Introduction
The only real science involved in all the corona-panic anymore is the science of crowd control. And however poorly our governments may have done with regard to the virus itself, having run out of rest homes to put the contagious in, they have done a marvelous job when it comes to manipulating and all-round spooking the general population.
Now there are plain indications of significant restiveness here and there, but over all the totalitolerance brigade has gotten away with a whole lot more than I think even they believed possible. They are not interested in the science called virology. It is more like the science of compliance.
But one of the things that has been revealed as a consequence, at least for those who have kept their eyes open, is the exact nature of the end game we are facing. That end game is control—control without brakes, control without limit, control without any system of restraints. Just as Richard Rorty once said that truth is whatever his contemporaries let him get away with, so also human rights (to the current managerial elite) are in that same malleable category. Whatever they can successfully seize must somehow belong to them. Due process is whatever their lap dogs in the media are prepared to let them get away with.
Those Pockets of Restiveness
I have been pleased and surprised at what has started to happen in Canada—things that make me the right kind of proud of my Canadian heritage. Have I mentioned that my mom was from Alberta? No, I am not referring to the Canadian government, which is being every bit as demented and twaddlesome as the government reigning over my place of birth, that being the state of California, which is saying something.
I was rather referring to the patrons of the restaurant in British Columbia chanting at the inspectors to “get out.” I was referring to the Polish pastor in Canada who managed to abbreviate that simple message down to the pithier word “out,” along with a postscript of “psychopaths.” But preeminently I am referring to Pastor James Coates who was imprisoned for refusing to stop preaching. And after he was released, the officials then felt constrained to build a big fence around his church, and they padlocked it. The official guardians of freedom Alberta-style then dispatched 200 cops to keep people from worshiping at the barricade. When this is all over, a lot of pastors need to contemplate what is happening, and then they all need to put on their Coates coats.
In California, the governor has announced they are going to reopen on June 15. They are going to do so despite the ongoing minuscule danger of death. He is doing this, be aware, on account of the recall election breathing down his neck. Millions signed the petition for that recall, those millions being among the remaining Californians who didn’t move to Texas or Idaho.
And then in Florida, their governor has banned vaccine passports, and good on him. He was followed in this by the governor of Texas, and just the other day, our governor here in Idaho did the same thing by executive order. Further, our governor forbade any state agencies from sharing any vaccination status info with anybody, whether private companies or other government agencies. Given how singularly unhelpful our governor was on the whole lockdown question, this stand almost certainly indicates a politician’s sense of some shifting winds.
So, like I said, signs of coordinated resistance developing here and there.
All Downstream from Darwin
People act the way they do for reasons. As Richard Weaver taught us, ideas have consequences.
If you believe in God, if you think that the cosmos was created from nothing, if you believe that mankind was created in the image of God, then it is possible for you to believe that we have rights. And by rights, I do not mean privileges, but rather actual rights. These rights cannot be revoked by bureaucratic fiat, they cannot be abridged by executive order, and they cannot be adjusted or trimmed by the winners of elections, stolen or otherwise.
But if you don’t believe in God, if you believe that this material universe is a meaningless concourse of atoms, if you believe that life originated all by itself accidentally in a primordial goo-pond somewhere, and that we are simply simians that learned to shave, then it follows of necessity that we do not have any rights at all. We are nothing more than meat and bones and protoplasm.
So which is it?
If we were created to reflect the image of God, and if the countenance is the principal place where we are being restored in Christ to reflect that image, from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18), then mandatory mask mandates for all are a huge deal. But if we are the end product of so many blind years of evolutionary groping, with the result that we are just so many ugly bags of mostly water, then putting a small covering over your pie hole is a small thing to ask. It is a small sacrifice, one that enables the other ugly bags of mostly water to pretend that your little submission flag is somehow protecting them.
It is not actually accomplishing that task, but it is accomplishing the thing it was assigned to do, which was to reinforce the hegemonic control lusted after by the ugliest bags of mostly water.
So the real travesty occurs when people who affirm the content of the first scenario, which is that we bear the image of God, decide for some mysterious reason go along with all the dictates of those who affirm the second scenario, which is that we don’t bear any such image, and that we are all so many mere carbon-based survival units.
