Malone writes, A Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) request by Blaze Media has revealed that the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) through the CDC has spent one billion tax dollars on propaganda to push the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines and to stop "misinformation." The money was given to ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times (the mainstream media), who have not disclosed that their articles and journalists were funded by taxpayers. This campaign was a national push to improve public "trust," using fear-based articles to threaten the population, promote the safety and efficacy of the gene therapy based COVID-19 vaccines, and defame those deemed as critical of the endeavor. Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming. Skyhorse, 2022. kindle, p. 42.
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Mathison says, The statement “All truth is God’s truth” is consistent with Reformed theology because if something is true, it is because it has been revealed by God, because it is an accurate understanding of the nature of something created by God, or because it is an accurate description of something decreed by God. In other words, a God-centered view of truth demands that we affirm that all truth is God’s truth. That which is true is true because God said it, created it, or decreed it. A Reformed Approach to Science and Scripture. Ligonier Ministries, 2013. Kindle, p. 13.
At the beginning of each trimester of school, I write a letter to the parents of my students. Since I want to elaborate here on my blog, I am including the text of the letter below, after which I will add some additional thoughts on science, scientism, and sociological manipulation in the COVID era. Dear Parents, I want to take a moment and spell out some of what I implied in this letter. The point of the letter was to emphasize the importance of keeping Christ as the foundation of science. The only alternative is a descent into chaos. But there is more to discuss in terms of how our culture has neglected Christ and has begun using science as “mere technology” and “sociological manipulation,” going back to Schaeffer’s terms. Mere Technology & Sociological Manipulation By “mere technology,” Schaeffer seems to have in mind scientific innovations and upgrades. Planes will still fly. Stairs and elevators will still take you up or down. Computer systems will still operate on software that will need to be updated to the latest version or to fix glitches and bugs, etc. By “mere technology,” Schaeffer is saying that certain products that are the result of discovery, innovation, and work will still continue to exist and be produced even after the Christian base that brought them forth is worn away. If we acknowledge that we, four decades after Schaeffer’s prediction, are living in a society whose Christian base has been thoroughly eroded, then it is safe to say that Schaeffer was correct. Science is still producing “mere technology” that continues to work. One could press Schaeffer as to whether or not "mere technology" would be able to flourish in a society once the economy of that society was so destabilized by the erosion of its Christian base, but that is another topic for another time. The other, more sinister side of Schaeffer’s prediction is that science would break down into sociological manipulation. I say “break down” because to claim that science would result in sociological manipulation is like saying, “I think science will become propaganda that is used in a utilitarian manner to achieve certain economic or political outcomes.” This indicates a clear breakdown of the proper use of science. The Proper Use of Science I teach my students that science is the study of God’s world and all it contains through observation and experimentation. This very brief definition of science captures the whole of the scientific endeavor and puts our scientific pursuits within proper limits. As soon as science swells beyond these limits to something larger than observation and experimentation, it then becomes something other than science. C. S. Lewis is helpful here: Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, “I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m. on January 15th and say so-and-so,” or, “I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.” Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. [1] Lewis correctly emphasizes the limits of science. We can learn much about God’s world through scientific observation and experimentation. We can even develop theories and laws based on those observations and experiments, yet science cannot be the end-all-be-all of our knowledge. Science cannot be the foundation of our knowledge. Scripture is clear that the only foundation is Christ, for “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Science as Idolatry Our society tells a different story. In our culture, science is lauded as supreme. Science has deposed God as the highest authority and has become the foundation of all knowledge. In biblical terms, we must say that science has become a cultural idol. This means that our affections for science are inordinate and we have sought from science what can only be given to us by God. This idolatry has caused us to allow the field of science to swell far beyond its limits in an attempt to make science speak to all of life's deepest questions. For example, we have pressed the theory of Darwinian evolution past the realm of observation into an alternative explanation for life on Earth. The bucket of Darwin’s theory cannot hold that much water, yet, in our effort to deny the Creator, we have allowed that Darwinian bucket to swell beyond its proper size in an effort to quench our naturalistic thirst. Once you reject the Creator as the foundation for scientific pursuit, you must then make science fill a void that it cannot fill. The irony of this is that as science exceeds its limits it becomes less and less, in a strange twist of fate, scientific. The idolatry of science, often referred to as scientism, has polluted the hearts and dulled the minds of the Western world. This has left us in the West primed and ready to fall prey to "science" used against us as sociological manipulation. We have glorified science to such a degree that we are all too willing to submit to its dictates or the mandates of those who speak in its name. This has been clearly seen in the rise of Anthony Fauci as “America’s doctor” during