On Worshiping He Who Created Nature

I have been reading, slowly I'll admit, Dennis Prager's book The Rational Bible: Genesis. I say slowly because it is a dense tome, and one often has to stop and think deeply about something. Prager's commentary is truly a blessing for those of us who believe that the Bible is indeed the Word of God. I am also anxious to get onto the next in the series: The Rational Bible: Exodus.

The Book of Exodus is the story of how God brought the Israelites out of bondage to the Egyptians and returned them to their Promised Land.  That land is today Israel again.  But, Exodus isn't just a story for the Jews.  Oh, no;  it is a story for everyone, for it describes how God does everything to bring us out of bondage and misery.  It is your story, it is my story.

Some years ago, I found that I had managed to put myself in a box by worshiping not the Creator, and not even creation itself, what Prager calls nature worship, but things that man has made in imitation of God's Creative power.  It was here that I had my low point, changed my mind, which is the actual translation of repent, and came back to worship the true God of creation, the God who reached out to me, because I could not reach out to Him.  The God who has done everything so that I can be with Him.  Who can imagine such Love?

Today, at Townhall.com Dennis Prager has an article that is timely for Christians, but is really a message for more out there who are like I was entitled Maybe Nature Shouldn't Be Worshiped After All. Prager is hopeful that this COVID-19 outbreak may just cause a number of people to see that their survival depends not on government or on themselves, but on a Higher Power.

Maybe the coronavirus will awaken young people, who have been taught by nature-worshipping teachers and raised by nature-worshipping parents, to the idiocy of worshipping nature rather than subduing it. Nature, it turns out, is not our friend, let alone a god. If it were up to nature, we'd all be dead: Animals would eat us; weather would freeze us to death; disease would wipe out the rest of us. If we don't subdue nature, nature will subdue us. It's that simple.

Nature is beautiful and awe-inspiring. It's also brutal and merciless. "Nature, red in tooth and claw," as Alfred Tennyson aptly describes it. Nature follows no moral rules and shows no compassion. The basic law of all biological life is "survival of the fittest," while the basic law of Judaism and Christianity is the opposite: the survival of the weakest with the help of the fittest. Nature wants the weakest eaten by the strongest. Hospitals are as anti-natural an entity as exists.

Only human beings make hospitals. We do so not by worshipping nature but by subduing it.

I would also point out that hospitals did not exist before the Christian era. Coincidence? I think not. We should all be praying to the God who created and loves us, and knew us before we were born, that he would sustain us now. But more than that, I would hope that more of us would have a change of heart and repent from worshiping creation.

I will save my thoughts on the difference between mankind and the rest of the animals for another time, except to say that the environmentalist saying that we are just another species is wrong. Oh, we share the same structure of  DNA with all the rest of life on earth, so in that regard, sure we are another species. But it is the "just" that disturbs me. It seems fairly clear to me that we have abilities far in excess of those needed to survive. Music and the arts come to mind. The ability to understand mathematics and science is another.  To me, these things are evidence of, though not proof (for there can not be proof) of the existence of God.  Whenever we engage in these things, we should look at them as alternate ways of worshiping our God..

Leftists and Social Bullies

So during this Kung Flu pandemic, the seriousness of which is, in my opinion, unproven, one of the things we need to keep in mind is the creeps who have popped up to boss the rest of us around.  Raleigh, North Carolina is not New York City, but we seem to have the same policies being imposed by the same types of people.

Kurt Schlichter today has an article at Townhall.com entitled Beware the Creeps Who Enjoy Their New Pandemic Power Spoiler alert: Schlichter thinks we will return to something approaching "normal" soon. He premises this belief on the fact that Americans will tolerate being essentially under house arrest for just so long:

The problem with people referring to this bizarre pandemic life limbo as “the new normal” is that there are people out there, both in and out of positions of responsibility, who are digging this opportunity to boss us around. And it is troubling to see that there are a number of prominent folks who are in no hurry to curtail their ability to boss us around. We need to note carefully who these people are and ensure that they never get a chance to control anything again.

...snip...

