Vaccine Passports do Not Belong in Church

 

The Right Reverend Peter Carrell is the Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Christchurch in New Zealand.   On the fifth of October, he sent out a tweet that began with the following:

 

Vaccine certificates…work to be done on [e.g.] whether they will be required for church attendance…and will be from November

 

Then, finally remembering how to form a complete and coherent thought, he added the following question:

 

Is there any reason why churches shouldn’t generally go with the flow of this measure for the safety of our nation?

 

By “our nation”, obviously, he means New Zealand whose Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seemingly an adherent of the Zero Covid cult, imposed a severe lockdown in August after the country had its first case of bat flu since February.    Sadly, sanity appears to be in short supply among the leaders of this, one of our sister Commonwealth Realms, and judging from the bishop’s tweet this applies to the ecclesiastical as well as the political leadership.   Not that an overabundance of it can be found among our leaders in the Dominion of Canada.   Quite the opposite, actually.

 

Note how the bishop’s question is worded.   By asking “is there any reason why churches shouldn’t” rather than “is there any reason why churches should” he makes the use of vaccine certificates to be able to go to church into the default position and places the onus of proof upon those who object to this.    That is the kind of crazy that in vulgar conversation is customarily associated with the feces of the winged mammal widely believed to have been the original host of the coronavirus.

 

The church is the institution established by Jesus Christ through His Apostles for the purpose of ministering His Gospel, the Good News about how He has brought the freely given, forgiving, redeeming, justifying, sanctifying, empowering, and transforming grace of God to us through His Incarnation, Atoning death and Resurrection to all people everywhere through the two-fold ministry of the preached Word and the administered Sacrament.   To turn people away from the ministry of the church, other than as the disciplinary act commanded by the Apostle Paul in cases of extreme, un-repented sin, is to turn people away from Jesus Christ.

 

The sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John is one of the most important theological chapters in the entire Bible.     The Discourse on the Bread of Life is foundational to the Sacramental theology of the Eucharist, perhaps even more so than the words of Institution in the Synoptic Gospels, for it is here that the concept of the body and blood of Jesus as the spiritual food that sustains eternal life is to be found.    Right in the middle of this Discourse is a passage vital to Calvinist theology – the most explicit statement in all of Scripture of how those who believe in Christ have been given to Him by the Father in accordance with His eternal purpose and how it is His, that is Christ’s, mission to lose none of them but to raise them up to eternal life on the Last Day (vv. 35 to 40, a passage which is also essential to distinguishing  the New Covenant concept of God’s “elect” from the Old Covenant concept of the same).    One could say that this entire passage, in which the most important themes of Catholicism and Calvinism are seamlessly interwoven as one, is the most Anglican passage in all of Scripture.   It is in this context, that Jesus makes the statement “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out” (v. 37).   I quote, as always, from the real English Bible, the English Vulgate, the Authorized Bible, which was good enough for King Charles I and is good enough for me, but it is worth noting the Common English, Good News and New International Versions’ renderings in which “I will in no wise cast out” becomes “I won’t send away”, “I will never turn away” and “I will never drive away” respectively.   However worded, the point is clear – Jesus doesn’t send those who come to Him away.    The church, which is supposed to follow His example, ought not to send them away either.

 

The churches have been doing an absolutely terrible job of following Jesus on this since the beginning of the irrational bat flu panic.    When government public health mandarins ordered them to shut their doors for months on end they did so.   When the same odious bureaucrats told them they could re-open but only at a limited capacity, requiring them to pre-register those who would attend and turn all over the capacity limit away, they did so.   When they told them that they could only allow people to attend on condition that they agreed to breathe their recycled carbon dioxide from behind a face diaper that covered their nose and mouth for the duration of the service they did so, thus turning away all who did not think they should have to give up breathing oxygen to hear the Word and receive the Sacrament.   

