Pre-covid, I was part of a group that volunteered at a local medium security prison to offer chapel services to a self-selecting group of men. There was a reputational cost to those who participated and we were not in control of which section of the prison we were sent to. This meant that we rarely got the same folks turning out each week.
Normally we would enter a room, set up chairs and the guards would bring in ten or so inmates to participate in the singing and then listen and challenge our discussion. It was fun with lots of laughs. On one occasion, a sense of darkness descended as the guards brought two inmates in. We had a good discussion but the sense of gloom was palpable and we were subsequently told that these two guys had finished their sentences for murder in a maximum-security prison and were starting their transition to life outside. Our sense of gloom was not based on an inherent fear of or prejudice against murderers because, at the time, we had no way of knowing their crimes.
In a similar vein, I heard an interview with evangelist Sean Feucht in which he described the deep sense of heaviness and gloom that he felt when standing in the rotunda of the US Capitol building in Washington DC. He did not offer any rationale for that feeling but insisted that it was real and was not mediated by an inherent hatred of adversarial politics.
About a month ago I read an essay from a friend that offered the following observation about the recent covid experience1;
“We've all probably seen a movie or TV show where the barn catches fire, and someone rushes in to free the animals trapped inside. I think that's why it was puzzling to me when, during the Covid barn fire, the reaction of the elites was not to let the horses run free, but to insist that they stay in the barn and let the experts manage the fire. This reflected a rather breathtaking - even religious - level of confidence in "the experts", especially given all the uncertainty.”
I can’t speak for others, but I found the entirety of the covid experience to be a prolonged episode similar to my dark experience in the jail. The covid years were typified by a feeling of gloom and heaviness like being covered by a wet, smelly blanket. In contradistinction to the heaviness of the covid lockdowns, the actions of the truckers was like the fresh breeze of rediscovered freedom. The psychic sunshine the truckers offered was immensely cathartic to me. I recognize that others have quite different views of the trucker convoy and I am not interested in debating whether the convoy participants were right or wrong. I am just describing my reaction to what they did.
So, what is the point of all this? I heard a phrase recently used to describe the strange events of the past seven or eight years.
“It is almost like we are ripening toward something.”
Did Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl have the same feeling as they contemplated the excesses of the German Nazis? Did Martin Luther see over this ripening hill as he stood before Charles V at the Diet of Worms? Was this a feeling shared by Catholics and Protestants alike as the flames consumed them at the stakes erected in English village squares? Here I stand, I can do no other…
What might we be ripening towards? The signs of some kind of ripening are getting hard to miss. Balloons being shot from the air by high tech missiles. Politicians discussing the potential use of nuclear weapons to prove a point in a far-off country. Failing infrastructure leading to potentially catastrophic loss in rural US communities. Uncertainty about the definition of “woman” with social censure guaranteed for those who have temerity to say that we are what our genes tell us we are. Once trusted social institutions caught spying on those they are meant to protect and even participating in seditious acts to advance undefined programs. Children being given irreversible surgeries without the knowledge or approval of their parents. Chinese operatives influencing Canadian elections and the government ignoring the warnings or the censure. Growing calls to depopulate the world so that superior species like dolphins can flourish. (You go first by the way.) China needing to be destroyed before it occupies Taiwan even though such occupation is official US foreign policy and arguably fifty percent of Taiwanese want to become a part of China. Are we ripening toward something?
I think we are and by this I don’t mean that Klaus Schwab and his minions are going to enforce a Great Reset and make us eat bugs. This might be what they want of us - I don’t know - but that is not going to be what happens, in my view. People like Jordan Peterson argue that we are living in a vacuum of truth and that we need to find the courage to stand for the truth/Truth that sets us free. His argument is a good one, but I think the issue goes deeper than this.