the COVID Era. COVIDism and Sociological ManipulationReflecting on the scientism taught in public schools today, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin write, It's no wonder that "science" is America's new divine center, with high priests like Anthony Fauci, who can decree the necessity of forced vaccinations and the closing of schools, churches, and businesses--and his disciples will act on his words without question. [2] The term high priest is an accurate term because scientism, and its recent manifestation of COVIDism, has taken on religious expression, as with any idol. One can easily argue that masking, social distancing, and vaccinations function as COVIDism’s sacraments, the visible and sensory signs of one's membership in the communion of those who “follow the science,” or at least who trust Fauci, the man whom to oppose is the same as opposing “the science.” One can also argue that “social distancing” is the truest expression of the communion of “COVID saints.” COVID communion is a kind of non-communion. As Naomi Wolf points out in her book The Bodies of Others, “social distancing” is a kind of Orwellian doublespeak since to be social means not to distance oneself from others. COVID is the epitomic fulfillment of Schaeffer's prediction that science would devolve into sociological manipulation. Yes, the manipulation has been decades running, but the global scale of the COVID propaganda was totally unprecedented. Moreover, the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the government, and the media outlets, including social media, to maintain the narrative and suppress alternative viewpoints should indicate plainly to us that our cultural idolatry of science was used as a weapon against us, manipulating most in the West into receiving a new, experimental “vaccine” based on a technological platform never used in humans on a mass scale before. What we must all reckon with is that the release of this new “vaccine” technology was an end goal of the crisis. Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty stated in an interview, You start with a behavior outcome that you want—a needle in every arm—and the messaging is geared toward getting that outcome at all cost. Very quickly you find yourself engaged in propaganda because it’s not about conveying accurate information, it’s about only conveying information that will give you a particular behavioral outcome. [3] Even the suppression of alternative treatments was in order to ensure that this “vaccine” technology would receive emergency use authorization (EUA), since the preexistence of any alternative treatment would have made the EUA possibility a non-starter. As is stated on the FDA website, “For FDA to issue an EUA, there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.” [4] For this reason only it appears, alternative treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were slammed by top health officials despite their time-proven safety profiles and the success doctors had treating their patients with them. Trials using these alternative treatments were quickly conducted using excessively high (potentially lethal) doses in order to discount their effectiveness at treating COVID-positive patients. I will mention one more point here to support the fact that science was used for sociological manipulation. In connection with the previous paragraph, I must mention vaccine adverse events and the intentional suppression of known harms. The vaccine manufacturers, the FDA, and the CDC knew that these vaccines would cause more harm than good, yet they proceeded to issue EUA. The following two paragraphs from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are worth quoting in full: Pfizer’s six-month clinical data for its COVID vaccine trials suggested that, while the vaccine would avert a single death from COVID-19, the vaccinated group suffered 4x the number of lethal heart attacks as the unvaccinated. In other words, there was no mortality benefit from the vaccines; for every life saved from COVID, there were four excess heart attack fatalities. Twenty people died of “all-cause mortality” among the 22,000 recipients in Pfizer’s vaccine group, versus only fourteen in the numerically comparable placebo group. (Pfizer was evidently so alarmed by the total number of deaths in its vaccine cohort that it omitted five of them from table S4, and only disclosed them in fine print buried in the body of its report.) That means there were 42.8 percent more deaths in the vaccine than in the placebo groups. Under FDA guidelines, researchers must attribute all injuries and deaths among the study group during clinical trials to the intervention (the vaccine) unless proven otherwise. Under this rule, the FDA must assume people who take the vaccine have a 42.8 percent increased risk of dying. This real-life carnage is the topic of Edward Dowd’s terrifying new book "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 in which he analyzes groups of people–athletes, young medical practitioners, young celebrities, children–who died suddenly in the two years after the vaccine rollout. The data show a 40% increase of death in people of working age (18-64), and Dowd is clear that “[i]t isn’t COVID, of course, because we know that COVID is not a significant cause of death in young people.” The dots are not hard to connect. While the VAERS system currently reports around 35,000 deaths after COVID vaccination, one study that has now been retracted estimated that as many as 280 thousand Americans have been killed as a direct result of COVID vaccination. Some individual reporters estimate higher. One can only suppose that the pressure to retract this study was in effort to maintain the false narrative and get more needles in more arms. Idolatry Unto Death The idolization of science left the Western world primed and ready to be sociologically manipulated into masking, social distancing, and vaccination during the COVID era. Many, Christians included, were all too eager to get vaccinated because they believed what they were told about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. Many also believed that scientific innovation was advanced enough to successfully implement a never-used-before mRNA vaccine platform to mass vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. Only months ago did a Pfizer executive finally reveal that the vaccine manufacturer did not even test to see if their product stopped infection and transmission. Yet, many did not