God s Justice and Ours [Scalia on the Death Penalty]

If anyone is interested in a truly fascinating book on the death penalty, see if you can find a copy of "The Death Penalty: A Debate" by Ernest Van den Haag and John P. Conrad.

Van den Haag is Pro, Conrad is Con. They exchanged chapters back and forth after meeting to establish ground rules. The result is very enlightening. There is much more to the death penalty than I thought (and I am pro).

Interesting.
We are inundated with half quotes and even full ones, at my university, which are designed to lead the student to come to quite different interpretations than were intended by the authors, all in the name of "thinking for ourselves."
One of the most interesting is Galileo's leter to the Grand Duchess Christina, where in he says (roughly), "it is the purpose of the Holy Spirit to tell us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes," a statement not out of line with what you are saying was the position of the church. Unfortunately, even though the letter is given in it's entirety, the accompanying preface, and the lectures all lead the student to believe not that he was making a distinction between where scripture could be used appropriately and not, but that he was somehow saying that scripture was untrustworthy.
They build on this, with selections from Newton which do not disagree with their all but spelled out intimation that he too was seeking to replace religion with science, and distort Locke heavily in order to make him a deist. All in an effort to build a foundation for the secular "scientific" worldview currently promulgated there.
Sorry, one of my favorite rants... We won't even go into the supposed enlightenment roots of our American revolution.
I would be interested in resources regarding Catholic teaching on astronomy and science in this period, or if there was any, I suppose.

Justice Harold Blackmun towards the end of his career ..... announced that he would henceforth vote (as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall had previously done) to overturn all death sentences.......

Yet these same "Justices" would vote to uphold Row v. Wade, having no remorse killing 35 million innocent ones....

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