In 2008 I participated in an interesting exploration of how “worldview” gives us a useful construct for understanding the times in which we live. One of the speakers spoke about the centrality of Genesis 1:26-28 to an understanding of our world,
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
He made the outrageous claim that if the Bible ended there, it would be enough to have created the ethical and moral system of the western world. And I agree with him. What we have lost over the past few decades is an understanding of the transcendence of human life because it is formed in the image of God.
The Biblical writer thinks we are made equal in potential as human beings but notice there is no guarantee of outcome equality nor any discussion of race or gender. Perhaps the author wants men and women to ripen towards building a multi-racial garden and have fun while they do it. But that is not what others would have us ripen towards. This other ripening seems to be a darker sort of thing.
What, for example, is the healthcare system ripening us towards? We have learned over the past three years that there is a shifting paradigm for the delivery of medical services. It used to be that I went to the doctor when I was sick and was concerned that an aspirin might not do the trick. By contrast, during covid I was assumed to be sick until I could provide proof that I was, in fact, healthy. And the proof I had to provide was based on a technology that was not intended for the purpose to which it was directed and was verifiably inaccurate. If you think I am being harsh, read what this American doctor says2,
Events of the past three years highlighted an even more ominous problem. Physicians jettisoned their souls and became felons as they shilled for their new gods. They hacked off body parts of confused minors. They foisted dangerous drugs—remdesivir and gene shots—upon us without informed consent, that is, the transmission of truthful information about risks, benefits, and alternatives. Some practitioners even refused treatment to those unwilling to acquiesce.
Doctors and medical boards are many things, but stupid is not one of them. So why the shift in the definition of “wellness”? Do they want us to ripen towards something?
Can it be that they have discarded the Judeo-Christian belief in the intrinsic value of individuals in favour of a technocratic belief in the unique ability of the self-appointed few to finetune the human species through mRNA gene therapy, artificial general intelligence, and chip implant prostheses? If this is so, then their thinking is just a throw-back to the gnostic challengers of the early church. Does this new medical and scientific clerisy believe that their superior knowledge elevates them into an all-knowing elite? Remember that one of the high priests declared that he was, in fact, Science. And that high priest had a boss who claimed that, Canute-like, he would roll back the seas.
To beat an old drum, the transhumanist project is doomed to failure because Dr. Fauci and Yuval Harari and their friends have cork screwed themselves into an incorrect worldview. It is a worldview that is not science-based but rather is a gnostic-religious effort to invert and pervert God’s image in humanity. Are they correct that we are just hard drives that need a periodic “reboot” or antiviral “wipe”? Can they heal society by mandating their version of health? Can they eradicate the mental toxicity of “wrong think” by canceling Twitter accounts and imposing QR codes? Are we all equal but some are more equal than others?
It seems we have walked off this cliff before. Didn’t the Nazis attempt to purify and heal the German volk by killing those deemed to be sick or subhuman? We do well to remember that the Nazi experiment was conducted under the emergency powers of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Enabling Act of 1933. Hitler’s totalitarian regime wasn’t legitimized by new constitutional legislation. What he did was legal! The necessary legislation was already in place – as it continues to be to this day.
If one is inclined to believe that the covid episode was a ripening toward something, then one must conclude that there is now a technique for remotely creating a mass psychosis that destroys individual autonomy even as it isolates the individuals. That is no small thing.
I believe that there is a struggle over what we are to be ripened towards. On the one hand we have the historic achievements of the Judeo-Christian worldview positing that, however ovine, we are equally made in the image of God and that we are formed in that image to preserve our individual autonomy while amplifying the creativity of those around us. On the other hand, we have the well worn Gnosticism of the totalitarians who profess a higher knowledge that will purge the defects from humanity. What they don’t recognize is that it is these defects which make us human even as we aspire to faithfully bear the image of our Creator.
The two concepts or worldviews in the struggle are quite different. I believe that history is on the side of individual humanity and the Imago Dei rather than the faceless mass of technocracy. Resolving the struggle is going to be deeply aggravating but the end is perhaps closer than we think.
https://www.keithlowery.com/humans-have-privilege/
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-profession-formerly-known-as-medicine/