Pray For the People Advancing the Cult of COVIDism

 Fay Voshell has an excellent piece this morning at the American Thinker entitled The Forcible Conversion to COVIDism, in which she points out that the rituals associated with the Pandemic remind no of science itself but of a new religion. To be sure, she is not the first to notice this, but Voshell has particularly expertise in these matters. Voshell holds a Masters of Divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary.

By now, even progressives are aware that the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 hygiene rituals are onerous. Temperature-taking, hand-sanitizing, mask-wearing, social distancing — all have become ubiquitous social practices since the arrival of the virus eighteen months ago.

Now forced vaccination and possibly vaccine passports have been added to the list of requirements deemed necessary for establishing and maintaining national health.

It strikes one that the ever-changing rituals pronounced by such entities as the CDC and WHO have become not only arbitrary and increasingly revelatory of dubious and ever-changing science, but also evocative more of religious practices than of rational, scientific measures.

Eerily, many of the rituals of COVIDism have assumed the status and significance of the ceremonies practiced by millions of Christians, who cross themselves, genuflect before the altar, and who pray the rosary. Christians believe those rituals are acknowledgement of the higher power who is God. God is represented by irreducibly Christian symbol of the cross and worshipped by the observance of sacraments, of sacred liturgies and by bowing the knee in prayer.

Devotees of COVIDism are acknowledging by their repetitious and symbolic rituals a higher power as well—that of the almighty State.

The emphasis is mine, to highlight what I want to discuss next. COVIDism is therefore yet another form of the idolatry that infects modern life. In the ancient times, people openly worshipping at the bronze bull were clearly idolatrous.  But, anything that calls to us and takes away our understanding of ourselves as dependent on the ever living God is idolatrous.

A Lutheran pastor once told me that if one could obey the First Commandment, one would automatically keep all the rest.  And this seems to be close to the heart of Lutheranism.  For in reading Luther's Small Catechism, on can see that the explanation for each of the Commandments begins with "You should so fear and  love God that"...  Clearly none of us can keep even the first Commandment, which is why God took it upon Himself to do the work of salvation for all mankind by Himself submitting to the Cross.

Meanwhile the reason for promoting the lie that is COVIDism is for one purpose:

While no one seriously doubts that COVID-19 is an illness requiring medical attention, it is increasingly apparent that the fear of the virus and almost superstitious practices have been factors in the rise of the cult of COVIDism, which in turn has become a useful tool for establishing the State's control over every sector of society and every aspect of life.

It is also perfectly clear the governing priestly elite foisting their quasi-religious rituals on the masses are miraculously immune from a virus that discerns who are the pure sheep of the church of COVIDism and who are the deplorably diseased goats. The high priests partying at the Obama birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard, at the Met gala, and at the Emmys do not have to wear masks. Nor do they have to observe the rules of social distancing once reserved for lepers and others deemed unclean.

But the unhealthy goats, most of them congregated in churches, the middle class, and the military, do have to follow the regulations and rituals.

Voshell offers some solutions to the cult of COVIDism. Let me suggest that there is more we the average American can do. For example, if you attend a congregation where you must be masked to enter, perhaps you should consider finding another congregation. You may be forced to submit while at work, because your employer is paying you to. But the moment you clock out, rip off that mask. Show that you will not be afraid. But at the same time you resist, do it joyfully. Do not take the resentment they ovviously desire to place upon you. Indeed, pray for the people advancing the cult of COVIDism. No, it may not change them, but that is not the point. Your prayer for them is intended to keep you sane, joyful, and focused on God.

The Corruption of Science

 I have often pointed out that the whole "climate change" theory is an utter hoax, a sophisticated hoax to be sure, but just as Piltdown Man was a hoax, so is "climate change."  The panic porn of Covid is equally a hoax.  In both cases I do not dispute that climate change is happening, or that the Cov-Sars-2 virus is real.  Rather, the notion that climate change is man made is what the hoax.  And reporting that Covid-19 is more dangerous than it actually is, is the actual hoax.  Today, at the American Thinker, Norman Rogers has an article entitled The "Science" of Climate Change that skewers both the hoaxes as unscientific.

The science surrounding COVID has been hijacked for political purposes. People who recovered from the disease are pushed to get vaccinated, even though they have a natural immunity that is stronger than vaccine immunity. People are required to wear masks even though masks are essentially useless for preventing infection. People that die are reported as dying of COVID even though they died of something else. The government demands that children be vaccinated even though they are naturally resistant to the disease and suffer disturbing side effects from the vaccine. Schools are closed for no good reason.