 

In defending all of this obeying man rather than God and rendering unto Caesar the things that are God’s, the ecclesiastical leadership have trotted out a number of arguments, each entirely specious.    The thirteenth chapter of the epistle to the Romans in which St. Paul enjoins civil obedience upon believers and teaches the divine right of kings (that civil government has authority from God to act as His ministers in the punishment of evil) has been constantly trotted out.   Those who bring up this passage fail to mention that in the examples of Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the Scripture provides us with clear exceptions to the rule of civil obedience, in Daniel’s case when government forbids the worship of the True God, in his friends’ case when government demands the worship of false gods.    Nor do they discuss how the passage in Romans limits legitimate government authority – if the civil government has been given a sword by God for punishing evil, then it must wield that sword in punishing what God says is evil, not whatever it sees fit to punish.   With these public health orders, governments have been punishing things that are not only not mala in se (literally bad in themselves, meaning intrinsically criminal apart from statutory law) but are indeed bona in se (good in themselves) and essential for healthy social and communal life, which is a clear abuse of the sword of the thirteenth of Romans, screaming out to heaven for vengeance.

 

Then there is the twisting of the Christian ethic with regards to loving others beyond all recognition.   Jesus, when asked which was the Greatest Commandment of the Law (the Old Covenant), said that it was to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and that the second, which was like unto it, was to love your neighbour as yourself.   At the Last Supper on the night in which He was betrayed and arrested, He told His disciples that He was leaving them with a New Commandment to love one another as He had loved them, which clearly has a self-sacrificial implication that was explicitly spelled out when He said that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”.

 

What does this look like in a time of plague?

 

For two thousand years it has been commonly understood that in times of plague the highest form of living out this ethic was when the healthy, at the potential jeopardy of their own health and lives, attended upon the sick and ministered to their needs.   The way the Right Reverend John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, ministered to the sick and dying in that city during the choleric outbreaks of the nineteenth century is a classic example of this.

 

Contrast that with today when we are constantly being told that the loving thing to do is for healthy people to avoid all social contact with other healthy people until such time, if ever, that the government sees fit to allow them to socialize again.    What is being called “love” in this perverse inversion of the historical understanding of the Christian ethic is far closer to fear.   The words of St. John from his first epistle might be appropriate at this point “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.   He that feareth is not made perfect in love”. (4:18).

 

As bad as churches closing their doors, limiting their numbers, requiring those Satanic masks, and the like has been, for churches to join the vaccine passport campaign would be a whole new level of apostasy.    Throughout the irrational bat flu panic governments have acted as if constitutional limits on their powers and protections of the rights and freedoms of the governed do not exist in a public health emergency and they are allowed to do whatever they want.   In terms of what the constitutional law of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth Realms such as the Dominion of Canada and New Zealand actually says, they are completely wrong in thinking this, of course, but they might be right in a practical sense in that so long as people are more afraid of the object of the public health scare than of losing their freedoms to tyranny and courts are willing to give government a lot of leeway, they can pretty much get away with doing whatever they want.   This is a part of human nature every tyrannical and totalitarian regime has known and exploited.   

 

Initially, perhaps, our governments were acting in bona fide, or the closest thing to good faith that politicians are actually of, and panicking themselves and not knowing what else to do, tried whatever their public health “experts” suggested.   What we are now seeing is far more sinister than this.    Having exhausted the public’s patience with lockdowns after lockdowns and having mostly achieved their initial vaccination targets only to discover that new waves of the virus keep coming, they are blaming their failure to do what no government has ever been able to do in the past, i.e., stop a virus, on those who have not been vaccinated to the satisfaction of the government.  

 

That these people have not been vaccinated could, of course, be viewed as another failure of government – they failed to convince these people that the vaccines were safe enough and the virus dangerous enough for the risk associated with remaining unvaccinated to outweigh the risk of receiving the vaccines.    Perhaps it never occurred to them that all of their efforts to keep people from hearing any information about the vaccines that was not positive and to demonize anyone who communicated such information make their own position less convincing rather than more convincing to anyone whose ability to think rationally has not been paralyzed by mass fear.   Or that their bizarre attitude of “I’m vaccinated but you’re not being vaccinated puts me at risk” sends the message that they do not themselves really believe that these vaccines work.  