But the medical perspective is not the only perspective. There are other perspectives that need to be considered, like the economy and our liberty, and so we elect people to consider them. See, this is why we are not a technocracy. We are a republic. We normal citizens get the final say in our country’s priorities, and we may not decide that our priorities are exactly the same as Dr. Fauci’s. I, for one, am willing to accept some risk regarding the infection in order to avoid America degenerating into a Road Warrior scenario – unless I can be the Humungous, who really gets a bad rap for his innovative and focused leadership style.

Adults accept risk when balancing various interests. The idea that “It’s not worth one life” is childish and stupid. We have cars. Cars kill 30K people a year. We accept that risk. What’s the proper risk balancing for the Chinese coronavirus? Well, we as citizens need to figure that out. That process is called “politics.” That’s why whenever anyone tells you that “This is no time for politics,” they really mean they don’t want you to have any input into the decision. Without politics, you have a dictatorship, and that seems to be the unspoken theme of a growing number of elected officials and others.

What Schlichter is talking about above is what is commonly known as "trade offs." We make them all the time. Is that old refrigerator worth repairing or should you buy new? Of course, the issue of cars, which typically kill 30,000 people per year. Is it worth it to force people out of their cars to save lives? If not why not? People die while choking on food. So, to save just one life should everybody be prevented from eating?   That last of course is obviously not intended as a serious proposal but rather to show the silliness of the "save just one life" argument is.

So, having shown that even Leftist  and social bullies can, and do instinctively make judgements about the risks they are willing to accept, it may be time to stop with the "save on life" arguments and begin discussing factual risks and trade offs.  Is the total destruction of the economy worth the saving of the lives of the vulnerable? What about the loss of lives of those not vulnerable to the virus, but who will lose their income?  Because, every business is ultimately essential to those who own it and to the employees who work there.

In fact, as long as we have wandered into this territory, Michael Z. Williamson, over at the blog  The Sacred Cow Slaughterhouse explains the interrelationship of the entire economy in a post entitle Businesses That Will Fail. This blog shows that though you start with one a person my feel are "nonessential" that pretty soon you start to impact essential businesses and services. It is why the Communist idea of a Central Planning Committee to determine these things is a fool's errand. 

Please go read both articles today.  I pray that Schlichter's outlook is the more correct, and that we will soon enough return to normal.  It is not at all clear to me, though that we will ever get rid of  the social bullies and their endless message of constantly restricting what we do, where we go, what we eat, and a thousand other restrictions on our freedoms and liberties, because it is good for us, of course.

It would be even more tragic of we, who are free, returned to slavery

Selwyn Duke has a thoughtful piece at the American Thinker today entitled Why Accepting 2 Million COVID-19 Deaths May Be Better Than A National Lockdown. Of course, from the title of the article, one would expect that it is rather hard hearted. But as Duke says, he has loved ones who are at some risk of getting the virus and perhaps contributing to the statistics. And yet, as he also points out, public policy should not necessarily be made on the basis of one's compassion for a neighbor, but what may be best for the whole. That is why we pay people to do these jobs, and they better have a thick skin.

One thing that Duke brings up is the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.  I have mentioned the Spanish Flu that swept the world during WWI to people and get a "deer in the headlights" look.  They have no idea what I am talking about.  This is too bad, because knowing history provides perspective.  As Selwyn Duke writes:

Remember, too, that we’ve been through this before. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, 675,000 Americans died; adjusted for today’s U.S. population this amounts to a bit more than two million people — exactly our worst case scenario number.

Now, you may be asking yourselves, Why didn't the government DO SOMETHING?" The fact is there was little either government or medical science could do. The virus had to play out, and it killed a number of people. But, let's now get to the heart of what Duke is writing about today, namely the idea of trade offs. Is it worth it to destroy the economy, kill off jobs that will likely never return, and risk imposing a tyranny on the American people for the sake of a worst case scenario of 2 million dead. That 2 million represents o.67% of the population. Does it, in other words, make sense to impose draconian hardships on 99.3% of the population to save o.7%, irrespective of whether that 0.7% is likely to die soon anyway of their other diseases? That is the real question.

