Category Archives: Death of Truth

The Theology of Vaccine Resistance from Winkler to Arkansas

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, Politics & Religion, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

I doesn’t matter much whether you look at vaccine resistance in Southern Manitoba or the United States. In either case it has some common characteristics.

For one it is often found among conservative religious people and conservative political people. The common denominator seems to be distrust of government. Allan Levine described it this way in the Winnipeg Free Press:

“You can only shake your head in dismay at such distorted thinking. From Winkler to Arkansas, the unvaccinated, who are now petri dishes for the Delta variant and putting themselves and everyone else at risk, explain their untenable decision (apart from the tiny minority with medical reasons) in a variety of ways. This includes everything from fearing needles and concern about insufficient medical data to believing crazy conspiracy theories about the vaccine being a nefarious plot to implant tracking microchips in arms.

Mostly, though, their position is about not trusting government, often combined with fundamentalist religion (as a Winkler resident put it, “I trust in God. I trust he’ll get us through this”), and anti-intellectualism and anti-science.”

 

In both countries the adherents to the theology of vaccine resistance share similar political views based in deep feelings of mistrust about governments. As Levine said:

 

In the U.S., it is no surprise that these sentiments are most prevalent in Republican-dominated states such as Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Wyoming, Florida and Tennessee, where rejecting the effectiveness of the vaccine is official policy — as are the absurd denunciations and threats directed at Dr. Anthony Fauci for his work managing the pandemic and promoting the vaccine (in Florida, the Republican slogan is “Choose Freedom over Faucism” and there are T-shirts emblazoned with “Don’t Fauci my Florida”).

The ideology of vaccine resistance is ultimately based on a rejection of science in favor of fundamental religious beliefs that reject science and evidence based decision making in favor of faith in the cause. For example, in the late 19th century and early 20th century Christians increasingly battled the advocates of scientific reasoning in favor of “truths” learned by faith, which usually involved beliefs that had been inculcated by parents in their children in hopes of assuring for them eternal life and avoiding eternal damnation.

Charles Darwin, perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, developed a theory of evolution by natural selection that had a profound effect on science. His theories were so deep and well argued that they changed the course of history and even religion. Darwin shredded the religious view of the day which presumed that the world we live in was created by God with a divine purpose in mind. This resulted in the igniting of a debate that rocked the 19th century world and continued unabated until at least the famous Scopes trial in 1925.  In many places religious views strained to resist the new science which they felt contradicted their faith. As a result, as Levine said,

“during the summer of 1925 in a small courtroom in Dayton, Tenn., (southeast of Nashville). By then, the very same states whose governments and citizens currently question or reject the vaccine — Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas — had passed legislation banning the teaching of evolution.’

 

Today in southern Manitoba communities like Winkler and Steinbach reflect the same trend—namely, conservative evangelical religion and conservative politics, against modern science.  Both groups give a pass to truth seeking in favour of faith based thinking.

 I  know that some believe this is  opinion controversial if not wrong, but it seems to me that everyday in this pandemic there is new evidence that supports it.

Know Jesus; Know Peace

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, reason, religion, The Sleep of Reason

Winnipeg Free Press Photo August 24, 2021

 

Southern Manitoba continues to lead the way on the stupid Olympics. When Umberto Eco, the Italian author, talked about the invasion of stupid he could have been talking about us.

A Municipal councillor from the Rural Municipality of Stanley, that surrounds the city Winkler, which have the worst and second worst rates of Covid-19 vaccine uptake in Manitoba,  permitted a sign on his property that clearly disparaged the vaccine. It had a graphic of a syringe with the word “Experimental” written inside it referring to the fact that it has been approved on an emergency basis. I don’t think that makes it experimental, but many in our area believe that is what it means. Clearly this was intended to sow distrust in the vaccine among the undecided. Or perhaps to mock those who had taken it. It also had the words “Know Jesus Know Peace” written on it as well. This was a reference to the Black Lives Matter protesters who often carried signs that said, “No Justice No Peace.”

