Raptum Omnium Ab Omnibus

 

The late Lawrence Auster, who passed away in March of 2013, was a huge inspiration to the generation – in a rather loose sense of the word – of writers who started blogging in the years when he was active at  View From the Right and who, like himself, were theologically conservative Christians and political “conservatives” in the “traditionalist” sense of the word who espoused views on race, immigration, sex, and gender that would have been well within the mainstream sixty years ago but are now considered to be beyond the pale on the right wing of the political spectrum.    This would include, among many others, Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife, the contributors to The Orthosphere, and this writer.

 

On April 21^st, 2009 he re-posted a comment from a post at Dennis Mangan’s blog and the thread that followed as “The Next Frontier of Non-Discrimination: Obligatory Interracial Dating”.    I’m not sure, upon re-reading the post after all this time, how much of the discussion was carried over from Mangan’s blog, which is no longer around to check, and how much was original to Mr. Auster’s, but it is not important.    The original comment linked to a Youtube video in which University of Delaware students were quizzed as to their willingness to date blacks and Muslims for the purpose of determining how “racist” they were.    The point was that liberal anti-racism was moving from condemning opposition to interracial dating as “racist” to condemning a lack of interest in participating in it oneself as “racist” and thus making interracial dating socially obligatory, hence Mr. Auster’s title.   About half way through the discussion someone who went by the handle “LL” asked Mr. Auster about whether it follows from this revised liberalism that to “eschew same-sex dating” is homophobic.    He answered in the affirmative, saying that this was precisely the direction in which liberalism was leading.    Pointing to how liberals were using previous bans on interracial marriage as part of their argument for same-sex marriage, he said “So if there’s no moral difference between a black and a white marrying each other and a man and a man – or a woman and a woman – marrying each other, there would not seem to be any moral difference between requiring a white student to date a nonwhite student (as some schools are apparently now doing) and requiring a male student to date a male student.”   The last comment in the post was by Lydia McGrew of What’s Wrong With the World and was about how pressure on heterosexuals to date members of the same-sex already existed in some women’s studies classes.

 

This whole idea that liberals’ own internal logic placed them on a trajectory that led from demanding tolerance of non-traditional relationships, to demanding acceptance of the same, to demanding participation in them, was one that Mr. Auster revisited several times.  I thought, and still think, that he was right about this and picked up the theme myself after he passed away.    A few years later, I wrote an essay that started with the hypothetical scenario of someone who politely rejected the advances of a member of the same sex being slapped with a discrimination suit, which he lost and found himself facing cripplingly punitive fines, and from this scenario reasoned towards the ethical conclusion that discrimination qua discrimination was not inherently wrong and that anti-discrimination laws, that is to say, laws that prohibit private persons from discriminating are fundamentally unjust.    Shortly after this, a judge ruled against the Christian dating site Christian Mingle in a discrimination lawsuit, and ordered them to expand their options from “men seeking women” and “women seeking men”.   While the court order did not compel individual men and women to date members of their own sex it was a large step in that direction in that it set the precedent that the realm of dating and relationships was now subject to anti-discrimination law.    In commenting on this at the time, I said that we were rapidly heading towards mandatory obligatory omnisexuality, which I described as a raptum omnium ab omnibus (“rape of all by all”) which expression, obviously, I borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of human existence outside of civilized society and its laws as a bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”).

 

 

Who would have thought at the time that five years later a radically different situation would develop which could also be aptly described with this same expression?

 

I am referring, of course, to the forced vaccination that is the latest episode in the ongoing bat flu saga.

 

Let us consider the component parts of the expression, beginning with raptum, which would usually be translated abduction but which I am using here in the sense of its English derivative, rape.

 

To call forced vaccination rape is to use this word in a sense that is only slightly less than literal.  In the most literal sense of the word to rape is to force someone to have sexual intercourse with you against that person’s will.   Apart from instances of statutory rape involving an adult woman and a minor in which the minor is unable to legally consent due to age, this almost always means a male forcibly penetrating somebody else.   This is due to basic biology – even if you have a female who is sufficiently larger and stronger than a male to try and force herself upon him in this manner, to succeed would require that his body co-operate in a wayr in which it is noted to fail even when its cooperation is wanted by the male and under the set of circumstances when it is least likely to do so.    Therefore, for all intents and purposes, rape can be said to be forced penetration.    Forced vaccination is forced penetration, albeit with a needle rather than a penis.   To the wiseacres who think that talking about the bees and mosquitos who “raped” them is a witty comeback to this, note that mens rea, which can only be present in those with human moral agency, is a necessary component of any crime.   Insects do not and cannot possess mens rea, humans who compel other people to be injected with substances that they do not want to be injected with, have it in spades.

 

Should, however, anyone still object on the ground that rape is essentially sexual in nature, I shall answer neither by suggesting, however plausibly, that those who are so insistent that everyone who does not want the bat flu vaccine be compelled to take it derive some erotic thrill from this, nor by making reference to the common feminist trope that rape is about power not sex, but by offering an alternative comparison.   Imagine the government telling everybody that they need to have two injections of heroin, and possibly a booster injection of heroin at a later date, issuing heroin passports to confirm that people have had their required doses, banning people from bars, restaurants, movie theatres, concerts and sporting events unless they can prove they have had their heroin shots, and requiring all public employees and all people employed, whether publicly or privately, in certain sectors, to take their heroin shots as a condition of their continuing employment.    This would be considered by pretty much everybody to be a heinous crime against humanity.   The analogy here is exact, with the only difference being the contents of the needle.    The heinousness of forced heroin injection, however, does not lie solely in the heroin itself, but rather permeates the entire act.

 

The omnium, meaning “of all”, requires little in the way of commentary.    The fact that these vaccine passport and mandate measures have generally been introduced after a sizeable portion of the population has already been voluntarily vaccinated shows that nothing short of 100% vaccination will satisfy those insisting upon such extreme measures, which in turn demonstrates just how irrational these people are. 

 

The ab omnibus, which means “by all” is appropriate here because of the broad support these vaccine passports and mandates seem to have.   If the numbers on the matter are at all credible, vaccine passports and mandates have far more supporters than lockdowns and mandatory masks did.   The explanation for this is that the number of those who supported lockdowns and masks but feel that forced vaccination is a step too far is much lower than the number of those who opposed lockdowns and masks and who see the vaccines as a means of escaping these things.    This was inevitable, I suppose.   Once someone has accepted suspending everybody’s basic and constitutional rights and freedoms, imposing quarantine on the entire healthy population, ordering people to close their businesses based on an arbitrary classification of “essential” and “non-essential”, and the like as acceptable means of slowing the spread of a novel respiratory disease that those who are young and healthy have over a 99% chance of surviving he does not have much further to go to accepting forced injections.   Such a person is not likely to understand that holding the rights and freedoms that the government stole from us hostage is not morally different from holding a gun to our heads as a means of persuading us to get vaccinated.   Meanwhile, two years of lockdowns and masks have tired many out, wearing away at their moral resolve so that those willing to resist the vaccine mandates are fewer in number than those who opposed the earlier measures.