Unemployment claims are at a record high, but I don’t have to tell you how the current lockdowns are ravaging our economy. Many businesses and jobs will never come back, yet this concern not only is just the iceberg’s tip, it isn’t even, as critics may say, just about “money” — because money isn’t just about “money.”

Money represents resources, people’s capacity to obtain food, shelter, clothing, health care, education and everything else that preserves life and makes it worth living. Note here that poverty is associated with a host of negative health and health-related risks, such as a higher incidence of manifold diseases, depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, suicide, domestic violence, child abuse and crime.

Yet even more must be considered. Remember now that if the following seems radical, it is a worst case scenario. And if we can consider the worst case scenario on one side of the equation, we must for balance and perspective consider the worst case scenario on the other side as well.

What if locking down the nation means causing a great depression lasting a decade or more?

What if this economic disaster leads, as history teaches it can, to the rise of demagogues and loss of freedom?

What if there are consequently millions more deaths from other causes due to economic malaise and descent toward tyranny?

What if, in other words, we essentially destroy our civilization as we know it? Will it have been worth it to ensure there’d be fewer Wuhan virus deaths — even two million, shocking though that number is? Civilizational destruction, something permanent, would be a steep price to pay to combat a pandemic, something temporary.

Benjamin Franklin, is reputed to have remarked that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Why is liberty "essential" Because, without it, we can not do what is right in the eyes of God, unless the State itself is aligned with God's will. But we have too often seen that the State becomes captive to the power hungry, while the people are impoverished and killed to preserve that power.

Today is Palm Sunday, the day Jesus entered triumphantly Jerusalem, and the beginning of a week that includes the Jewish Passover, and that ended in Jesus's Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.  Tragic though His death was, it was done to save us all from slavery to sin.  The entire Bible is about this one event!  It would be even more tragic if we now were to return to slavery when we are free.

America Needs A Statement Of Purpose Aligned With God's Will

Perhaps it was 10 years ago that I noted that a town next to ours at the time had an ordinance that said one must get a permit from the town in order to cut a tree on your property down.  This ordinance was supposedly necessary because trees reduced greenhouse gases and thereby kept the earth from burning up, or something.  I noted at the time that the town had effectively turned our trees into their trees.    Clearly the town was taking out one of the legs of the Declaration of Independence, the right to property.

But as William Sullivan notes at the American Thinker today, in the current COVID-19 situation, one has to ask oneself In What Sense Do You Think You Are Free?:

Here’s a sensible question. If the mayor of the most notable metropolis in the country can openly suggest that the government has the right to permanently shutter the doors of a church if it refuses to comply with “social distancing” guidelines, or any other edict the government finds necessary in a given moment, then what can’t the government do?

Just a few weeks ago, the threat of COVID-19 was considered by nearly everyone to be potentially far deadlier than it has yet proven to be. The fatality rates, hospitalization rates, and the predictions of American death tolls (once routinely touted as “over 2 million”) associated with infection were all much higher three weeks ago than they are today. And yet, as the dire projections about the impact of infection has become considerably smaller with new data and improved medical readiness, the social restrictions placed upon the populace have become progressively more obstructive and draconian.

...snip...

Examples abound of pastors of churches being threatened, fined, even jailed, for refusing to suspend religious worship during this period where “social distancing” is a matter of life and death.

This leads to myriad questions that deserve much attention and discussion, not least of which is how state governments have any authority to obstruct the First Amendment right “to peaceably assemble” or to prohibit “the free exercise of religion.” How all of this of this is consistent with any modern understanding of an incorporated Bill of Rights, as the United States Supreme Court currently holds as the jurisprudential standard, is anyone’s guess.

To answer Sullivan's question, we are demonstrably not free at all. Oh, we can have guns all right. But this begs a question asked 20 years ago by Jeffery R. Snyder in A Nation Of Cowards: Essays On The Ethics Of Gun Control, namely what good is the Second Amendment if we don't have free use of the other of our rights?  We have the right to freely assemble, to freely exercise our religion, to speak freely and and to petition the government for our grievances.  And of course there are other rights not enumerated.