The “science” of climate change is also BS. That should be easier to accept after seeing what the government did to COVID science. Why do politicians want to hype a nonexistent climate crisis? In a word: power. By claiming that there is an urgent climate crisis the politicians can spend billions to fight the imaginary foe. Those billions create political allies and reward friends. H.L. Mencken put it nicely in 1918:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Rogers is a real, honest to goodness scientist, and seems to know where the bodies are buried. He drops names like that of Richard Lindzen and others less famous. You will want to check out the many links he provides to these other scientists' sites.  But for many, he points out, they really can't afford to tell the truth.  To do so is the kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I spent 10 years going to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I spoke with many climate scientists including many who freely admitted in private that global warming is a very dubious enterprise.

I remember a Danish guy who visited beaches in northern Greenland by dog sled. He discovered 6,000-year-old driftwood on a beach always blocked by ice, year-round. That was clear evidence that the Arctic Ocean was summer ice-free during a time called the Holocene Optimum. Present-day global warmers claim that our coming climate disaster will again make the Arctic Ocean summer ice-free, something that happened 6,000 years ago with no help from SUVs or belching cows. Of course, the guy was afraid to make too much of his discovery because it challenges the climate doom theory.

There is no such thing as an early career climate scientist that is skeptical concerning global warming. I actually tried to find one and did a poster at a scientific meeting on the subject. The reason is simple. It is not because the science is so clear that only an idiot would question it. It is because our early-career climate scientist would soon be looking for a new job. Interfering with the flow of money from Washington is grounds for dismissal.

What we are seeing is the corruption of science by money from governments and corporate interests, who hope to gain money and power from these hoaxes.

Is the ELCA Still a Christian Organization?

 So here's a...just lovely...piece at the American Thinker from Andrea Widburg entitled The Evangelical Church In America Abandons The Bible. It confirms my decision to leave the ELCA. I describe my decision to my fellow Missouri Synod Lutherans as that I am an escapee from the godless ELCA. 

It all started when the ELCA voted to allow gay and lesbian people in what they called "committed relationships" to be ordained as pastors. We were promised that LGBTQxyz pastors would not be pushed upon us. I said at the time that sooner or later such people would be pushed onto normal congregations and sadly, I was right.

I noted at the time that there was something terribly wrong with the ELCA.  There were no children in the church, and the average age of the congregants was older than I was at the time.  I was 60.  We should have had a Catechism class each year, yet the pastor only occasionally had a Catechism student.  I still have a picture of my own Catechism class of 30 students.  Clearly there was something wrong, and I was unable to do anything about it.  So I left and found a home in the Missouri Synod.

Do I need to highlight the way pronoun madness turns English into gibberish? No, I don’t think I do.

It’s bad enough when ordinary people with body dysphoria take it upon themselves to declare that they have the power to transform from one sex to another and to control the English language. However, it’s really bad coming from someone who not only claims to be religious in accordance with the Bible but who also occupies a position of power within a religious institution. You see, the Bible is very clear:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (King James Bible 1:27.)

God didn’t give a choice of “None of the above,” or make a person’s sex a buffet from which he can choose. If you belong to a Bible-based faith, “transgenderism” simply isn’t within that religious framework.

And because this whole thing really irks me, let me make one more point: The whole “transgender” edifice is a fake. If Rohrer, an archbishop who attacks people for misgendering that poor child he’s raising as an “it,” really could magically change his sex, you wouldn’t need the appellation “transgender” in front of his identity as a woman. Instead, if he had the god-like power he’s arrogated to himself, he’d simply be a “woman,” with no “trans” about it.

The label “transgender” is the "tell" that the people identifying as such know that they’re not capable of transforming into the opposite of their biological sex. Instead, these are people suffering from a form of body dysphoria every bit as delusional as anorexia or the belief that one is an alien or a cow.

Widburg obviously feels about the whole "transgender" issue as I do. Indeed, the whole idea of "trans" anything is out of step with the reality that God created. This makes it wrong, and sinful. And while yes, of course, we all sin, we all have gone astray, and desperately need the forgiveness that God freely offers, that doesn't mean we don't need to at least recognize our sins. For how can we confess our sins if we don't recognize them and ask?

One has to ask if the ELCA is still even a Christian organization?

Gun Control Is Not About Preventing Crime

 Kevin D. Williamson writes generally thoughtful articles, even if I don't always agree with him.  But in Gun-Control Laws Aren't About Preventing Crimes I think he is onto something. Indeed, what gun control laws are really about is yet another front in the Culture War.