 

This is most unfortunate since forced vaccination is, in reality, an escalation of the tyranny of the last two years, not an escape from it.   Do we want to live in a society where we can be compelled to be injected with substances without our informed and voluntary consent?   Do we want to live in a society where we can be required to show our “papers” wherever we go?   Do we want future generations to have to live in such a society?

 

If our answer to any or all of these questions is no, then regardless of what we may think about the vaccines qua vaccines, or whether we ourselves have been vaccinated, partially or fully, or not, we must fervently oppose and reject this raptum omnium ab omnibus now.

The Evanescence of Ethics in the Epidemic

Imagine three individuals who each wish to relieve you of the burden of the contents of your wallet that they might bear this load themselves.

 

The first individual approaches you and says “I hate to ask this, but I’m in a real pickle, I owe Vinnie and Guido $50 and if I don’t pay it by the end of the day they are going to break my legs, would you be a pal and help me out.”

 

The second individual comes up to you wearing a bandana, pulls a gun, and says “stick em up” and then grabs your wallet and runs.

 

The third individual says to you “I want you to give me all your money.  It is your choice if you do or not, but if you don’t I’ll see to it that you can never work, travel, or participate in any community events again.”

 

Which of these individuals was guilty of robbery?

 

The first individual may be guilty of having made very poor choices but is not guilty of robbery. 

 

The second individual is clearly a robber and a stereotypical robber at that, going so far as to wear the traditional uniform of the robber, a mask covering the lower face.

 

The correct answer to our question, however, is that both the second and the third individuals were guilty of robbery.   Robbery is theft – the unlawful taking of another person’s possessions – through the means of coercive force, either actual or threatened.    Both the second and the third individuals used threats to force you to hand over your money.    The nature of what they threatened to do was quite different but the difference does not make what the third individual said any less of a coercive threat.

 

Is it ever right, or at least morally permissible, to use coercive force?

 

This ethical question is more complex than it might at first seem, due to a number of complicating factors.   One such factor is the nature of the coercive force.    Consider our illustration above.   The threats used by the second and third individuals differed in two ways.   One of these was in their level of credibility.   The stereotypical robber’s threat was made believable by the presence of the gun.   The credibility of the other robber’s threat depends upon who the robber is.   If he is in a position of sufficient power to actually carry it out then his threat is credible, otherwise he is obviously a nut and his threat can be disregarded as empty and crazy.   The other way, which is the one that is relevant to this discussion, is in the nature of what was threatened.   The stereotypical robber threatened the use of lethal force.   The other robber merely threatened to make your life miserable, not to take it from you.    Historically, this distinction has been very important in discussions of the ethical question at hand.   While there has been no answer to the question which could be said to have the support of a universal consensus, there has been wide agreement that lethal force is the least justifiable or permissible form of coercion.

 

Another complicating factor is that of the distinction between the state and private individual persons.    It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to conceive of the enforcement of law and the administration of criminal justice that does not in some way or another involve the use of coercive force.    Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has also been wide agreement – although not nearly as wide as with lethal force being the least justifiable or permissible – that it is more justifiable or morally permissible for the state, the institution whose raison d’etre is to enforce the law and administer criminal justice, to use such force than for private persons.    Again, support for this idea while broad, has not been as wide as for the one with which we ended the previous paragraph.   The liberal tradition, that is to say, the tradition that over the course of the Modern Age became dominant in what used to be Christendom but is now Western Civilization, has produced many different views on the matter.   One such view, which is evident today among those liberals or progressives who would argue that you should never fight back and defend yourself, your loved ones, or your property when these are under criminal attack, but  allow yourself to be victimized and let the professionals, the police, take care of it, is that the state ought to have an exclusive monopoly on all use of coercive force.    Conversely, some although not all of the liberals of the kind who began calling themselves libertarian in the last century to indicate their retention and emphasis on the individualism and suspicion of government that were predominant in the liberalism of the nineteenth century, hold that force is only justifiable when used by private persons to defend themselves, their families, and property and that the state is illegitimate.    Although these views, each the polar opposite of the other, are both supported by their proponents from ideas that belong to the mainstream of the liberal philosophical-political tradition, neither could be said to itself represent the mainstream liberal view on the matter of how much coercive force is permitted to the state and the private person.     That the use of force on others, whether on the part of the private person or the state, is ethically permissible only under certain circumstances, which are broader for the state than for the private person, with lethal force being permitted to the latter only in circumstances of self-defense, is much closer to what historically would have been the liberal mainstream.   In this, the mainstream of the liberal tradition was itself much closer to the mainstream of the tradition that preceded it, or, if you prefer, the mainstream of the Western tradition as a whole, including both liberal and pre-liberal strands, than in many other areas.

 

There is one way in which liberalism did depart from the pre-liberal Western tradition that warrants consideration in the context of this discussion, especially in that it had a direct bearing on the way the factor examined in the last paragraph was framed.   Distinguishing between the private person and the state is fairly universal in the ethical debate over the boundaries limiting when force is permissible.  Restricting the distinction to these two, on the other hand, is rather unique to the liberal tradition.   Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet stressed throughout his career, beginning with his seminal The Quest for Community (1953), the importance of a plurality of institutions.    He described such other institutions as the family and the local community as “intermediate” between the state and the private person.   That liberalism had come to largely disregard these is evident in the radically opposite views both emerging from the liberal tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph.    What the ideas that the state should have a monopoly on force and that the state is illegitimate and only the individual person is justified in using force in self-defense have in common is that they both see the state and the individual as the only players worthy of consideration.   The other institutions that Nisbet called “intermediate” traditionally possessed a significant amount of authority.   Authority, which is the respected right to lead, is different from power, which is the ability to command obedience.      For society or any institution within it to be functional authority must take strong precedence over power but, human nature being what it is, authority cannot long exist without power backing it up.   This necessarily means that those who exercise the authority in Nisbet’s intermediate institutions must be morally able to use some kind of force, to some kind of degree.   Another way in which liberalism’s reduction of everything to the state and individual is evident has been in the way in which the liberal tradition, which in the interwar period of the last century largely abandoned its anti-statist libertarianism from the century prior and then sharply veered into statism after World War II, has been attacking the authority of all of these institutions, especially the family, by having the state strip them of their power. (1)

 

The ability to back up an order with force is the essence of power, which to some degree or another is necessary to support authority.    The force needed to support authority differs from institution to institution in both kind and degree.  That lethal force is limited to the state, except in situations where the individual needs it for defensive purposes is something to which virtually everyone in Christendom would have agreed around the time that liberalism began to convert Christendom into Western Civilization.    This consensus did not exist in the classical civilization that preceded Christendom.    In ancient Rome, the pater familias, which meant the patriarch of a household consisting of a large extended family, rather than merely the father in a domestic unit, held authority, the pater potestas, over his family that was not equal to that exercised by the Senate over the Roman city-state, but certainly comparable to it.    Classical literature abounds with stories featuring the abuse of such authority – Oedipus, the king of Thebes who features in several of the extent tragedies, bears a name (“swollen foot”) that testifies to his having been a victim of a botched attempt to end his life while an infant, carried out at the orders of his father when the latter heard the prophecy that the child would kill his father and marry his mother.     While Oedipus’s father Laius was a king, the order to have the child exposed was an expression of what would have been regarded as his patriarchal rather than his civil authority at the time.      