Interestingly enough, the government does not have to exercise its police power, but then it shouldn't make laws that it can not, or will not enforce.  for that just garners a lack of respect for the law. In that regard, the fact that some governments are releasing convicted criminals into society does mean that the average citizen has even more reason to carry a gun for self defense.  But the fact that the governments who are releasing these criminals into the population suggests that they many not consider these people truly dangerous, and begs the question, why were these people sent to prison in the first place?

Sullivan, again:

It’s healthy for Americans to maintain skepticism about the motives and effectiveness of our government. Right now, there is a lot which calls the government’s motives and effectiveness into question. Like what I suspect is a growing number of Americans, I am completely unconvinced that the harsh measures being foisted upon the American people, as collective units amongst the states, are entirely necessary, and even more unconvinced that a similar outcome could not have been achieved with fewer rigid restrictions upon healthy and less at-risk individuals and American life, in general. And as days pass, I’m ever more convinced that the utter annihilation of the economy that we’ve seen, and the trillions in spending of taxpayer money that we absolutely, positively do not have, could have been significantly less damaging if we had demanded fewer government restrictions throughout this crisis, rather than more.

One may wonder how this has come about. One thing to note is that people have relatively short lives of perhaps 80 to 100 years. If the Left can slow down the rate of change, given people's general lack of knowledge about history, they can effect changes slowly over time. And so we see that this is exactly what has been happening in the United States. According to Scott S. Powell, also at the American Thinker:

What has been allowed to grow in the American cultural and political petri dish over the last two generations is a mixture whose contagious influence is as harmful as it is riddled with absurdities. A partial list would include: an unequal two-tiered justice system; open borders; preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens; the dominance of political correctness and its de facto censorship of free expression; fake news; rewriting history; the 1619 project; renaming Columbus Day; the abolition of traditions of every size and shape; destruction of American historical monuments; trampling the American flag and other symbols of democracy; the eradication of family values while celebrating and elevating relationships counterproductive to procreation -- an imperative for any civilization that wants to survive; election fraud and dismantlement of the electoral process; an attempted coup that would have nullified the Constitution and the peoples’ sovereignty; a baseless and wasteful impeachment; the disgraceful character assassination of nominees to the Supreme Court; the pervasive infiltration of education with academics hostile to America; the adoption safe spaces and the prohibition of trigger words on college campuses; union control and influence on public school educational curricula whose net effect dumbs down students and often paints America as the great villain.

Any one of these is no little thing. But together, the collective influence of all these factors presents us with a reality that is disheartening and threatening. How did this happen and what are patriotic Americans to do?

We find ourselves in this perilous and incendiary state in large part because we were asleep or preoccupied, while internal enemies of America were gnawing away at our institutions and public civility over the last two generations -- following the playbook of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, the father of the “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci called for a gradual radicalization of the knowledge industry and the cultural institutions -- “the superstructure of our society” -- so as to transform the values and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society’s morals were softened and confused, greater division would ensue, leading to political and economic transformation. The changing orientation of the Democrat Party would seem to confirm the validity of Gramsci’s theories and suggests he was right.

Please go read the whole piece, but I will say that what Powell suggests is precisely what the country needs right now: a statement of purpose that aligns our actions with God's will. The Left's prescriptions are designed to place more power in the hands of an elite few, while God's will is that we are each free to do his will in our own lives. The truth is there are few once size fits all situations. We each need freedom to make the most of God's creation for all.

More On Possible War With China

NC Scout writes in a post at the American Partisan entitled Drug Interdiction Or Something Else?

I agree with the overall assessment that this is not a move to check any drug cartel. In fact, the cocaine trade has been at a near all-time low and the current street drugs of choice, opiates and fentanyl, have come from Chinese labs in Mexico.

They’re stopping something much bigger. China is seeking to take advantage of a weakened US and its likely that their preparing their allies they’ve fostered over the past twenty years to initiate movement north...

Please read and consider the implications. Oh, and get weapons and other supplies with you can.

Is China Preparing To Attack?

First up today is a piece by Ann Coulter at Townhall.com entitled The Bill For Globalism Has Arrived. I used to feature Ms. Coulter frequently, but then she disappeared from my read file sources. But she is back, now at Townhall.