In the latest issue of National Review, I write about the lax enforcement of our gun laws and touch on a theme that is worth exploring a little more: Gun control is not about gun crime — gun control is about gun culture.

If we cared about keeping guns out of the hands of felons, we’d be locking up straw buyers. We’d be prosecuting prohibited “lie and try” buyers who falsify their ATF paperwork. And we’d be confiscating guns sold in retail transactions that were wrongly approved because of defects in the background-check system. But, for the most part, we don’t do much of any of that.

Instead of doing the hard work of enforcing the law on people committed to breaking it, we focus almost all of our efforts on the most law-abiding group of Americans there is: People who legally buy firearms from licensed firearms dealers, a group that, by definition, has a felony-conviction rate of approximately 0.0 percent. These are law-abiding people, but they also are, in no small part, the type of people who mash the cultural buttons of the big-city progressives who dominate the Democratic Party both culturally and financially. From that point of view, what matters is not that retail gun dealers and their clients are dangerous — which they certainly are not — but that they are icky.

In explaining why he thinks that the idea of gun control is a culture issue rather than being intended to prevent crime, Williamson cites an article from the New York Times by Gail Collins. And Collins, it turns out, is either ignorant, or a deliberate liar, or both:

That culture-war mentality produces a great deal of sloppy thinking and ignorant commentary. Consider the case of Gail Collins in Thursday’s New York Times. Collins is hopping mad about gun shows, about which she seems to know . . . not a whole lot. “Yeah,” she writes — really, “yeah” — “right now one easy way to buy a gun without having anyone check to see if you have a history of criminal convictions, mental illness or a domestic violence restraining order is to just plunk down some cash at a gun show.”

This is — and this part still matters! — not true.

Willimson goes on to point out the many things that are not true. Long guns of all sorts from single shot .22s to 30-06 rifles, the evil AR 15s and shotguns make up perhaps 2% of all gun crime, which is less that fist and feet. Oh, and the same requirements obtain at gun shows as at the dealers store, or anywhere else. And criminals by and large get their guns by stealing them of buying them from the black market (i.e. from someone who stole them.) Oh, and this:

Collins goes on to spend five paragraphs excoriating Texas for its new “constitutional carry” law. I myself preferred the old concealed-carry regime, with the required classwork, shooting test, and background check. But what Collins does not mention is that this is not some new innovation unique to the redneck states — Texas now has the same law as radical, right-wing . . . Vermont, which has had constitutional carry for as long as we have had the Constitution. Texas joins Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming in this arrangement. Some of those states have relatively high rates of murder and other violent crimes (Alaska, Arkansas) — though not a single one of them has a murder rate as much as half that of the District of Columbia — while others (Maine, Vermont, Idaho) are among the safest states in the Union. The obvious conclusion is that whatever the important variable is in murder rates, it isn’t this.

It always amazes me that people like Collins think everyone has a life as pampered as her life is. I know a guy who is a retired telephone installer. He confessed to me that he used to keep a pistol on his truck, despite the fact that the telephone company required them to be unarmed,  because he often found himself in some questionable neighborhoods. Maybe Collins doesn't feel the need for a gun, but that doesn't mean the single mom working a late night shift at a convenience store doesn't need a gun for protection. Or how about a nurse working the late shift at a hospital? I suspect it has to do with the fact that todays journalist all come from the upper middle class because of the need for J-school credentials to get a job in journalism. In the old days, journalists came from the working class and had more empathy with their fellow man.

But of course, she can't empathize with people who aren't as fortunate as she is because she is so locked into the cultural tribalism of them versus us.  To her, guns are not tools that may protect, but talismans that show gun owners as subhuman.  Sad.  

Our best hope is to pray

 The Roman Empire wasn't always an empire.  It started life as the Roman republic.  It wasn't quite like our republic, but a republic it was.  The end of the republic of Rome was the day Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river with his army at his back.  Republics die when their leaders no longer follow their founding principles.  It is in this context that Robert Arvay asks Is the Republic dead? Can it be saved?

It’s not nearly as complicated as once I thought it was. It’s a top-down insurrection. All that it ever needed was a sufficient number of conspirators, in key positions, to network with each other. Granted, the numbers needed were large. That is why it took so many years to take hold. Once the threshold was reached, however, circa 2015 or 16, the treachery began in full swing.

The plotters were delayed by one mistake, a very big one, in 2016. They underestimated the amount of electoral fraud that was needed to place Hillary Clinton in the White House. That set them back four years. By 2020, however, the insurrectionists understood their error, and they did not repeat it again. This time, the fraud was massive. It was too large to hide, but on the other hand, there was no longer any need for concealment. Nobody in power was ever going to oppose the reported result, save for President Trump and a very few others, but there were not enough of them to be effective.