 

The spread of Christianity and the conversion of classical civilization into Christendom led to the elimination of the practice of infanticide by exposure and stricter limits being placed on the pater potestas leading to the Christian consensus that the legitimate use of lethal force is limited to the state except in instance of self-defense on the part of private persons.    While this meant that the power and authority of the family patriarch was no longer comparable to that of the state and that in temporal terms the civil power was now unquestionably the highest authority, the mainstream point of view in Christendom did not regard all other institutional authority as falling in the intermediate position between the state and the individual of which Nisbet spoke.   The mainstream point of view in Christendom was that there were two realms in Christian civilization, the temporal and the spiritual, the membership of which overlapped, but in which different institutions were vested with the highest authority.   In the temporal realm, the state was the highest authority.   In the spiritual realm, the church was the highest authority.  The bishops, as citizens of the temporal realm, were under the authority of the king as his subjects.   The king, as a member of the church, was subject to the authority of his bishop in the spiritual realm.   The king and the bishop, each possessing the highest earthly authority in his respective realm, required power to back that authority up, and this power was conceived of as two “swords”.   These swords were metaphorical, of course, although much less so in the case of the king, whose sword included the use of lethal force to punish crime. (2)   The bishop’s “sword” was the “keys”, given to the Apostles by Christ after St. Peter’s confession of faith, which included the power to exclude people from the Sacraments and the fellowship of the church.

 

Disagreements about the “keys” were involved in fracturing the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom in both the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, which contributed to liberalism’s takeover of Christendom and transformation of it into modern Western Civilization.    While the specifics of these disagreements is not relevant to our discussion here, it is important to note that in the Christian orthodox mainstream of Christendom neither the king nor the bishop was thought to have the right the wield his sword whenever he saw fit to serve his own selfish purposes.   Liberalism maintained otherwise, of course, because it wished to weaken the king or replace him with a republic and to reduce the church from the institution of highest earthly authority in the spiritual realm to one of many intermediate institutions in the temporal realm, but the concept of the divine gifting of the “swords” in Christian orthodoxy clearly implies that both kings and bishops were held strictly accountable to God for the right use of the swords, and a great deal of space in the writings of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted to spelling out the limits on when these swords could be rightly used.   The importance of this lies in the fact that despite the significant differences between the orthodoxy of Christendom and the liberalism of modern Western Civilization both agreed that there were limits on when force could be used, whether by the state or by private persons, and that these limits were written in the language of ethics, of what is right and what is wrong.

 

The idea that there are limits on the right use of force even for the state is an ancient one, going back to the earliest of civilizations.   Even before the Socratic philosophers wrote the dialogues and treatises that laid the foundation of the long tradition of Western political science, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, continues with his being avenged by his son Orestes, and concludes with Orestes escaping the vengeance of the pursuing Furies by placing his fate in the hands of the patron goddess of Athens who establishes the first jury to adjudicate the case, resulting in an acquittal.   The trilogy illustrates how the civilized justice system with its laws and courts is superior to pre-civilized blood “justice” because it limits the violence rather than letting it continue to spiral and escalate.    The myths behind the plays are much older (Homer had drawn from the same source material in his Illiad and Odyssey three centuries prior to this).   Indeed, even the Lex Talionis that is featured prominently in the ancient Code of Hammurabi (Babylon of the eighteenth century BC) and the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, can be understood as a limit on the permissible use of force (under it if someone puts out your eye, the maximum that you can demand as just repayment is his own eye).    That the ancients saw the force of law, exercised by the state, as being subject to the limits of morality is also attested to by manner in which they categorized their philosophy.   While modern totalitarians, who reject limits on the power of the state, have sometimes claimed Plato as an ancestor, to do so they must rely entirely upon a dialogue that is fantastical in nature, in which Socrates and his friends engage in an entirely theoretical exercise in city-building that is clearly set in a world other than the one they actually live in.    The purpose of the exercise is not to create a model for the builders of city-states in the real world to use, but to examine further an ethical question about the nature of justice.   The totalitarians’ claim on Plato, therefore, is very tenuous.   By contrast, modern constitutionalists, that is to say those who believe in constitutional restraints on the powers of government which ought to include everybody of every political stripe who is not a totalitarian, can rightly point to Plato’s disciple Aristotle as their ancestor.   Some of these have agreed with the totalitarians in assigning Plato to the latter camp, but where Plato and Aristotle were clearly in harmony was in making politics in the sense of political science, the theory of states and statecraft, a subcategory of ethics, the theory of human habits and behaviour as evaluated by the standards of what is right, good and virtuous versus what is wrong, bad, and vicious.   This is spelled out by Aristotle, who introduced politics as a subdivision in his treatise on Ethics, then wrote a sequel devoted to Politics, but it is also the obvious implication of Plato’s having made his most famous political discussion as part of a larger ethical debate.   The subordination of politics to ethics is consistent with the constitutionalist rather than the totalitarian point of view.

Over the course of the pandemic that was declared early last year and has continued to the present day it has been very disturbing to see this subordination of politics to ethics that has been so important to every phase of our civilization (or to our civilization and its two immediate predecessors depending upon how you look at it) disregarded or, worse, inverted (the use of shame and guilt to coerce people into obeying every public health order – “you are a bad selfish person who cares only about yourself if you object to being forbidden all social interaction for two years straight” – is the use of a twisted form of ethics to serve the interests of politics, not in the Platonic/Aristotelean sense of the word but in a sense of the term that is usually if, perhaps, unfairly, associated with Machiavelli).   At the beginning of the pandemic, the citizens of Western countries basically acquiesced as their governments imposed unprecedented restrictions upon them.   In imposing these restrictions Western governments overstepped the limits their constitutions place on their powers and essentially took away what for centuries Western people have regarded as their most basic civil, if not human, rights.    Telling people they can have only a limited number of people over to their house is a restriction that limits their freedom of association, but telling them they can have no visitors over to their house, as the province of Manitoba did from November of last year until this July, is taking away that freedom altogether.  This is a freedom that is identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was added to the Canadian constitution in 1982, the rights and freedoms in which the Supreme Court of Canada has previously ruled that governments can limit, but only if the limitation is minimal, as this one obviously was not.   Nevertheless, the province was somehow allowed to get away with this. 