 

Whatever is the case, they are now trying to compel where they failed to convince.   The vaccine passport system punishes people for making what is a valid, legally protected, choice not to allow something to be injected into their bodies that they have not been properly persuaded is worth whatever risks might be associated with it.   This is a completely unacceptable form of state bullying that evokes the whole “show me your papers” imagery frequently found in dystopic literature and film inspired by such historical totalitarian regimes as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.    Churches were wrong to turn people away from Jesus in compliance with the earlier public health measures.   For them to do so in compliance with the vaccine passport system would be to fully align themselves with Christianity’s opposite.

 

That brings me to a point that I raised at Dr. Adrian Hilton’s Archbishop Cramner blog in the comments section to a post entitled “Should you need a Covid vaccination certificate to attend church?”    This post, Dr. Hilton’s response to the Right Reverend Carrell’s tweet, is well worth reading in its entirety.   He gives the right answer, the negative answer, to the question in his title, and closes with the appropriate sentiment “There is neither clean nor unclear, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”.

 

To his excellent arguments I added the following comment, which I will close this essay by reproducing here:

 

It does not matter how one interprets the Book of Revelation. One could be a dispensationalist, who thinks that the Beast is a specific individual who will be revealed after the elect have been raptured. One could be a preterist who thinks that the Beast was an individual/system of the first century and that all Biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the year 70. Or one could hold to any of the positions in between that are more in keeping with how the Book has traditionally understood. Either way, it is obvious the Beast is not a figure to be emulated. Requiring people to show a vaccine certificate to be able to conduct an economic transaction is eerily close to the Beast's requiring his mark to buy and sell, as even some Roman Catholics, like John Zmirak a month or so ago at The Stream, are starting to observe. Requiring it for church attendance would be even worse. We are to follow Christ not Antichrist. Jesus' example was clear. When He came across lepers, He did not avoid them, but touched and healed them. Go thou and do likewise.

The Book of Revelation and the Present Situation

 

If someone were to take a poll of orthodox theological historians about which book of the Holy Bible, Old and New Testament, we ought to approach with the greatest amount of humility and the least amount of dogmaticism with regards to its interpretation, I suspect that the Book of Revelation would win hands down. It might even be a unanimous vote. 

The Apocalypse – Greek for “revelation” – of St. John is considered by most Biblical scholars to have been the last book of the New Testament to have been written. It was certainly the last book to be received into the canon by the Church. Its author identifies himself as “John” and traditionally he is believed to have been the St. John who was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles and also to have been the author of the fourth Gospel and the three Johannine epistles. I have no quarrel with the traditional view and find the so-called “higher critical” arguments against the traditional ascription of authorship for these, or any other of the canonical Scriptures for that matter, to be utterly unconvincing. In the ninth verse of the first chapter he mentions that he was in exile for his faith on the isle of Patmos. The persecution that put him there is usually believed to have been that which occurred in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in the last decade of the first century, although some have argued that it was that which occurred in the reign of Nero. If the latter are correct, this would place the composition of the book around the same time as that of the book of Acts.

The book begins with St. John having a vision in which Jesus Christ appears to him in His heavenly glory and gives him seven messages to be sent to the Churches in Asia – Asia Minor, that is, which is now Turkey – to whom St. John also addresses the book as a whole. These occupy the second and third chapters, after which he has a vision in which a door opens in heaven and an angelic voice summons him up to the throne of God. There he has an extended vision of events filled with vivid imagery taken from the various prophetic books of the Old Testament. These begin with Jesus Christ, depicted as both the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” and the “Lamb that was slain”, taking the scroll that is in the hand of God, being the Only One worthy of doing so, and opening the seven seals one at a time. After this seven angels blow their trumpets. The final trumpet introduces the next seven angels who have the seven bowls of the wrath of God, but before they are poured out upon the earth there is an interlude in which a drama plays out involving a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and crowned with twelve stars, the Son to Whom she gives birth, the seven-headed, ten-horned, red dragon who is “the devil and Satan” and who seeks to devour the Child and wages war against St. Michael and the angels in heaven before being cast out, a beast which rises out of the sea having the same number of heads and horns as the devil and who receives great power and authority from the devil, and a second beast who arises out of the earth with horns like a lamb but who speaks like a dragon, and who makes a great idol of the first beast, makes the whole world worship it, and forces them to bear the mark of the beast. The bowls of wrath are then poured out upon the world, the harlot “Babylon” who rides the beast is destroyed, the armies of the world gather to fight at Armageddon, at which Jesus Christ, leading the armies of heaven, returns to the earth, casts the beast and the false prophet (the second beast) into the Lake of Fire and binds the devil for a thousand years. After the thousand years the devil is released, wages one last war against God and His saints, is judged and cast into the Lake of Fire, after which the Final Judgement of the dead takes place before Christ’s Great White Throne and the lost are cast into the Lake of Fire. This all culminates in a vision of the new heavens, the new earth, and the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city which descends to the earth to be the eternal home of the redeemed.