stop to ask such questions because the potency of scientism mixed with heightened fear made most people more than willing to go along unquestioningly with the dictates of the government, media, and regulatory agencies who were manipulating them into receiving a new, experimental product that has now killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, worldwide. Our idolatry has led to death. Before the body count gets any higher, we must resituate science back on the foundation of Christ. The call on the church is not merely acknowledging Christ as King over its spiritual life but over all of life. We must stand firm upon Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and apply that claim to every area in which we live. One application of this call is to identify, disclose, and resist “science” used as sociological manipulation however and against whomever it is manifested. Whether at the hands of the civil authorities, the mainstream media, the pharmaceutical companies, or by all three working in collusion, we must resist sociological manipulation by seeking and speaking the truth at all costs in every situation. Romans 13 and Epistemology The COVID era provided Christians with ample opportunity to reject scientism by refusing to be manipulated by the colluders; yet, many Christians did not have a strong enough epistemological base from which to say, “No, I will not comply!” It was easier for many believers to simply go along because they could not articulate a justification to resist. Due to the scientistic air we breathe, it was easier to find justification for compliance than for non-compliance. Many within the church turned to Romans 13 as the reason that we should willingly go along with masking, social distancing, and vaccination mandates. The argument was that since the government was not mandating anything necessarily sinful, we should comply. But using Romans 13 in this way was a wrong move, since it did not give justice to the original text or context of the passage, and it failed to apprehend the extent to which compliance with the government’s demands constituted a participation in a network of lies and deception. Proper submission to Caesar can never include rendering to Caesar what clearly belongs to God–our bodies and our children’s bodies–especially at a time when that very same Caesar has become a terror to good rather than to evil. Now is the chance to learn from our mistakes and return to Christ as our epistemological base. In the case of COVID, we must first turn from science back to God as the Healer. Psalm 103:3 states clearly that it is God, not science, “who heals all your diseases.” Sometimes God uses the means of medicine and nutrition to heal our diseases, yet our trust must remain in God. In our thinking, we must never shift the power to heal from God to anything else, like “the science.” As soon as we begin believing in the power of science or the innovations of man, we have idolized science and opened ourselves up to sociological manipulation, as I have laid out. But there is more. If Christ is the only true epistemological base, Christians today have the duty to be very skeptical of what is put forth as science by those who do not speak from a Christian base. We should not continue going along with the next thing that science says just because it is what science says. To do so is to maintain a religious belief in science and to add to Christ as one’s final epistemological base. This too opens one up to being sociologically manipulated by those who speak in the name of science. The point I am making ties back in with what I said earlier about science becoming less scientific the more it exceeds its proper limits. The scientific enterprise is built upon a healthy level of skepticism. It is skepticism that drives research and experimentation. Moreover, science is not in the business of proving, but rather disproving hypotheses and theories. Yet, when science exceeds its limits and becomes religious in practice, it loses its inherent skepticism and begins establishing truth claims for its adherents to follow. But science as a religion can provide no real epistemological base for what it is claiming, and therefore, Christians must learn to approach these claims as tenets of a false religion rather than actual scientific fact. Dicta like “Follow the science!” and “The science is settled!” function more like doctrinal statements used to divide the “believers” from “non-believers” than actual derivatives of empirical data. Conclusion We must return to Christ as the base of all knowledge and again set ourselves apart from the world, refusing to participate in its lies, deception, idolatry, sins, and plagues. In Revelation 18:4-5, God calls his people with these words: Come out of her, my people, Christ has set us apart for his purposes, not that we would participate in the ways of Babylon, but that we would be his holy people. We must flatly reject the tenets of scientism and stay grounded on the foundation of Christ, the only sure foundation in whom all things hold together. With the teeth of scientism sunk deep into our culture, it is only right to expect that science will continue to be used as a tool for sociological manipulation; yet, we can and must learn to see and resist this manipulation if we are to live as God’s set-apart people. Only then can we properly herald the coming Kingdom, a Kingdom in which science will forevermore stay within its proper limits, with the Truth of Christ as its foundation. [1] Mere Christianity, p. 22-23
[2] Battle for the American Mind. New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2022, p. 98. [3]https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/10/15/catholic-doctor-takes-up-the-cause-for-natural-immunity-against-vaccine-mandates/ [4]https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/emergency-use-authorization-medical-products-and-related-authorities [5]The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. New York City, NY: Skyhorse, 2021. p. 191 (kindle). Schaeffer and Koop said [O]nce the uniqueness of people as created by God is removed and mankind is viewed as only one of the gene patterns which came forth on the earth by chance--there is no reason not to treat people as things to be experimented on and to make over the whole humanity according to the decisions of a relatively few people. Whatever Happened to the Human Race in vol. 5 The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer. Crossway Books, pg. 288.
