The Devil stalks the SCOTUS.

The Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. If there is no Devil, then their is nothing to fear from God, or better yet, their is no God. The single greatest appeal to their being no Devil or God, is that there are no eternal consequences to ones actions here on earth. Every individual is free to act in any such manner as fit’s their desire.

If you choose to act in a moral and ethical manner, then you are free to do so, providing you can demonstrate a logical, rational basis for those moral and ethical patterns of behavior. If you choose to not accept any conventional moral or ethical standards, well, you are also free to do that. The only constraints on any individuals behavior are those enforced by the “Monopoly on Violence” of the government under which they are a citizen.

Having no ultimate retribution awaiting the individual predicated upon their personally culpable actions and patterns of behavior frees the individual to behave in any manner that they want. In effect giving license to every human being to place their own personal desires and interests ahead of everyone else around them. In other-words, legitimizing sociopathic or psychopathic behavior to the extent that it does not violate the laws of the nation the individual lives in.

For even longer than the human race has had a written language, it has had codified religious laws dictating which actions and patterns of behavior were acceptable and which would hold eternal consequences. Whether the theory is true or not that the written language came into existence for the express purpose of codification of religious laws and theology is debatable. What is not debatable is that among the oldest written documents in existence are “The Code of Hammurabi” which begins with the preface, “Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared Marduk, the chief god of Babylon , to bring about the rule in the land.”.

What can clearly be seen here is that Hammurabi invokes the Gods of Babylon as the source of authority for the legal codes that he then proceeds to lay out. Herein lays one of the most significant problems or issues in the history of the Human race. The written codification of laws dictating what constitutes socially acceptable behavior makes relative morality nearly impossible unless those codified laws can be altered easily.

If a Deity, such as the Judeo-Christian God or the Babylonian God Marduk is invoked as the foundation, or authority for those laws, then it becomes incredibly difficult for those laws to be arbitrarily changed to suit the current whims and desires of those living at the time.

Every civilization in human history has had it’s own codified legal system. Those codified legal systems have been written down in some fashion. From the original Mesopotamian writing system (believed to be the world’s oldest) circa 3600 BC and the Indus script found in early Harappa after 3500 BC (currently un deciphered) one thing is abundantly clear, once written down and codified laws of behavior become more difficult to modify at a whim. What constitutes acceptable moral and ethical behavior as codified by every civilizations written legal code, becomes static and highly stable.

The last 100 years in America has seen an erosion of the stability of moral and ethical behavior in the United States of America. Since Everson v. Board of Education (1947), there has been a concerted effort to separate any connection to the Judeo-Christian religious theology of America’s Founding Fathers and the American Legal system. Such proponents nearly always cite Reynolds v. United States (1879) as the foundation of their efforts (the Court wrote that Jefferson’s comments “may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment.”).

This divorce of any Deity from the legal code of the United States removes the single most powerful obstacle to Moral Relativity “Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.”

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) marks perhaps the beginning of America’s decent on a Slippery Slope (Modern usage includes a logically valid form, in which a minor action causes a significant impact through a long chain of logical relationships. Note that establishing this chain of logical implication (or quantifying the relevant probabilities) makes this form logically valid. The Slippery Slope argument remains a fallacy if such a chain is not established.) where traditional moral and ethical values began being replaced by moral relativism.

When the SCOTUS created out of whole cloth the supposed constitutional right of a mother to murder her own unborn child, traditional American Judeo-Christian morals and ethic’s began to find themselves systematically being outlawed and replaced with normative moral relativism based laws. March 25th 2013 the SCOTUS once again found itself deliberating another of those once absolute Judeo-Christian morality based laws.

The Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. He followed that up with convincing people that morals and ethics should be based on normative moral relativism rather than on the absolute dictates of any religious Deity. SCOTUS will find itself in a strange place when it takes up California’s Proposition 8, on one hand it will find itself being ask to rule in favor of normative moral relativism, which is to say, that the opponents of California’s Proposition 8 are arguing that the ancient prohibitions against homosexual conduct being based upon Judeo-Christian are banned or otherwise restricted by Thomas Jefferson’s “Separation of Church and State”.

At the exact same time, they will be forced to decide, once again based upon the concept of normative moral relativism whether or not the majority of any state in the Union can enact legal statutes baring or restricting certain forms of behavior that a minority in that state wish to engage in.

So what is going to be decided by the SCOTUS is can the citizens of any State in the United States pass legislation dictating what the majority of that state decides is morally or ethically acceptable behavior, can the majority of any State Amend their State Constitution according to their own perception of normative moral relativism or whether an aggressive minority can impose upon the several states their moral and ethical values against the will of the majority.

That California Superior Court Justice Vaughn Walker ruled on a case that he indisputably should have recused himself from for personal conflicts of interest reasons because he himself stood to benefit from that decision, will probably not even enter into the deliberative process of the 9 justices on the SCOTUS. Justice Walker should be removed from the bench for his actions or at the very barest of minimums severely rebuked by the Justices of the SCOTUS.

Personally I have grown extremely cynical and distrusting of the ability of the SCOTUS to deliberate objectively with a clear and unquestionably firm grasp on the United States Constitution as a foundation for their ultimate decisions. What has become painfully obvious is that SCOTUS decisions have increasingly been politically motivated rather than based upon the intentions of the Framers of the United States Constitution. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the SCOTUS upheld Justices Walker’s ruling, obliterating the rights of the citizens of each state to amend their own constitutions according to the morality and ethical values of the majority of it’s citizens.

The Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Yes, the Devil is stalking the Supreme Court of The United States of America.

Isaiah 14
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

In my opinion The SCOTUS has become like Lucifer as quoted above from Isaiah 14, having but themselves in the place of God, dictating what constitutes acceptable moral and ethical behavior. As a consequence I place little faith in the SCOTUS any more.

Edit: I would like to include the following comment made to me over at Hot Air.

The Devil stalks the SCOTUS.

SWalker on March 28, 2013 at 10:42 PM

One small quibble, SWalker.

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) marks perhaps the beginning of America’s decent on a Slippery Slope

No, Engle v. Vitale in ’62 was the beginning. It forbade the recitation of prayer in the public school system.

Why was that so important? Because Dewey and his disciples understood that what enters the minds of the young in their earliest stages of cognitive development sets the framework for all subsequent intellectual context. Removing the introduction of the idea of the Transcendent from the intellectual and subconscious development of young Americans’ minds was a master stroke which set the stage for the introduction of other ideas which would otherwise register as morally and intellectually inconsistent with their understanding of reality, and therefore would be a much more difficult sell.

Cleombrotus on March 28, 2013 at 11:34 PM