 

Having gotten away with these experimental severe restrictions on our freedoms, our governments then began to add mandates on top of these.   The first of these was the mandate that we wear lower face masks in indoor spaces.   The mask mandates were controversial for a number of reasons, many of which I have discussed in other essays in the past.   What is most significant for our purposes here is that while many have seen the masks as being a lesser imposition than the lockdowns, and in one sense they are right, they represent the transition from the government forbidding us to do things that we had previously been free to do to the government requiring us to do things.   Throughout history, the laws of the freest countries have been mostly if not all prohibitions rather than requirements, and the more requirements a government has added the less free the country has become.   The laws that have been the most universal – the basic laws against such things as murder and theft – are prohibitions.

 

We have now arrived at a point where, if polls are to be believed – and this is a big “if” – the vast majority of Canadians support a different – and far worse – mandate, mandatory vaccination.    The rapidly developed vaccines for the bat flu have spawned much more controversy than the masks.   Much of the heated discussion has been over such matters as the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.    I will leave these matters to others because the ethical problem with vaccine mandates would be the same if they were 100% safe and effective.

Some would distinguish between mandatory vaccination and forced vaccination.    The distinction is false, however, and involves no real difference.   By the latter, these people would presumably have in mind a situation where someone ties you to a chair and injects you with a vaccine without your consent, either freely given or coerced.   A mandatory vaccine, however, is as much a forced vaccine as a vaccine in the circumstance just described.   The only difference is in the nature of the force used, which difference is essentially the same as that between the two robbers in our illustration at the beginning of this essay.

 

Let us use a slightly different illustration.

 

There are three young men.    Each has a young lady of whom he is in pursuit.

 

The first young man woes her with flowers, and chocolates, and sappy love poetry.

 

The second young man, clubs her over the head, drags her off to his cave, and forces himself upon her.

 

The third young man is the young lady’s immediate supervisor.   He tells her that if she wishes to advance in her career, it would be in her best interests to sleep with him, and hints that she will be fired and blackballed in her profession if she does not.

 

As with the original illustration, the first young man is innocent.   The second young man, also corresponding to his counterpart in the first illustration, is a stereotypical rapist.   

 

Is the third young man as guilty of rape, assuming his ploy to be successful, as the second?

 

If your answer is “no” you might be wise to keep your opinion to yourself in the presence of the ladies.  As Rudyard Kipling so aptly said “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.

 

The reason for this second illustration is that the crime involved is much closer in nature to forced vaccination than robbery.   In both rape and forced vaccination someone’s body is penetrated, without that person’s voluntary consent, by a foreign tube which injects a substance into the body.    The similarities far outweigh the differences and include all the elements of rape which make the act a heinous crime.

 

The rhetoric we have been hearing from political leaders, like the Prime Minister, who have imposed vaccine mandates on certain sectors, has been “it is your choice not to be vaccinated, but there will be consequences”.   Imagine a man saying to a woman “it is your choice not to sleep with me, but there will be consequences”.   It would be one thing if by “consequences” the Prime Minister meant something like “you won’t be as protected against the virus as somebody who chooses to take the vaccine.”    This is obviously not what he meant.   It was a threat of the imposition of additional negative consequences apart from whatever ones might be inherent in the choice itself on those who reject the vaccine.   This is an unjustifiable abuse of government power.   Indeed, it is ethically unacceptable for any institution to abuse its authority and power in this way.   Rather than issuing vaccine mandates for their own employees, and those of certain private sectors, governments ought to be forbidding everyone else from imposing private vaccine mandates.    The latter would be a proper and ethical use of government power.  

 

That so many people have indicated their support for vaccine mandates, government or private, demonstrates just how badly our ethical thinking, which was not exactly in great shape prior to the pandemic, has deteriorated over the course of the last two years.

 

(1)   This is what the so-called Culture War, or at least the moral aspect of it, has really been all about.

(2)  The imagery comes from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans in the New Testament.

The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode III

Reaction Man Defeats the Diabolical Designs of Diaper-Face

In their dens at home, Justice Bob Baddecision of the Ontario Inferior Court and Don Alfredo Fettucine of the Fettucine Crime Syndicate turned on their computers and opened a popular teleconferencing app. They had been told to be ready at 6:66 pm for a very important online meeting. They had been given special clocks for the purpose, as regular clocks don’t register a 6:66.

 At that precise moment a burst of flame appeared on their screens which began to emit a smell of sulfur into the air. The flame coalesced into the image of a man with a goatee and ponytail, and the stumps of horns on his forehead. 

“Hi Lucy” they exclaimed. 

 “Greetings my closest friends” said Lucifer, or Lucy, as the gender-confused devil preferred to be called. “I have called this very important meeting tonight to introduce you to my latest scheme.” (1)

 Lucy rubbed his hands together and began to cackle. 

 “As you are aware, some of my recent plans have suffered unfortunate setbacks. Four years ago, my favourite daughter from the Sisters of the Night coven was set to take control of the most powerful army on the face of the earth, and launch the Battle of Armageddon. My plan was foiled, however, by the rise of Donald the Orange, who has been doing the exact opposite of what I wanted, reducing his country’s military presence around the globe, putting out the fires of ethnic conflict that I have been stoking for over a century in both the Balkans and the Middle East, and even going to North Korea to negotiate peace with Kim. I have since unleashed my mutant-demon squad on Donald the Orange in the hopes of getting revenge.” (2) 

“More recently, working through my faithful minions, the Woke Millennial and his Aunty Fa, I unleashed an army of Marxist zombies on the campus of Aberhart Manning University in Brown Moose, Alberta. My scheme went awry, however, due to the interloping of that annoying superhero, Reaction Man.” (3) 

“This time, however, my plot is foolproof. Allow me to introduce you to my new minion Diaper-Face.”

Lucy stepped aside and a new face filled the screen. Or rather, what would have been a face, if a large diaper were not permanently obscuring most of it, leaving only the eyes visible. Diaper-Face said something, but neither Justice Baddecision nor Don Fettuccine could make out what it was due to the combination of his accent and his voice being muffled by the diaper. 

“Ummmm” they both said. 

 “My apologies”, Lucy said, stepping back into the screen. “What Diaper-Face was trying to say was ‘hello’”. 

The judge and the mafia boss both greeted Diaper-Face in return. 

“Diaper-Face used to be a research scientist in a virology lab in China”, Lucy said. “He was performing an experiment one day when an accident occurred and every virus in the lab escaped and infected him simultaneously. He instantly came down with the biggest attack of the sneezes the world has ever seen. You could even call it a sneeze seizure. He left the lab, intending to go to the nearest hospital, but the sneezing attack disoriented him. He ended up going into the glue factory next door instead and let out a particularly violent sneeze that knocked over a vial of the stickiest, most permanent, adhesive ever invented by man, which spilled onto his face. Not knowing what it was, he grabbed a diaper that was for some reason sitting there, and tried to wipe his face off. Instead, the diaper became permanently attached. The experience has driven him mad. He now has no desire except to see the entire world in the same predicament, with diapers permanently attached to everyone else’s face. He called upon me, and I granted him powers in exchange for his soul. With the combination of the powers I have given him, and his own in-depth understanding of virology, it should be a cinch for him to frighten the world into forcing everyone to wear diapers on their faces. The diapers will be specially consecrated in a Black Mass ceremony so that everyone who wears them will be pledging their loyalty to me.” 

“Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” 

“Diaper-Face is my greatest creation yet! He truly is my left hand.” 

“Don’t you mean right hand?” Don Alfredo asked. 

“No, Steve Earle’s mama was right when she told him back in the General Store that that is the pistol.”

“Left hand sounds funny” said Justice Baddecision. 

“Just think of what people used to use their left hand for”, Lucy said. “Through Diaper-Face, that is what I intend to do to the world.” 

Unbeknownst to Lucy and his colleagues, their conversation had been intercepted and recorded, and the recording transmitted to an obscure monastery in the Carpathian Mountains. 

A short time thereafter, Lucy unleashed Diaper-Face. Through the combination of his expertise in virology and the powers the devil had given him in exchange for his soul, he had created two viruses. One of these he called the Viral Bogeyman, although the world was soon to know it by a different name. It produced a respiratory disease that was severe-to-fatal among a small minority, although most infected experienced only mild symptoms. It was the other virus that was the more deadly of the two, for it infected the mind rather than the body, causing people to perceive the first virus as being something other than it was, something on the same level as the Black Death or worse. This virus spread around the globe much more quickly than the first, and infected a lot more people. The symptoms of the infected were that they curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, and calling upon their government to take away all of their neighbours’ rights and freedoms while they waited for Big Pharma to produce a magic needle that would save them from the Viral Bogeyman. While they waited for the magic needle, they put their trust in a magic diaper, wearing it all times and in all places, even when sitting alone in their own cars, to ward off the Viral Bogeyman. 

Those who were fortunate enough not to be infected by Diaper-Face’s mind virus, looked around in dismay and astonishment, at the foolishness of all those around them who were. Among these were the Right Reverend John Keble Waterland, Bishop of Paleo-Middlesex and his good friend “Eddy” Johnson. Bishop Waterland and Eddy would have tea about once a week, and these days much of the conversation revolved around the craziness of everyone around him. Bishop Waterland would shake his head as he recounted the latest silliness of the Right Reverend Barty Battyblabber, Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Neo-Soho. Most recently, Bishop Barty had taken to wearing no less than ten magic diapers on his face at any given time. (4) 

“He looks absolutely ridiculous”, Bishop Waterland told Eddy, “but he says that he would rather be safe than sorry. At least I think that is what he was saying. It is almost impossible to make out a word he says under all those layers.” 

The phone rang, and Bishop Waterland answered it. 

“Hello? Oh, alve-say Brother Whippet. I think this is the first time we have spoken since you returned to Romania. How are things over there? Why yes, as a matter of fact he is here.” 

Bishop Waterland handed the phone over to Eddy. 

Eddy took the phone and was soon in intense conversation with the member of the ancient and sacred Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow who had come to Canada and knighted him after he had received the power to turn back the clock on the anniversary of the Reaction of Thermidor, turning him into Reaction Man. It had been Brother Whippet’s superior, Brother Moonpie, who had received the transmission of the recording of Lucy’s conversation. (5) The Marshmallow Monks, having put together what had happened, urged Eddy to find Diaper-Face and defeat him. 

Eddy, after he had finished talking with Brother Whippet, handed the phone back to Bishop Waterland, explained the situation, for the Bishop knew his secret, then changed into his Reaction Man costume and set out to track down Diaper-Face. 

Reaction Man found Diaper-Face standing on a high balcony, surveying the streets below where every visible person was wearing a diaper on his face. Diaper Face was laughing and gloating over his success. 

“I’ve found you at last, Diaper-Face” said Reaction Man. “It is time to set all these people free from the bondage they are under due to the spell of your evil mind virus.” 

 In response Diaper-Face said “Good luck with that, Reaction Man. You can never defeat Lucy and me. All the people of the world will be living in slavery to the irrational fear that my mind virus has planted in their rotting brains for the rest of their lives.” 

Of course, since he said all of this in Chinese and from behind his glued-on diaper, Eddy couldn’t make out a word of that. 

“What did you say?” 

 Diaper-Face repeated himself, but was still indecipherable. 

“Pardon me, could you say that one more time?” 

 Diaper-Face gave his super-villain boast in heavily muffled Chinese again, but, of course, to no avail.

“Well, I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It is my duty to defeat you and that is exactly what I am going to do.” 

 Reaction Man pointed at Diaper-Face and used his power to turn the clock back. The super-adhesive holding the diaper onto Diaper-Face’s face dissolved and the diaper fell to the ground. 

“My diaper! My beautiful diaper!” Diaper-Face screamed, this time in English. 

“Finally you said something that makes sense”, Reaction Man said, “although I beg to differ. That diaper was as ugly as sin.” 

“You don’t understand. All the power that Lucy gave me was contained in that diaper. Without it, the spell will be broken.” 

 Diaper-Face lunged for the diaper, but Reaction Man was faster. He grabbed the horrid thing and threw it into an incinerator that for some odd but convenient reason was located there on the balcony. As the diaper hit the flame, it burst into a cloud of brimstone. 

 All around the world, people woke up from the paranoia that the mind virus had induced, realized how foolish they all looked wearing diapers on their faces, threw them in the garbage in disgust, and resumed living their lives, no longer bound by fear of the Viral Bogeyman.

(1) Lucy the gender-confused devil and Justice Bob Baddecision first appear in Lucy’s Day in Court. Don Alfredo Fettucine first appears in Justice for Minnie? 

(2) See The Witches’ Sabbat and Brother Moonpie and the Devil’s Apocalypse. 

(3) See The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode II – Reaction Man Versus the Marxist Zombie Army (4) Bishops John Keble Waterland and Barty Battyblabber first appear in Bishop Bartholomew B. Battyblabber and His Big Bad Bash. 

(5) As told in The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode I – The Origin.

The Bread of Life

 

The institution of the Eucharist is recorded in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It took place towards the end of the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that Jesus ate with His Apostles before His betrayal, arrest, trial, and Crucifixion. The account of the institution is brief in each of these Gospels. Here is how St. Matthew tells it: 

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. (Matt. 26:26-29) 

Interestingly, the fourth Evangelist, who provides the longest account by far of the Last Supper – all of chapters thirteen and fourteen take place at the table, and a conversation which began there and continued as they went on their way to the Garden of Gethsemane occupies the next three chapters - omits any mention of the institution. Paradoxically, however, it is St. John who provides the fullest doctrine of the Eucharist earlier in his Gospel when He provides us with the Lord’s discourse on the bread of life in the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand in the sixth chapter. There are those, of course, who would deny any connection between what the Lord has to say about eating His flesh and drinking His blood in that chapter and the Eucharist, but these merely illustrate the old saying that there is none so blind as he who refuses to see. To agree with them requires believing that on two separate occasions Jesus made reference to His flesh and blood as food and drink but meant something completely different by it each time. This is possible, perhaps, but hardly likely. While words can have different meanings in different contexts, this whole elaborate image of eating flesh and drinking blood, does not lend itself well to multiple uses. 