Coulter makes the point, and it is one that I have made as well, that the United States is in a precarious position when so much of its manufacturing base is in a hostile country.  If we had to go to war with China, what are we going to do?  Ask them to please send us the supplies we need?  Things like...oh, I don't know...uniforms for the military?  Unfortunately, President Trump is not doing enough to disentangle us from China.

I have also previously mentioned that while I was still working for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, I saw a paper, unclassified, the conclusion of which was that we would be at war with China in 20 years.  The analysis in the paper seemed particularly solid, and the paper itself seemed especially prescient.  I suspect the timing was somewhat off.  These predictions usually are.  But, one of the things that made me think he was on to something was that China would have, about now, a huge population of young men with no women to marry, as a result of China's "one child policy."  As usual, the edict by Mao had unintended consequences.

Today, at the American Thinker William L. Gensert has an article entitled China Is Preparing To Start A War With America.  Please read Gensert's piece and think about his analysis.  As he states, "What has China to lose?  And Gensert isn't the only one who sees the current situation as potentially dangerous.  Of course, I would assume that the Pentagon see the facts on the ground and has alerted the President.  In any case, think about what you would do if China does indeed attack.

Our Liberties Are Being Stolen From Us, And No One Is Upset About It

James Swafford has an interesting take on the current crisis.  Swafford's ideas run counter to current thinking, but if there is anything to them, they would have people back to work sooner.  His piece, at the American Thinker today is entitled How Can We Obtain Herd Immunity? He makes the point that rather than keeping everyone away from everyone else, which extends the time the virus can work its way through society, perhaps letting those under, say 60 and who are healthy to interact with each other.

Herd immunity is when enough members of a population (a herd, so to speak), are immune from a disease, so that a person with the disease infects fewer than one other person. Once there is herd immunity, outbreaks of the disease taper off rather than grow exponentially.

...snip...

Until a vaccine is developed, the only way to obtain herd immunity from the coronavirus is for enough people to have gotten the Wuhan virus and to have recovered from it. One question that immediately arises is how many people need to get it and recover for herd immunity to take hold. The answer depends on the rate that of transmission of the disease or the R0. I have seen estimates of the transmission rate ranging from 1.4 to 3.5. At a transmission rate of 1.4, herd immunity requires a little less than 30% of the population to be immune. If the transmission rate is 2.0, then herd immunity requires 50% of the population to be immune. A transmission rate of 3.5 requires a little over 71% of the population to be immune.

Keeping in mind there is no vaccine today and there is not likely to be one for months, the only way to get herd immunity is for something like 30% to 50% or higher of the population to get the Wuhan virus and recover.

An implication of this is that while social distancing, hand washing and avoiding touching one’s face are excellent policies to avoid getting the Wuhan virus yourself, they delay herd immunity for the population as a whole. This creates a free rider situation that is the opposite of vaccination. When vaccination is available and you don’t get one, you are free riding off of the rest of the population who did get vaccinated or contributed to herd immunity by getting the disease and recovering. With no vaccination available, if you avoid getting and recovering from the disease, you are not contributing to herd immunity and free riding on those who do contribute to it by getting the Wuhan virus and recovering.

Fox News reported this morning that of those tested, approximately 1 million so far, 7,000 had the virus and had recovered.  This is twice the number of people who have died and who had the Kung Flu.  (Note that not all of those who had the Wuhan Flu and died, died of the Flu.  Many of them had other issues, of which the flu was an exacerbating illness.)

Besides the obvious point that the virus seems to be deliberately stretched out, there is the point that our Constitutional liberties are under attack in the name of fighting a disease that, all data shows to be deadly, but no more deadly than other pandemics that have swept the world. We didn;t lose our rights to assemble, to vote in some cases, to bear arms, to travel freely.  No one said we could not attend church services.  All these things are unprecedented.  What is more shocking is that everyone seems to be acceding to these tyrannical edicts, as though politicians had a right to make them.  They do not.

Shelter at home if you if you feel you must.  But if you get out and talk with anyone, I suspect you will find that people who are healthy are none the less suffering.  I don't mean to minimize this disease, but I also don't want to exaggerate it either