Like I said, that is the real travesty. And that is why everyone is astonished when a pastor like James Coates stands up and acts like he genuinely believes what he preaches. He acts like a real pastor. No, more than that—he acts like the prerequisite of a real pastor, which is to say, an actual human being.
This, of course, is intolerable for our secular managerial elite, schooled as they have been in all that Ivy League jive. Coates is out there acting like a free man, and the effect on those accustomed to nothing but the shuffling of slaves can be startling.
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
Thomas Sowell
But Let’s Go Back and Review Something Important
Our heritage of law, with its foundation in biblical law, recognizes that the magistrate does have a responsibility for public health. That responsibility brings with it the authority to quarantine or isolate the diseased and contagious. When this is done, there is no tyranny involved at all. When this is done it is an act of responsible authority, not an act of tyrannical overreach. Those who object to such “tyranny” because their personal autonomy was restricted in some way are actually the kind of atomistic individualists who set us all up for this tyrannical nightmare.
To say it again, if you lived in a small town that had a population of 100, and the bubonic plague swept through killing 50, and 30 of the survivors were really sick, the local county magistrates would be out of their minds if they let anyone come out of there. That is not authoritarian—although it is authority.
But if you have the kind of mind that reasons from that scenario to a completely different one, where the whole population is buttoned up, not because of an outbreak of the bubonic plague or the Spanish flu somewhere, but rather because of an outbreak of a respiratory disease with a 99% survival rate, then you are a coward and a poltroon, with the only difficulty being the decision of which of those two words to use on you first.
Suppose there was an outbreak of pickpockets in a city, and the magistrates tried to solve the problem by making everyone with a wallet stay home. And let us say that the White House was contemplating an executive order that would require us all to turn our wallets into them for safekeeping. For good measure, Congress took up a law that would outlaw pockets. What will the pickpockets do then, eh?
The answer is simple. They will continue to run the country. Now they have all the wallets. They will continue to run your life. And they will continue to do so because we continue to let them.
The Way Out
The only way out is through a flat refusal to cooperate. If the managerial elites running this clown show have a worldview that allows them to do whatever they can get away with, the first order of business is to refuse to allow them to get away with any of their enormities.
Christians argue that civic actions are lawful if they are consonant with the character of God as revealed in Scripture. Our law is based on the nature of our God, as revealed in the Word, in the world around us, and in the conscience of man. This foundation is not subject to repeal.
The secularists have no external brake or check. They have no God outside their system because their system is their god. This is why they serve a god of power and control. That means that they deem any actions lawful if they manage to leverage their power in such a way as to control the outcomes. Their system is a system of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and so they act accordingly.
They also serve the father of lies, and hence have no problem with lying. If lying doesn’t work, they won’t do it, but if it does they will. And whether or not it works has nothing to do with whether or not we know they are lying. It is possible for their plan to be visible to us and still work.
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Look. Think about it. We have no business appealing to their god with any hope of getting the kind of determination that we would get if we were appealing to our God.
That was important enough that I really think I should say it a few more times, varying the angle so that it may be seen plainly.
You can’t gather figs from thistles.
You can’t get sweet water from a brackish spring.
You know. You can’t order a Whopper at MacDonalds.
You will not get Christian blessings from pagan gods.
We cannot hope to walk up their mountain and come back down with stone tablets containing a law inscribed by the Spirit of God. No, if we go up their mountain, what will happen is that we will come back down with an idol, one that looks like a carved and grimacing monkey. And why anybody expects to get the deliverance of Jehovah-Sabaoth from that carved monkey I am sure I don’t know.
In the Meantime . . .
In the meantime, for those Christians who think that the way through all of this foolishness is roll over onto our backs, all four paws in the air, in the hope that our secular overlords will deign to rub our tummy, I do have a suggestion that might work for them. Call a special meeting of the church where everyone shows up with a plastic face shield, and with double-masks underneath the face shield. Because an important personage somewhere, and lets make him a cross-dressing tranny in charge of determining what is healthy, has decided that random droplets that might occur while singing to God in worship are a true hazard, you can have everybody simply hum their way through the hymns. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
I propose that you start with “Rise Up O Men of God.”