At the beginning of the sixth chapter of his Gospel, in introducing the account of the feeding of the five thousand, St. John notes that the Passover was approaching. While one wants to be wary of reading too much into details such as this, the fact of the matter is that an understanding of the Passover and how it relates to the significance of Jesus’s death is absolutely essential to making any sense out of the Eucharist. The orthodox Fathers were right and the Gnostic heretics very wrong indeed about the ongoing importance of the Old Testament for the Church under the New Covenant. 

The original Passover comes from the book of Exodus and from the central event that gave that book its title. The children of Israel, who had moved to Egypt in Joseph’s time, had grown to nationhood there but had been subjected to slavery. God, hearing the cries of the Israelites, had raised up Moses and sent him to speak to Pharaoh on His behalf to demand the release of His people. God sent a series of judgements of increasing intensity upon Egypt but each time Pharaoh hardened his heart and refused to let Israel go. Then, in one final judgement, He slew the firstborn of every household in Egypt, from Pharaoh’s down, prompting Pharaoh to not just let Israel go but to actively drive them out. The Israelites were instructed, on the night in which this was to take place, to take a lamb per every one or two households, depending upon their size, kill the lamb before the assembly of Israel, mark the sides and lintel of the door of their homes with the blood, and eat the flesh of the lamb. Those whose houses were so marked by the blood would be spared from the judgement on Egypt. The Israelites were commanded to repeat this on the anniversary of the event, the Ides of Nisan, perpetually. 

The Israelites, celebrating the Passover every year, looked back to how God had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. The Passover, however, and the deliverance it commemorates, also looked forward to the greater act of deliverance that would inaugurate the New Covenant promised in the Old. Just as the physical bondage of the Israelites in Egypt depicts the spiritual bondage to sin which has held the human race captive since the Fall, so the killing of the lamb depicts the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who offered Himself up as the one, true, and final sacrifice that would effectively remove man’s sin as a barrier between man and God. St. Paul, who in his epistle to the Hebrews explains how all Old Testament sacrifices are types of Christ and how Christ is the final sacrifice that once and for all accomplished what all previous sacrifices could only illustrate, spells this out in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth when he writes “For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7). 

This context is essential to understanding what the Lord was saying when He instituted the Eucharist, and in that context His words make perfect sense. After the lamb of the Old Passover was slain, and the protection of its blood was applied to the door of the home, the flesh of the lamb became the meal which the family ate. The Passover was not complete without the eating of the lamb. In the Eucharist, God offers the flesh and the blood of the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” as food and drink, in a way that unites all the different sacrifices and offerings of the book of Leviticus. Read through the book of Leviticus and you will see what I mean. Apart from the various sacrifices and burnt offerings in which an animal was killed, there were grain offerings or oblations – called “meat offerings” in the Authorized Bible – of flour and oil, or of unleavened cakes made of the same, and drink offerings or libations of wine. Through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, corresponding to the oblations and libations of Leviticus, the flesh – and even the blood, which, of course, was never consumed in the Old Testament – of the one true Sacrifice become the food and drink which nourishes the souls and spirits of the faithful in perpetuity. 

When considering how the temporal shadows of the Old Testament depict the eternal verities revealed in the New – how anybody can read the eighth through the tenth chapters of Hebrews without recognizing that St. Paul was a Christian Platonist is beyond me – the differences are often as striking and significant as the correlations. We have noted one such difference already – that there was no drinking of the blood along with the eating of the flesh in the Old Testament, and, indeed, there was a strict prohibition of the consumption of blood which was the only dietary restriction to be carried over into the Church by the decree of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem after the conversion of the Gentiles. The offering of the blood of Christ as drink through the wine of the Eucharist stands out, therefore, as the sole Scriptural exception to this rule. This, of course, corresponds to the most obvious way in which Christ’s one final and true sacrifice is the sole exception to the Scriptural prohibition on human sacrifice. 

There is only one example in the Old Testament of God commanding a human sacrifice. (1) That can be found in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis and is the familiar story in which Abraham is commanded to take his promised heir, Isaac, to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys the command, but is stopped from killing his son at the last minute by a voice speaking from heaven. This had been a test of Abraham’s faith, a test which he passed and was rewarded with a magnification of the promises of blessing which he had previously received in earlier chapters. Multiple allusions to Christ are evident in this chapter. Abraham, in answer to an inquiry from Isaac, expresses his faith and speaks prophetically when he says “God will provide Himself a lamb.” It is a ram, not a lamb, that is sacrificed later in the chapter, for the ultimate fulfilment of the prophecy awaited the coming of Christ, the Agnus Dei. In the repeated praise of Abraham because “thou hast done this thing, and not withheld thy son, thine only son” there is a hint of exactly how God would ultimately “provide Himself a lamb.” It is, of course, in the coming of Christ, that the promise that all the nations of the world would be blessed through Abraham is finally fulfilled. 

Elsewhere in the Old Testament human sacrifice is strictly prohibited. The Israelites are forbidden from practicing it in the Mosaic Law and are told that this is one of the abominations that is bringing divine judgement upon the nations that preceded them in Canaan. The apostasy that later brings the judgements of the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Captivity upon Israel involves their lapsing into pagan idolatry including human sacrifice. 

To understand why Christ’s sacrifice was acceptable and, indeed, the only truly efficacious sacrifice, when all other human sacrifice was condemned as abominable, it is helpful to observe the reversal of direction that occurs in the New Testament. Sacrifices in the Old Testament were called offerings. Whether the offering consisted of animals – lambs, rams, doves, etc. – flour and oil, or wine – it was something that the faithful brought to God. This was the ancient concept of a sacrifice. It was dutifully brought to the altar by the faithful as a tribute owed and dutifully offered up to the deity by the priest. The direction was always upward.  

While the sacrifice of Christ does fit this pattern when the participants are correctly identified, as we shall see momentarily, the New Testament sets it in the context of the Gospel where the overall direction runs the other way. Repeatedly in the New Testament Jesus Christ is depicted as God’s gift to mankind. The most beloved words in all of Scripture are “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” While the Incarnation as a whole is what is meant by the giving of God’s Son, that there is a focus on His death as the atoning sacrifice is evident from the verse that immediately precedes the one just quoted. 