Apart from the thousand years of the twentieth chapter, which is the subject of debate between the amillennialists (that it is figurative of the period between Christ’s two comings), the premillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age to be inaugurated by the Second Coming) and the postmillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age which will culminate in the Second Coming), the final chapters of Revelation largely pertain to the elements of eschatology about the substance of which, albeit not necessarily the details, there has been a general consensus among orthodox and traditional Christians – the Second Coming itself, and the Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell).

 It is the part between the letters to the Churches in the second and third chapters and the Second Coming in the nineteenth that causes most of the trouble. Do the colourful images in these chapters depict people and events from the first century when the book was being written as the Preterists say? (1) Are they a picture of the whole of human history between the First and Second Comings as the Historicists say? Or do they refer to events and persons yet to come in the period immediately prior to the Second Coming as the Futurists say? Is it, perhaps, a combination of all three options? (2)

The reason that I suspect the Book of Revelation would win our hypothetical poll is that throughout the Church’s history there has been no lack of individuals who have both held to the Futurist interpretation of the book and read the people and events of their own time into it, saying that those people and events are the final fulfilment of those prophecies. This has frequently been accompanied by date-setting for the Second Coming – despite the clear warnings against this in the Olivet Discourse – even if it is of the evasive sort that tries to get around said warnings by saying “Jesus said we don’t know the day or the hour, but He said nothing about the week, month, year, decade etc.” This has given the Futurist interpretation a bad name among many theologians, although the majority of Futurists have not been this irresponsible.

Having said all that, I do not wish to make the case for any particular interpretation of Revelation here, but to make the point that the eerie correlation between what is going on at present and the thirteenth chapter of Revelation ought to be sounding warning bells regardless of how we interpret Revelation.

To illustrate my point, allow me to note that there are people out there who deny the existence of evil spirits. Such people may be rationalist, materialist, unbelievers, or they may be the kind of “Christian” who likes to cherry-pick everything that is positive from the Christian worldview and omit the negative. Either way, how would such people regard a Satanic temple or any other religion dedicated to the worship of evil spirits?

The answer is that they are not likely to regard such cults significantly differently from those of us who affirm the existence of evil spirits. To join such a cult is to make the conscious choice to side with evil. This ought to be a problem even for people who deny the existence of spiritual entities personifying that evil. 

Half a year ago, almost the whole of the world was shut down in order to “flatten the curve” of the spread of COVID-19, an experimental new strategy that in many ways resembled past Communist revolutions albeit on a global scale. Everyone was placed under a sort of house arrest, with day passes allowed for business arbitrarily deemed to be “essential.” The basic freedoms that we have long regarded as fundamental to our civil order in the Commonwealth Realms and most other Western countries such as the American republic were clearly classified by the “powers that be” who dictated this whole “lockdown” as “non-essential.” A glance at what was considered to be “essential” and “non-essential” tells us what we need to know about the spirit moving those powers. Businesses that produced and sold the goods necessary for maintaining our physical lives were declared to be essential, but libraries, art museums, symphony orchestras and everything that elevated those lives from that mere physical level were regarded as non-essential. Abortuaries, marijuana shops, and plenty of other businesses that promote vice and self-destructive behaviour were labelled essential, but Churches where the Word of life is proclaimed and the Sacrament of life distributed were at the top of the non-essential list. Family gatherings, real life social interaction, community, and basically everything traditionally regarded as good, were treated as crimes and outlawed. When the restrictions began to be eased, Churches were left closed longer than almost anything else. Clearly, the spirit moving the powers behind the lockdown is that which the Book of Revelation describes as a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns.