As of now, there are a few loose ends to be tied up before the take-over is strong enough to make us into another Cuba. The top is secure, but the bottom is a bit unsteady. One of those loose ends is that pesky Second Amendment, or more precisely stated, the people who exercise it. It’s not that those in power cannot prevail against an armed rebellion of the citizens; they can, and they know it. They also know, however, that it would be messy. Spartacus never really stood a chance against the Roman Empire, but he still defeated a legion while trying. He made a mess of things for quite some time.

In retrospect, perhaps we should have seen it. But I confess to being too busy doing the normal things people do like holding down a job, mowing the grass, and trying to enjoy the few free moments life gave me. Then too, in recent years the Democrats put up such terrible candidates that it made the Republican candidates, bad as they were, seem like the right choice. But as George W. Bush has shown, he was really just playing a part in a play put on by the ruling class. And the fact that the United States was truly unique among the nations of the world, was indeed as Reagan put it a "shining city on a hill," doesn't matter to these narcissistic people, who are already rich and powerful. But it isn't enough for their grandiose sense of themselves.

Arvay offers some hope that we may prevail in the end.  

There remain two last hopes. First, the parents of public schoolchildren are outraged that their children are being indoctrinated by radical leftists, and morally undermined by sexual perverts lecturing in the class, in one case, by a man with bared buttocks. Will the parents act effectively? If the general public fails to protect its children, there is no hope.

The second hope is that, as is well known, those in government tend to be inept. This is why, in communist nations, the Great Leaps Forward have always tended to fall flat on their faces, worsening the economic deprivation that communism inherently inflicts on its millions of subjugated people. How does that apply to America? To paraphrase Barack Obama, never underestimate the ability of Biden to screw things up. That applies to progressives in general.

Both "hopes" seem iffy at best. I suggest we pray.

Apparently Democrats Are Not In Favor of "Democracy"

 Once again, the Dems have used black Americans as a tool to strike down voter photo identification in North Carolina.  Note that the judges are in fact Democrats.  This is pure politics.  Yet it keeps happening.  The people passed a Constitutional amendment, but the Dems deny it.  The Legislature tries again, and the Dems manage every time to strike it down.  You can read about the story at the Epoch Times right here.

For those who think that the Dems might have a point, please note that if you have a drivers license, you have an ID sufficient for voting. But there are several other things that you can use, including a FREE state identification. You need a photo ID to visit the doctor's office, to buy alcohol or tobacco, to have a bank account, and many other things people do every day. For someone to not have photo identification, one would have to be living off the grid. There are not many people doing so, and such people don't vote.

This is nothing more than the Democrats trying to make it easier to commit fraud.  The people have spoken.  Apparently the Democrats are not in favor of "democracy."

A Note To Elitists, When The Revolution Comes...

 I've said it before, perhaps in even more stark terms, that when the "revolution comes" many who now are rooting for the Left will be the first people thrown against the wall and shot.  Members of the media, and a host of others who know where the bodies are buried will also suddenly become unnecessary.  Pol Pot shot anyone who wore glasses. And Castro had Che Guevara executing people on an industrial scale. Anyway, that is the point of James Mullin's piece at the American Thinker today entitled An Urgent Message To Deep State Elitists.

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say I suspect that it's not just patriotic deplorables who read the essays in American Thinker. It's not an intergalactic leap to assume that what is written here gets "monitored" by congressional aides, assistant-assistant media editors, and sub-administrative assistants at our tech behemoths, to name just a few of the woke elements that draw the short straw and are tasked with reading our thoughts. They just watch what we're up to, hoping to catch us "insurrecting." So, knowing they're listening, I have a message of vital importance to them.

You probably assume that your zealous and loyal service to the Deep State will "get you a ride" on that "last plane out" or a golden ticket admission to the deep bunker in Mount Thunder or wherever, if and when it all comes crashing down. So, news flash — it won't. You and yours will be left outside in the cold, wailing with the unwashed deplorables as America comes tumbling down. Just ask one Andrew Cuomo.

For those who may be just a little bit dense, what Mullin is saying is that most of you will be in the same boat is we deplorables. History tells us this is true. It has been ever thus at least since the French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror. Many people lost their heads, quite literally, while the rest starved. It was so in the Soviet Union, in Communist China (indeed it still is.) As I say, it has been ever thus. Meanwhile, you are throwing away the one system that has lifted the average person out of poverty, allowing us to achieve our best selves.  Naturally, not everyone will pursue his or her best self.  But everyone has the opportunity.