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Pascal's Wisdom

I’ve been reading Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. Wow. Pascal was brilliant scientist and a fiery Christian thinker. The Pensees are a collection of thoughts about faith and the human condition that Pascal wrote but never published during his lifetime. Here are some of my favorite aphorisms from the Pensees so far (numbers in parens are to the numbering system in my Penguin Classics edition):

  • Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical. (21).
  • Man’s condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. (24)
  • Extremes in the law are extremes of injustice. Majority opinion is the best way because it can be seen and is strong enough to command obedience, but it is the opinion of those who are least clever. (85)
  • Cause and effect. One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person. (91)
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Schiavo and Judicial Activism

I was listening to the Sean Hannity show on my way into the office this afternoon. He was discussing the Florida District Court’s ruling denying the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order under the federal statute passed by Congress (the “Schiavo Act”). Hannity stated that he believed the court’s opinion did not even reference the Schiavo Act. He was hammering the federal court’s decision as symptomatic of the arrogance of the judiciary. Senator Rick Santorum came on the Hannity show and claimed the Schiavo Act required the federal court to order the reinsertion of nutrition and hydration tubes pending a full hearing on the merits. Santorum also decried the ruling as an abuse of judicial power. This seems to be the Christian Right’s theme: a National Right to Life Committee spokesman referred to the federal court’s decision as a “gross abuse of judicial power”; Christian Defense Coalition Director Pat Mahoney, quoted in a Focus on the Family article, attributed the federal court’s decision to “an arrogant and activist federal judiciary.”

Unfortunately, all of these comments about judicial activism are wrong.

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