We are now several phases into the re-opening in most places. There has now arisen, however, a demand for a new restriction. Our governments are being pressured to make it mandatory for people to wear masks over their lower faces in public places. Many of the businesses that remained open during the lockdown required their employees to wear masks, especially if they were involved in directly serving customers. Now some of these same businesses, even in the absence of public orders, are requiring their customers to wear masks. Last week, for example, Walmart made mask-wearing mandatory at all of their Canadian locations. The World Health Organization, which pooh-poohed the efficacy of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, has thrown its weight behind mask-wearing, and the public health officials such as Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States who seem incapable of thinking independently of the WHO, have likewise done an about-face on the matter. Celebrities have been enlisted as part of a massive media campaign to shame people into wearing masks. If those who would make masks mandatory get their way, nobody will be able to buy or sell unless he wears a mask. The similarity between this and Revelation thirteen, noting especially verses sixteen to seventeen, is remarkable, even if the present situation involves a mask and that in the book involves a mark. Regardless of whether one reads Revelation thirteen as being about the first century Roman Empire (Preterist) or about the empire of the Antichrist who will rule just prior to the Second Coming (Futurist) this is cause for alarm. For even if the beast of Revelation is a figure of the past whose time has long come and gone, he is hardly an example worthy of emulation. In Revelation he and all who take his mark end up in the lake of fire.

One does not have to believe that we are seeing the final fulfilment of Revelation thirteen according to the Futurist interpretation, or even hold to the Futurist interpretation, to have a deep, spiritual, theological, and ethical problem with the totalitarian spirit of the present day and with mandatory masking. Revelation thirteen is grounds for opposing such things regardless of one’s interpretation of Revelation.

(1) Full Preterists would apply this to the entirety of Revelation including the last four chapters. Full Preterism is the claim that all Scriptural prophecy was fulfilled in the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Full Preterism is not an interpretation available to the orthodox for it denies that Christ “will come again to judge the quick and the dead”, which, being affirmed by all of the Creeds, has clearly been regarded by the Church as belonging to the esse of the faith rather than to the adiophora since the earliest centuries. 

(2) Another interpretive option is the Spiritual/Allegorical interpretation in which the events of Revelation are regarded as depicting the spiritual conflict in each believer’s life – think John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Apocalypses 2020

Years from now, provided there is anyone left to write the history, the year 2020 AD might very well be dubbed “The Year of the Apocalypses.” That is not a typo, the plural is deliberate.

A mere three months ago, in a period that already seems to have been wiped from living memory by the death of George Floyd, we were told by the mainstream mass media that we were living out the reality of Stephen King’s The Stand. A superflu was spreading around the globe like wildfire, threatening all life in its path. We would either die a horrible death from an asphyxiating pneumonia that causes excruciating pain, or, more likely, would experience ordinary flu symptoms, or, just as likely, no symptoms whatsoever. In the name of saving us all from this fate, our governments suspended our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion, told most people other than those involved in the production and distribution of food and medicine that their jobs and businesses were “non-essential”, and ordered everybody to stay home and to stay at least six feet away from each other at all times. It looked very much like our governments had decided that to avoid living out The Stand we needed to live out George Orwell’s 1984 instead, and learn to love Big Brother.

We have now moved from The Stand into The Camp of the Saints. In this novel by Jean Raspail which first appeared in French in 1973, white, Christian, Western Civilization is brought to an end by its own liberalism. First, the liberalism which permeates France from the top to the bottom, prevents her from doing what is necessary to preserve her own existence when threatened by the invasion of an armada of decrepit ships laden with the teeming, impoverished, masses of the Third Word. France’s president knows what must be done to save France, but is unwilling to say it publicly. The overwhelming message, expressed in mindless and banal slogans, from the political and cultural leadership of the country is that the migrants must be welcomed and embraced. This part of the story occupies the largest part of the novel. After France’s refusal to turn away the migrants lays bare the weakness of the West for all to see, anti-racist uprisings occur in every major Western city with the West’s own, progressive and liberal corporate, governmental, ecclesiastical, and media elites defecting to the side of the revolutionaries.