In the old sense of the word sacrifice, a tribute which man offers to God, human sacrifice was an abomination. God repeatedly rejected even the sacrifices He Himself had ordained if they were offered in a wrong spirit, and He regarded the ritual slaying of other human beings as a crime crying out for His wrath and judgement. Christ’s death, insofar as it was an act for which other human beings were responsible, whether it be the disciple that betrayed Him, the religious leaders that conspired against Him, the Sanhedrin that unjustly condemned Him, the mob that howled for His Crucifixion, the Roman magistrate who knowing Him to be innocent signed His death warrant to appease said mob, or the soldiers who cruelly beat and crucified Him, was most certainly a crime. When God accepted it as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, it was not as an offering from the hand of other men. The Victim Himself was the High Priest Who offered Himself on behalf of the sinful world, by knowingly and meekly submitting to this injustice. Indeed, since Jesus Christ was God as well as Man, He was simultaneously the Priest, Victim and the Recipient of the offering. 

This is why Christ’s sacrifice accomplished what no other sacrifice could do. Sinful man, bringing his tributes to God, had nothing to offer Him which could atone for his trespasses and rebellion. Only God Himself, Incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ, could make such an offering and that offering was Himself. While Christ in His Crucifixion offered Himself up to God as the true sacrifice which took away the sins of the world, His having come into the world to do so was itself a gift in the other direction, from God, in His infinite goodness, mercy, and grace, to sinful man. 

This same reversal of direction can be seen in the Eucharist. In the Old Testament the grain offering was brought to the altar, a portion was burned, and the rest became bread reserved for the priests. The drink offering was poured out in its entirety upon the altar. Under the New Covenant, the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar, and then distributed among clergy and laity alike, as the means whereby the whole Church partakes of the Body and Blood of the true Paschal sacrifice, Jesus Christ. 

It seems incredible that anybody at all familiar with the Old Testament and the book of Hebrews could make the mistake of disconnecting Jesus’ discussion of Himself as the Bread of Life with its vivid imagery of eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel from the Eucharist and interpreting these references as meaning nothing more than the reception of the verbal communication of the Gospel message. It is not surprising, however, that those who do make this mistake are the same people who think that going to Church is an academic exercise in which the important and essential part is hearing a lecture, and everything else is just cosmetic trimmings, the less of which there are the better. Such people belong to the class of Protestant that we have had cause to consider in the context of other issues recently, who see their Protestantism as a rejection of the Catholic and not just the Roman. This kind of Protestantism always swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction of Rome. Whereas the early Reformers, who merely rejected the Roman and not the Catholic, rightly took exception to the papacy’s claim that Christ’s sacrifice, clearly stated by St. Paul to have been offered up once and for all, is re-offered on the Eucharistic altar, this other kind of Protestant goes to the extreme of rejecting the Scriptural and Catholic doctrine that the faithful are fed in perpetuity by that Sacrifice through the Sacrament. Whereas Dr. Luther and the other Reformers rejected the papacy’s explanation, derived from Aristotelian philosophy, of the Sacramental Presence of Christ because it went too far and asserted the post-consecration absence of the bread and wine, this other kind of Protestant tends to reject the Sacramental Presence altogether, or to explain in in some way that is just as nonsensical as transubstantiation. 

What is truly puzzling is that in this present crisis in which Satan, through his demon-possessed minions among bureaucratic practitioners of the modern-day witchcraft of medical science, successfully shut down the Churches around the world back at the beginning of Lent and has kept them closed for months, allowing them to re-open only if they met insane and anti-Christian requirements such as restricting their numbers, which translates into the thoroughly unchristian practice of turning people away from Church, or admitting people only if they agree to wear the devil’s diaper on their face, the strongest opposition to all of this nonsense has come mostly from the kind of Protestant who believes the Bread of Life is communicated only verbally, and who thus logically ought to have the least objection to being forced to do everything online. 

Surely it is time for those with the Apostolic ministry who recognize that it is through the Eucharist that the Bread of Life is communicated to the faithful to speak out against this Satanic oppression. 

(1) However we understand Jephthah to have fulfilled his rash vow in the book of Judges, there is certainly no command from God that he sacrifice his daughter in the text.

The Meaning of the Mask

 

Last fall, a virus that was common enough among Chinese bats managed in some way to jump to humans in Wuhan, the capital and largest city of the province of Hubei in China. The question of exactly how, whether it involved mad scientists working in a lab, a plot by the Communist dictatorship in Beijing, or merely the barbaric cultural practices of the notorious “wet markets”, became a topic of hot debate. The virus, which usually produces either no symptoms at all or a disease indistinguishable from the ordinary flu, can, like all other colds and flus, turn into a potentially fatal pneumonia under certain circumstances.  In this case, the pneumonia is the particularly nasty form known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, first identified almost twenty years ago. Those who are above retirement age and who have two or more other serious health conditions are, as with other colds and flus, the ones most at risk from this virus. By the end of January, the virus had spread beyond China, in this case definitely due to malfeasance on the part of the Chinese authorities who had sealed the inflected province off from the rest of their country while deliberately allowing international travel in and out of Hubei. In March, the hopelessly corrupt and Communist-dominated World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus to be a “pandemic”, a truism, since the word “pandemic” simply means that an infectious disease is being experienced around the globe, like every seasonal cold and flu. The mob, however, never noted for its ability to think clearly – or at all – influenced by the malice of the media, took the word to mean something along the lines of “the next Black Death” or “the super-flu from Stephen King’s The Stand” and dropped the dem from pandemic turning it into a panic. 

Governments around the world, seized on the opportunity to give dictatorial powers to their public health officials, who of all bureaucrats are the least worthy of enhanced powers of any sort since they are medical doctors, who have long had the reputation of having the highest percentage of tyrannical, full-of-themselves, jerks of any of the professions. Those public health officials, proceeded to live down to this highly negative assessment of their character, and imposed an experimental and thoroughly draconian new form of quarantine on most countries. Whereas traditional quarantines are imposed upon the symptomatic and those known to have been in contact with the symptomatic, for a set and limited time, this new quarantine was imposed upon everybody, healthy and sick alike, for an indefinite period of time. 

In imposing this new form of quarantine, the public health officials issued “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders, closed all public facilities, and shut down all businesses except those which sold groceries and medicine or were otherwise arbitrarily declared to be “essential” by these autocratic “experts.” These measures were generally called “lock-downs”, although many of us who had more sense than to be in favour of them referred to them as “house arrests”. Both terms evoke the image of a police state. They caused immeasurable damage – economic, psychological, spiritual, and, yes, physical, for the medical health profession used the pandemic as a pathetic excuse to fail in the treatment of non-COVID-related conditions – as many of us, right from the onset, could and did say would happen. 

After a couple of months of this nonsense, the public health tyrants began to slowly ease up on these restrictions. Businesses were allowed to re-open, provided they followed a long list of new regulations aimed at promoting “social distancing” within their buildings. The number of people allowed to gather for social functions was gradually increased. Restaurants were given permission to re-open their dining rooms at a reduced capacity.