The Symptom One of the symptoms of secular humanism is that we have flipped the separation of church and state on its head. Many claim that this distinction requires us to keep our politics free from our religious beliefs. This was not the original intention. The original intent was to ensure that the state never asserted its authority in an improper manner over the church of God. It was a safeguard to ensure that the state retained its moral framework by inviting the church to keep it in check. Just as the national government in America was split into three branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – to create a system of checks and balances, the separation of church and state worked as an additional safeguard to ensure that the civil authorities did not assume too much power. Today, the separation of church and state is used, not to keep the state in check, but rather to keep God and morality out of the public sphere. As Francis Schaeffer noted, Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, and all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state. The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent. It is not rooted in history...It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas. The effort today to make politics completely free from Christian ideas, and therefore morality, is based on a false assumption that the public sphere should be a neutral space. People, however, are never morally neutral. Neither are the laws that govern them. And therefore, neither is the public sphere, no matter how many kinds of people are gathered there. People are moral or immoral, and any attempt to govern them will necessarily reach into the realm of ethics. This means the government is de facto moral or immoral, depending on what laws it establishes and what policies it puts into practice. But the government is never amoral or morally neutral. Laws by definition tell us the way that we “should” behave, the way life “should” go if we stay in bounds. And where there are “shoulds,” there are implied “oughts.” And where there are implied “oughts,” there are morals. The government can’t opt out of ethics no matter how hard it tries. And it should not try. History indicates to us that the harder the state tries to become morally neutral, the harder that attempt backfires. The question is not whether or not the state should be moral or amoral, but rather what kind of morality it will establish and uphold. There are two bases for morality–the law of God and the ever-changing law of man. Two Options The morality of the state will either be based on the law of God or the law of autonomous man. If the government is based on the law of God, it becomes properly subordinate to the law of God and falls into place on the right side of history. If based on the law of man, a different phenomenon occurs. With man as the base of authority, the state over time swells into the supreme authority. It displaces God and, as the final arbiter of what is acceptable or not, begins legislating its own morality, which is inevitably a perversion of and contradictory to the law of God. Think of the Israelites' golden calf or the animals in Orwell's Animal Farm. "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." When God is no longer the King, man's tendency is to vie for power and lord it over each other. Only in Christ and under God’s law can a man truly view all other men as his equal. Any Better Now? If Schaeffer was right forty years ago, what is the current state of the state in America? It is clear that the humanist state and media have not changed their mentality. They have not returned to the original intention of the church and state distinction. Rather, they have gladly assumed greater power and control over the church and general populace, such as the shutdown of churches and other "non-essential" institutions during the COVID lockdowns. There has even been direct collusion between the state and the media to control the thinking of the people in an attempt to maintain and increase centralized power by “controlling the narrative” on issues such as COVID, vaccination, and climate change. One is left to wonder if anything on mainstream media is anything but smoke and mirrors, and many have abandoned various news sources that were previously thought trustworthy. The dictum “Question everything!” is the motto for our day, and for good reason. We are immersed in a culture saturated with propaganda. In response, we must doubt what we see presented to us on screens and compare it critically with what we see and hear in the real world. If we fail to do this, those who control the narrative will continue to become “more equal” than the rest of us. We are not in a better condition than we were in Schaeffer’s day. Our state is much worse and we must live with great discernment. We must deal shrewdly with the world around us, especially with the state, the media, and the large corporations. But apart from this, what do we need? The Solution What we need is a return to Christ, a third Great Awakening. Such a return would move us back into a proper understanding of the separation of church and state. The church, as guided by the Scriptures, once again must be allowed to speak into the state's affairs in order to restrain the state, calling it continually to subject itself to Christ the King. There is only One to whom “all authority has been given in heaven and on the earth” (Mt. 28:28), and His name is not Caesar. Only when we return to Christ will we as a nation be able to regain the “form and freedom” that provide the proper bounds for human life to flourish. We must also be mindful, lest we think that Christ’s authority is purely “spiritual,” that Christ is the One of whom Isaiah prophesied, “The government shall be upon his shoulder” and “of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (Is. 9:6-7). If Christ is King, then we must let him be King and worship him as such. If Christ is King, we must also call Caesar, our presidents, and all the other governing authorities, to assume their place below Christ, to be his servants. The Scriptures are clear: “The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 34:1) It is only when we learn to render to God what is God's–namely, everything, including what is delegated to Caesar–that the fabric of civilization holds. And so here is the call to you, American: Repent and worship Jesus, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Repent and turn back to the law of God.
Machen wrote, A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Christianity and Liberalism, 1923.
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Michael Price - I am a husband, father, poet, and science teacher at a classical Christian school in Memphis, TN. I have three volumes of poetry. New book available now!
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