Five years ago I wrote about how the migrant – or “Syrian refugee” as the media falsely labelled it – crisis in Europe, was like watching the first part of Raspail’s story come true. Today, what we are seeing looks more like the second part of the story. The Black Lives Matter movement has capitalized on George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis police to organize events in every major city in not just the United States, but in Canada and throughout the Western world. Called “peaceful protests” by an adoring and sympathetic mainstream media, they are more accurately described as riots, being all too frequently, and hardly coincidentally, accompanied by mass looting, vandalism, arson, and violence. In all of this they are no different from previous race riots, such as those of the “long hot summer” of 1967. This time, however, they have the endorsement, not just of empty-headed celebrities, but of major corporations and religious and political leaders as well. Indeed, with all the monument and statue toppling that has being going on, “insurrection” would be a better word than even “riot.” It is very much starting to resemble the global racial insurrection in The Camp of the Saints.

Earlier this year, when the previous Apocalypse was underway, many of us noted that the way the politicians, the media, and the World Health Organization were talking about keeping the lockdown in place until a vaccine was developed and then making that vaccine mandatory, was sounding suspiciously like the passage in the thirteenth chapter of the actual Apocalypse of St. John in the New Testament that speaks of the Mark of the Beast. This was even before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the United States House of Representatives devised a bill authorizing the American Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend $100 billion in programs for “Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone” with regards to the coronavirus and gave it the number HR6666. I made a few jokes about Bill Gates, a major funder of vaccine development and who was talking last year about implanted vaccination records, acting like he were auditioning for the role of Antichrist, but I promptly regretted it when a friend tried to turn it into a tiresome and tedious discussion of the fine and minute points of eschatology and what has to happen before what in the unfolding of the last of the last days.

Now it seems that another contender for the infamous Mark has appeared on the scene. In these anti-white racist rallies, the representatives of civil authority such as politicians and policemen, have been expected to participate in a ceremony that is usually called “taking the knee.” It began in the world of athletics four years ago when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49s, knelt during the pre-game playing of the American national anthem as a protest against what he erroneously believed to be the state of affairs in his country with regards to police racism. It is obvious from the way it is being used in the rallies today that is has developed into something far beyond what it was in its original context. It is demanded as a sign of submission and contrition – albeit with no absolution proffered.

It is noteworthy that this ritual abasement involves a gesture that is virtually identical to what is called genuflection in Christianity – the bending of one knee and touching the ground with the other. The significance of genuflection in Christianity is as a sign of respect and reverence in acknowledgement of the presence of God. It was originally derived from the recognition of God as the King of Kings. One would bend one knee when called into the presence of his earthly liege lord and Sovereign. The Church, in recognition of God as the Highest of Kings, reserved the other knee for the acknowledgement of His presence. In the Roman Communion, and the higher of the Churches of the Anglican Communion, it is customary to genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in both the Nicene Creed and in the reading of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, in acknowledgement of the fact that God had come down from His throne in Heaven to dwell among men as one of us. Other genuflections, such as those made by the celebrant during the consecration of the elements of the Eucharist, and by the congregants upon entering and exiting the building or their pew, are in acknowledgement of Christ’s Sacramental Presence.

The practice is not universal among Christians among whom there are many theological disagreements with regards to Christ’s Sacramental Presence. When a violent and totalitarian movement, however, starts demanding that people demonstrate their submission by making to it a sign of respect that has traditionally been reserved for the presence of Christ, all the faithful should recognize that it is the Enemy of their souls who so demands their submission and allegiance.

Whether or not this is “the” final, Mark of the Beast, of prophecy, I have no idea. The way things have been going we are likely to get two or three more Apocalypses in before the end of the year. Either way, our duty is plain and that is not to submit.

Those who take the knee, do so at the peril of their own souls.

Failing the Test of Civilization

It is quite evident that the idea that the best response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to shut down society and the economy except for the bare bones minimum, order everybody to “stay at home” and to maintain “social distancing” on the exceptional occasions when they are allowed out for some necessary reason, was thought up by people who have large enough homes that being required to stay in them for months on end will not feel like a prison sentence, where they live with their immediate families, who can afford to have everything they need delivered to them, who can work from home, and who assume that what is true of them is true of everybody, or at least the vast majority of people. It was thought up by pampered fools in other words.

