The last "Honest Originalist" - Anthony Scalia (in "The Devil")

-
Hoisted from an interview in New York magazine (emphasis mine)
Anthony Scalia: You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. 
So, lets take a look at this
  • Hindus? Nah, no such person/thing. If you really want to get down to it, there is no "Good" or "Evil", but just different levels of realization/consciousness/being
  • Buddhists? Eh, kinda, sorta, not really. There is "Mara" (the dude who tempted Buddha), but its actually more like the embodiment of selfishness/desire in Man/Mankind. 
  • Judaism? Nah, the closest would be yetzer hara, which is more about evil tendencies/inclinations - its kinda like Buddhism in that way. (And yeah, Satan does show up in the Book of Job. But not really as the "Devil")
  • Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheists? Well, d-uh
And I'll stop at that, mainly 'cos between that we're at ~38% of the world's population. Today. 
Considering that only about 6.5% of people that have ever lived are alive today, and considering that the Indian population has always been quite high, I think we can fairly say that even today most of mankind doesn't believe in the devil, let alone through all of history.

Then again, this is the same chump honest originalist who believes that the cross honors all war dead, not just christians (yup. seriously. what a doof.)

Note: I'm fairly certain he wasn't talking about FreeBSD. And even then...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Spot The Difference — Deep Learning Edition

-
Image
You’ve played  Spot The Difference  at some point, right? (Of course you did. We  all  did  ). Think about what you actually did when you were trying to Spot The Difference — in fact, just do it again with SpongeBob juggling above. You’re probably doing something like 1. Quick glance to the left. 2. Quick glance to the right 3. “ Spatula on the left. Wonder if there is one on the right? ” 4. “ Yup, there is. Sriracha on the right. Is that on the left? ” 5. “ Nope! It’s a ketchup bottle on the left! And there is nothing on the plate below it! ” etc. To summarize, what you’re basically doing is looking at each image alternately, identifying objects in each image, and trying to find the same object in the other image. As it turns out, what most Deep Learning systems do is something quite different. They basically do something like this 1. Figure out everything in the first image (“ ketchup bottle at 1 o-clock, empty plate at 3 o-clock, spatula at 1...
Read more