbara J. King, an anthropology professor at William and Mary, writing on NPR.org questioned in hushed, soporific tones just what Scalia meant by “Humanity has been around for at least 5,000 years or so”. Could Scalia be one of those creationists? You know, they believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. She admits that it’s not clear whether Scalia is making that claim or not but does note that he does recognize creation science as a body of scientific knowledge. Oh, the horror!

Hermant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, similarly chimes in echoing King about the possibility of Scalia being a young earther. (Does the fact that he calls himself “The Friendly Atheist” mean that atheists are not normally friendly?) He then adds, “…it does fall right in line with the I-Hold-Loopy-Religious-Beliefs Scalia, who said in a 2013 interview that he believed in a literal devil.” Our friendly atheist then goes on to add, “It’s a sad state of affairs when someone who doesn’t accept basic science sits on the Supreme Court.” Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

And Jeffrey Tayler of Salon.com takes us there. He believes that Scalia is mentally deficient and should be removed from the Supreme Court bench because:

Scalia rejects the fact of evolution – the foundation of modern biology – in favor of the opening chapter of a compendium of cockamamie fables concocted by obscure humans in a particularly dark age, evidence that his faculty of reason has suffered the debilitating impairment associated with Faith Derangement Syndrome (FDS).

Tayler must not be a friendly atheist. I think he’s one of those naturally hostile atheists, you know, the ones that are always seem to be having a bad day. Check out how he describes Christian Evangelicals: “…Dugger-esque hairdos and Tammy Bakker-ian makeup, preternaturally sunny dispositions, and pedophiliac tendencies, sartorial ineptitude and obesity.” Wow, this guy really has command of his online thesaurus! Funny though, I always thought Denzel Washington was a pretty cool dresser with really great abs. I’m also willing to bet that one of the hottest stars in Hollywood right now, Chris Pratt, is a little cooler looking than Jeffrey Tayler, but please forgive me, I’m just being catty.

Tayler does get serious though in charging that Scalia is ignoring the monumental threat of anthropogenic (manmade for those of you without an online thesaurus) global warming which early generations didn’t have to face, making life today far more perilous than earlier times.

Therefore, in the mind of those like Tayler, we either accept the fact that man is destroying the planet or we are deranged. Never mind the fact that the earth’s average temperature has been flat for close to twenty years now. Pay no attention to those NOAA men behind the curtain who are frantically changing earth based temp data to support the global warming claim. All the satellite data clearly shows there’s been no warming.

How about that consensus of scientists on devastating man-caused climate change? I don’t think that’s quite right either. I can provide you a petition signed by 32,000 American scientists that do not support the notion; and they are not all Evangelicals.

Tayler takes great issue with the creation account in Genesis and calls the events “manifest absurdities”. Well let’s look at what the facts of science are:

— The universe had a beginning. Scientists to their frustration admit that the universe has a space-time boundary in the finite past no matter what hand waving you get from Hawking. Check out the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem.

— The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned for intelligent life to exist. The tuning of the physical constants of nature is so precise as to be impossible to have occurred by random friendly atheist chance.

— All biological life is based on information that can only come from a mind. Check out what Bill Gates says about DNA.

— The fossil record in no way supports Darwinism’s required gradualism.

I can go on and on, but the bottom line is that there is far more evidence in support of the Christian worldview than that of the friendly atheist view. So who’s really deranged?

Image: http://grovesapush.wikispaces.com/Bush+v.+Gore