What do these morons think “stay at home” could possibly mean to people who have no home?

It is currently estimated that in the city in which I reside, Winnipeg, Manitoba, there are anywhere between three to fifteen thousand such people. Even the smaller estimate exceeds by far the capacity of all of the city’s homeless shelters combined. The numbers of homeless are much larger in cities like Toronto and it is estimated that in the Dominion of Canada as a whole, there are approximately thirty five thousand homeless on any given night, and over two hundred thousand who will experience homelessness in any given year.

While the shut down orders do not apply to homeless shelters, the social distancing laws have greatly restricted the number they can take in. Meanwhile, the closing of restaurant dining rooms, libraries, and most other public places, has taken away from them the places where they go to find warmth and respite from the elements in winter. It was still winter when these measures were put in place and even now we are hardly past the point where really cold temperatures and large snowfalls would be considered extraordinary, as the huge two-day snowfall of last week demonstrates.

As part of the ill-conceived “flatten the curve” strategy, our governments have been encouraging businesses to switch to debit and credit transactions only. While this undoubtedly makes sense from their narrow point of view – physical currency, which is constantly exchanging hands, is notorious as a means of passing on germs – it is very hard on those who do not have bank accounts and whose only means of exchange is hard cash. It is also, of course, objectionable from a civil libertarian point of view. A cashless society is the totalitarian’s dream, for it means that the government can monitor and record all market transactions. St. John’s Apocalyptic description of the ultimate totalitarian, the Satanic false messiah who will deceive the world and become global despot prior to the Second Coming of the true Messiah, includes the famous detail that he will require people to receive a mark bearing his name or the number of his name – six hundred, threescore and six – on their right hand or forehead in order to buy or sell. Not a few people have drawn the obvious link between this and the totalitarian nature of a cashless society. Some of the supposedly “Christian” supporters of the “flatten the curve” strategy and its extreme measures, in their almost total disregard for the threat to civil rights and liberties during this universal government power grab and their haste to condemn anyone, but especially other Christians, who dissents from their point of view as “selfish” and “ideological” give every impression of having taken the Mark of the Beast in their hearts already.

Just as there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is meaningless because they have no home to stay at, so there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is the equivalent of a sentence of solitary confinement. This is because such people live in small, cramped, quarters with very little space. Such people will be especially vulnerable to “cabin fever” during this period because, unless they are extreme introverts, they depend upon getting out of the apartment and into the neighbourhood to avoid a sense of confinement.

Similarly, people who are single and live by themselves rather than with a spouse and children, depend upon social events and gatherings to avoid a depression-inducing sense of loneliness. These social events and gatherings have now been stolen from them by these vile, power mad, despotic, health bureaucrats who think that flattening the curve is the only acceptable response to this pandemic and that any and all means to that end are justified, which is a truly diabolical point of view.

Obviously, a response to the pandemic that involves shutting down most of society and the economy, will have a disproportionately hard impact on people who depend upon their paycheques to pay the rent, their grocery and utility bills, and other necessary expenses and have little to nothing left over after doing so, and therefore little to no savings. Shutting down the so-called “non-essential” sector of the economy, is far more likely to put such people out of work, than it is to put people with high figure salaries, who can work from home, like the overpaid bloody twits who thought up the “stay at home” strategy, out of work. It eliminates their existing jobs and makes it virtually impossible to find new ones. Government programs to assist such people can only ever be a very short term solution to this problem. Placing such a huge percentage of the population on government assistance at the same time that you are killing the source of government revenue is simply not sustainable for the kind of time frame that the models the “flatten the curve” strategy is based upon require.

Samuel Johnson is quoted by his friend and biographer James Boswell as having said: “Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."

The new programs being enacted by the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa are not what “a decent provision for the poor” looks like. They are at best an attempt to lessen the incredible evil that our governments, Dominion and provincial, are doing to the poor through their ill-advised strategy for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. We are failing Dr. Johnson’s “true test of civilization.”