We are all Cretins!

Fools for Christ

Chuck Colson's tribute to Antonin Scalia (April 16, 1996):

Well, the thinking Christian can indeed find much to dismay him.

Take one recent week. On Wednesday the president vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban. Earlier the same week, a District of Columbia Superior Court judge struck from the November ballot an initiative that would have allowed voters to restore student-initiated voluntary prayer in D.C. schools.

Think of it. In this ruling the courts have gone so far as to deny citizens even the right to vote on an issue involving religious liberty. But then in the midst of all the disheartening news came a refreshing clarion call in defense of Christian truth.

And the best part is that it came from a most unlikely source—none other than a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Justice Antonin Scalia would no doubt be embarrassed if I called him a prophet. But in many ways that’s what he is. Scalia, considered by friend and foe alike to be one of America’s top legal minds, has never shied from pointing out the lunacy of the prevailing orthodoxy.

Some of Justice Scalia’s finest moments have been in his withering dissents. In Casey v. Planned Parenthood, he excoriated the majority’s position, which defined liberty as “choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.”

He warned that it wouldn’t stop at abortion. The next stops were “homosexual sodomy, polygamy, adult incest, and suicide.” Unfortunately, time has proven him right.

Last year, dissenting from the Court’s refusal to hear an appeal from abortion clinic protesters, he stated that prolifers were a “currently disfavored class” that cannot expect the Supreme Court to look favorably on their appeals.

A week ago the justice spoke out again. Speaking to a meeting of Evangelicals in Jackson, Mississippi, the Roman Catholic justice from Brooklyn told his audience that our culture has moved beyond skepticism to open hostility toward Christianity.

Taking his cue from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Scalia said that “the [worldly] wise do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. . . . So everything from Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by th

Scalia noted that cretin—a synonym for moron and imbecile—is derived from the French word for Christian. He continued, “That is the view of Christians taken by modern society. . . . Surely those who adhere to . . . Christian beliefs are to be regarded as simple-minded.”

He brought the crowd to its feet when he said, “We are fools for Christ’s sake.” Our response, Scalia said, should be to “pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.”

And scorn is what he got. Washington was scandalized that a Supreme Court justice was speaking out in defense of religion. And Justice Scalia reminded Christians of something we’d rather forget: that a world that has rejected the Truth himself will naturally reject those who live by his word. Thank you, Justice Scalia, for courageously speaking out, and reminding us that acceptance by a hostile culture isn’t the goal for those who follow Christ. Bearing witness to the “truth which is in Jesus” is.

Comment: For anyone who expresses Christian views in the public square ...

• Abortion is sin!
• Marriage is to be between a man and a woman!
• God created the world!
• Evolutionism is wrong!
• One is to remain sexually chaste until marriage (or sex outside of marriage is sin)

We understand that these views are not popular and we are regarded as stupid and obtuse.  Word origin (see link above):  from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin, from Latin Chrīstiānus

"for the virtuous person, doing the right thing is incentive enough"

Incentives vs. Virtue

Excerpt:

Greensboro, North Carolina, is paying teenage mothers $1 for every day they are not pregnant. Like paying students to improve their grades and test scores, paying teen mothers to not get pregnant appears to be having the desired affect.

The core ideas in these kinds of programs come from a new field known as “behavioral economics.” Classical economics assumes that people are rational and act in accordance with their best interests. Behavioral economics knows that, in the real world, people make bad and even self-destructive choices all the time.

The goal of behavioral economics is to identify the “dizzying array of human foibles” and help policy makers take them into account when shaping policy.

In the case of incentive programs like the ones I have described, it means “nudging” people to act in their own best interests. It’s an approach, by the way, that is favored by a “number of high-level appointees” in the Obama administration.

While basing policy on human beings as they actually are is certainly preferable to basing them on rational “economic men” that exist only in economists’ imaginations (you can count me among the critics on that one).

It doesn’t surprise me that these “nudges” can have a short-term positive effect. But it’s difficult to imagine these programs making a long-term difference.

On the contrary, the “long term damage” mentioned earlier may very well include creating a generation of people for whom incentives will become a necessity, not a nudge.

To put it in Christian terms, incentives will replace virtue. Instead of doing the right or prudent thing because it’s what a moral person does, people will do what they do because they get something out of it. This doesn’t build character—it builds calculators.

What’s more, in the real world, people don’t always reward you for doing the right thing. But there are still consequences for behaving foolishly. How will people raised on a steady diet of nudges avoid these pitfalls?

The answer is that many won’t avoid them because they never learned that, for the virtuous person, doing the right thing is incentive enough.

Chuck Colson: I know how Rod Blagojevich feels!

Chuck Colson: I know how Rod Blagojevich feels!

Excerpt:

In the wake of Blagojevich’s arrest, many Americans are left wondering once again how intelligent people can do such stupid things — especially when they’ve achieved the pinnacle of power.

The answer comes down to pride.

At the height of Watergate, a dear friend of mine, Tom Phillips, then CEO of Raytheon, invited me to his home. As we sat in his kitchen, Tom read to me a chapter on pride from a little book by C.S. Lewis titled “Mere Christianity.”

Lewis wrote, “There is one vice of which no man in the world is free. … The vice I am talking about is Pride or Self-conceit. …. Pride leads to every other vice. … A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. … Pride is a spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

Tom — who told me about Jesus Christ that night — didn’t know I was in utter despair over Watergate, watching the president I’d worked for flounder in office. I’d learned I might become a target of the investigation. In short, my world was collapsing.

That night I sat in a darkened driveway and in a flood of tears called out to God. I didn’t know what to say; I just knew I needed Christ. At that moment God took the White House “hatchet man” and turned me into a new creation.

Comment: From my other blog: http://www.4bya.info/