America’s Refusal to Lift Lockdowns Shows We’ve ‘Gone the Way of Cain, Balaam’
We have experienced a lengthy time of single-minded adherence to alarmist, scaremongering scientism. This is due to the excessive belief that the “scientific” understanding of disease is the only relevant issue, providing exclusive access to the truth whilst ignoring any other factors.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Allysia Finley observes that “Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. ‘We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,’ California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. ‘Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,’ she wrote in an op-ed.
“But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to ‘science’ are transparently political or ideological,” Ms. Finley commented. One of the dissenters tarred and feathered by the main street media clique is John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, of health research and policy, and of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists, having published more than 1,000 papers.
“In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. … Chief among them was a study by modelers at Imperial College London, which predicted more than 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the U.S. absent ‘any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.'”
Calling it a “quest for very urgent, spectacular, exciting, apocalyptic results,” Dr. Ioannidis considered that “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”
Another dissenting voice is Johan Giesecke, a Swedish physician and professor emeritus at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. One of the world’s most acclaimed epidemiologists, Dr. Giesecke asserts, “The measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based, and when you start looking around for the measures being taken now by different countries, you find that very few of them have the shred of evidence base.”
“The only measure ‘we know’ will work is [that] washing your hands is good for you and good for others when you’re in an epidemic, but the rest, like border closures, school closures, social distancing, there’s almost no science behind most of these.”
In light of this, the foolhardiness of government bureaucrats, categorically timorous political leaders and blatantly biased epidemiologists is beginning to show.
Unscrambling the political landscape, Tucker Carlson pronounced: “Dissent has been banned, and that ban is relentlessly enforced by the willing stooges in our media, who have finally stopped pretending they don’t hate you. They definitely do.
“What country is this? Well, it’s a country in a lockdown.
“We’re told we have no choice but to stop our lives completely. Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives; but that’s a lie. They don’t know it’s true, despite what they claim. There’s no scientific record to consult, it’s never been done.
“We are currently living through the largest and most expensive experiment ever conducted in human history. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and crushed millions of [people’s lives], purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus.”
On the basis of guesswork of titanic proportions and media fanning the flames of panic, 27 million people have lost their jobs. Moreover, the mania has led pliant politicians to irresponsibly charge an extra $2.5 trillion to America’s credit card, on top of the already $24 trillion debt.
As we wrote recently, government spending is just another word for private sector spending, orchestrated by politicians. Those doing this to our country should be voted out of office in November. And let’s not forget that we also need to remove the unelected bureaucrats whose faulty advice largely precipitated this fiasco.
In answer to Tucker Carlson’s query of what country this is, we hold that America has “gone in the way of Cain and run greedily after the error of Balaam for reward” (Jude 1:11).
It has done so by abandoning the Judeo-Christian, biblically based culture laid down by its Founders. Given their understanding of human nature as irretrievably sinful and under God’s curse, they included checks and balances based upon Scripture in their design of society.
America’s miraculous rise notwithstanding, 20th-century secular atheistic educationists barged in, imparting to the last three generations the humanistic worldview that human nature is predominantly upright and in good standing with its Maker.
Genesis 4:1 describes Cain as a “man from the Lord.” Destitute of any adequate sense of sin, or need of atonement, however, he was self-willed and rejected God’s way. In a land where atheist secularists have removed God from public education and the culture, modern, apostate America has “gone in the way of Cain.”
To rectify the situation, two things need to be done:
- Prayer must be restored to the American marketplace by “God’s people, called by God’s name, humbling themselves and turning from our wicked ways” (see 2 Chr. 7:14).
- Evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians have to take their “civics” game to the next level. Religious liberty will be won by prayer and organizing. Sunday sermons alone are not enough.
If America is to experience a 21st-century spiritual awakening, it will obviously require a model completely different from the one advanced over the last century. Today’s American Christendom is doing very well materialistically. It has publishing houses, Christian television and Christian radio. It can count on Christian royalty, GMA Dove Awards and National Religious Broadcasters. It has achieved prominence, popularity, position, profit, acclaim, applause and White House visits. And yet, all it has is a teeny-weeny stick to powerlessly swing with in the community and culture. Jude 1:11 refers to it as, we “have run greedily in the error of Balaam for profit.”
As an example of the minimal influence, we once again refer to the Greater Dallas area church with tens of thousands of members and a multimillion annual budget. When the City Council bestowed in a 5 to 3 vote “special rights” upon pro-LGBT activists, all with the backing of the city’s republican mayor, an evangelical leader threatened the mayor with the words, “We’ll see you in November.” Raising $318,000 for his reelection, the mayor was reelected with a total of 14,180 votes. This was in spite of the presence in the city of one of America’s largest churches, with a high-profile Christian school, 45,000 church members and a $70 million annual budget.
To survive, we must return to Jesus’ kingdom assignment found in Matthew 16:18. Expressly present in the public square, outside of the four walls of the church building, His ekklesia stands where “the gates of Hades shall not prevail.”
At just the right time, Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand.