In a famous scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the character of Johnny Fontane, widely believed to have been based on Frank Sinatra and portrayed in the movie by Al Martino, goes to his godfather – in this case, in the literal sense, as well as the more obvious one given the nature of the story – the title character of Don Vito Corleone, portrayed by Marlon Brando. The crooner whines and complains that the head of a motion picture studio won’t give him the film role he needs to salvage his career. Don Vito, after slapping him and telling him to act like a man, advises him to go home, eat and rest, and in a month he would have the role. When Fontane says that this is impossible because they start shooting in a week, Don Vito utters in response one of the most familiar lines in all of cinematic history “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The audience had been tipped off in advance to the double meaning of this phrase when, only a short time prior to this, the Don’s youngest and favourite son, Michael, played by Al Pacino, had used it in explaining how his father conducted his business to his girlfriend Kay, played by Diane Keaton. Later in the film, it is made quite clear when the studio executive, after telling Don Vito’s consigliere Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall, that Johnny Fontane would never get that role, wakes up one morning to find the head of his very expensive race horse lying beside him. 

In the midst of the far-too-slow re-opening of our countries, those who took all of our rights and freedoms away from us back in March made us an “offer we can’t refuse”. We can have our lives back, they said, and everything else they took from us, we can see our friends and families again, we can have access to public facilities again, we can go to Church, the library, the movies, etc., and basically resume our normal lives, provided we wear a mask. 

It is truly appalling to see the extent to which the public have taken them up on this offer. I am not referring merely to the number of people who have started wearing masks, even out of doors, but to the enthusiasm with which they have embraced the making masks mandatory. It makes one wonder whether anyone reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four anymore. Those of you who have read that classic dystopian warning against totalitarianism will perhaps recognize the part of the novel to which I am alluding. In Orwell’s novel, the totalitarian state in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives, is entitled Oceania, a vast super-state and one of three between whom the world is divided, an allusion on Orwell’s part to James Burnham’s theory that the world was headed towards a geopolitical realignment around three regional loci of power. The extent to which the state of Oceania, represented by the figure of Big Brother, controls the thinking of its citizens is illustrated by the fact that at any given time, Oceania is allied with one of the other two super-states, Eurasia and Eastasia, and at war with the other. When the identity of the ally and the enemy switches, the Ministry rewrites history, and the controlled populace accept against the evidence of their own memories that “we were always at war with Eastasia.” The relationship between the totalitarian regimes of Orwell’s own day, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, which went from being enemies to being allies to being enemies again all within a short space of years, was, of course, the inspiration for this. 

Interestingly, a similar sort of mind-control in which someone is made to affirm contradictory propositions can be found in William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, where it was put to comic rather than political effect. In that comedy, the Paduan nobleman Baptista Minola has vowed that he will not allow his younger, more pleasant, daughter Bianca to marry, until her older sister Katherina does. This is not an easy hurdle to overcome because Katherina, the shrew of the play’s title, has driven away all prospective suitors with her acerbic tongue. Hortensio, however, one of Bianca’s suitors although not the one that ends up with her, talks Petruchio, who is looking to marry a rich wife and live off of her fortune, to court Katherina. Petruchio is successful both in his courtship and subsequently in his efforts to tame his sharp-tongued bride. At the beginning of the fifth scene of Act IV, Petruchio and Katherina are travelling to her father’s house, and Petruchio comments about how bright the moon is shining. While Katherina initially points out that it is the sun, Petruchio insists that it is the moon, and that he won’t go any further with her unless she agrees. She declares “Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,/and be it moon, or sun, or what you please:/An if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.” “I say it is the moon” he replies, to which she says “I know it is the moon” only to hear “Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun”, to which she says:

Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: 

But sun it is not, when you say it is not; 

And the moon changes even as your mind. 

What you will have it named, even that it is; 

And so it shall be so for Katharina. 

The mask-wearing populace of today resembles both the citizens of Oceania and Katharina in their willingness to accept the necessity of masks today, even though it is coming from the same experts and authorities who told us not to wear masks back in February, March and April. 

This is not a matter about which the body of knowledge could have grown sufficiently within a short period of months to justify a complete turn-around on evidentiary grounds. This particular virus may be new to humans, but the effects of masks on the transmission of viruses has been studied for years. Either the experts were lying to us then or they are lying to us now. Either way, it completely undermines any notion that they deserve to be trusted with the sort of absolute control over our lives that they have exercised since March. 

As far as the efficacy of masks as preventatives of viral transmission goes in itself, the data largely confirms what common sense tells us. There are masks designed to prevent viral transmission and there are masks which are not. The latter, which are the kind that are being made mandatory almost everywhere, are ineffective at preventing the spread of viruses. If air can get through the mask, a virus can. Since the corollary of this is that an effective anti-viral mask will prevent airflow, such masks are not safe to be worn by anybody long term – unless, of course, we are talking about some kind of Darth Vader type apparatus that provides you with a non-external source of oxygen, which obviously we are not. Non-anti-viral masks are effective at preventing the spread of larger particles, which may contain viruses and transmit them through other-than-airborne means and this is what most of the memes and videos and articles in support of masks concentrate on, but the slight benefit in slowing transmission gained in this way, hardly constitutes grounds for justifying forcing everybody, including the asymptomatic, to wear these things. 

The efficacy of masks is not really the issue, however. If it were, and masks were incontrovertibly effective, what we would be hearing is advice to consider wearing one if we are experiencing either a) anxiety about contracting the virus or b) symptoms. This is not what we are hearing. The argument we are hearing from the pro-maskers is that although the masks probably won’t keep you from getting the virus they may prevent you from spreading it so they provide a protection against the virus but only if everybody wears them. This, however, is an argument that is clearly not derived from fact and logic, but crafted to support its end, which is the shoving of masks down everybody’s throat. 

The real issue, therefore, is what the masks represent. Earlier this year, the public health officials, and the politicians who gave them their power and seat and great authority, took away from us our lives and livelihoods, our friends and families, our basic rights and freedoms, showing thereby that in their opinion these were not ours but theirs to give and take away from us as they so choose. Now they are offering all that they took away from us back on the condition that we wear the very masks they told us not to wear half a year ago. We are threatened, if we do not comply, to have everything that had been left to us at the beginning of the lockdown – such as being able to buy or sell groceries - taken away from us. The masks are not, therefore, tickets out of the oppression of the lockdown. They are symbols of the very tyranny and totalitarianism behind the lockdown. The insistence that we wear them is a demand that we acknowledge the claims of that tyranny and totalitarianism and wear a sign of our submission and obedience on our faces. 

In the masks, therefore, the oppression of the lockdown, has been taken to a whole new level. It has increased rather than decreased, grown greater rather than less.   The masks are not there to give us our lives back, as some internet propaganda would suggest, but to force us to grant our approval to their having been taken from us int he first place.

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.