This is dangerous stuff in a Rural Municipality where about only 20% of eligible people have taken the vaccine when we desperately need all the confidence in it that we can get to encourage people to take the vaccine and prevent a deadly 4th wave of the virus that might again overwhelm our health system.  With my wife Christiane finally having a tentative date for her brain surgery we cannot afford to take the chance of another 5 months delay like we just experienced in the 3rd wave. Hopefully the vaccine can help us avoid that, but if everyone was like the people around Winkler we would be in trouble.

 

The sign on the councillor’s property was actually installed by Travis Fehr a local farmer  who told the Free Press that he believes he has important information that indicates the authorities have been hiding a drug treatment for the virus. Presumably that is because the government wants to use the virus to control us.  He has placed other signs in the community that explain “his goal is to spread a religious message that encourages people to trust in God before ‘Pastors, or politicians, or doctors or anybody else.” I suppose when he needs his appendix removed or heart surgery he will trust in God rather than doctors or politicians. According to a local doctor, Don Klassen, there is in his area a common belief that  “a wide network hiding is information about a treatment for Covid from the public.”

Fehr also said, “I believe that God is going to start a fiery revival for Jesus in Manitoba, and so I want to be a part of that. So I do have some signs out there.”

The Free Press also reported that Fehr set up

“a rotating set of messages, including calling the vaccine a “#Clotshot,” suggesting the drug Ivermectin (typically used as a de-wormer for livestock) is a proven successful treatment for COVID-19 and implying the vaccination rollout violates the Nuremberg Code.”

According to the Winnipeg Free Press Fehr gets his vast medical knowledge on “Telegram, a messenger app that touts its privacy features and is known for hosting far-right personalities that are often banned on mainstream apps.”  Again we get that toxic connection between untruth, religion and conservative politics. I wonder why these people hide their cure that would no doubt enable them to earn hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just today I heard that Manitoba Covid-19 cases jumped again. More than twice as many today (105) than yesterday (41). And guess what—almost half of them in Manitoba were from our Southern Health region. Either the Lord doesn’t care about us, or Covid-19 knows where the idiots can be found.

It never ceases to amaze me what people in the Bible belt are prepared to believe. Know Jesus; Know Peace.

Dying or Thinking: Health authorities’ “Agenda”

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Truth Seeking

 

CBS Morning show recently filmed a man in a Louisiana hospital bed recovering from Covid-19.  If I did not know better I would have thought he was in Boundary Trails Hospital l between Winkler and Morden. After a lengthy stay in the hospital as a result of Covid-19, he was about to get out of hospital but still he said he would not get a vaccine. The interviewer asked him why and he responded, he did not want the government to “shove it down his throat.”  When asked what they were shoving down his throat , he said the local, state, and federal governments were all trying to shove it down his throat. The interviewer asked, “what are they shoving the science?’  The patient answered “No they are shoving the fact that this is their agenda. The agenda is to get me vaccinated.” What is so remarkable about this is that he was dead right (not dead yet, but right).  Public health officials do want to get him vaccinated to protect the public, including him.

Excuse the naughty words, but as John Oliver responded to this interview,

“public health officials agenda is to get you vaccinated. And you know what Covid’s agenda is?  To fucking kill you! To burrow into your body, into your hot little mouth, fuck around with your body, flip your nostrils off, make soup taste more like nothing than it already does and then kill you!”

 

Why is no one worried about that agenda?  Because Covid -19 is not the government. And that makes all the difference. Such people don’t trust anything that comes from the government, even if it will save their life.

People like that will never be persuaded.

The vaccine is doing its job. Nearly 100% of patients in hospital beds for Covid-19 are now unvaccinated. It is not perfect. There are some breakthrough cases. But the success rate is astonishingly good and the side effects are surprisingly low. Frankly, for most of us there is no good reason not to take the vaccine and a lot of good ones to take it.

As Bertrand Russell said, “Most people would rather die than think. And most people do.”

 

Anti-vax Insanity

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Politics & Religion, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has written about unreason in relation of vaccines. He also saw that part of the reason for vaccine hesitancy could be explained by reference to their holder’s political beliefs. Unfortunately, in the United States and Canada, Covid-19 has become a hot political issue. This started when Conservatives asserted that they did not believe Covid-19 was real.  This movement was led by Donald Trump the President of the United States who originally said ‘Covid is a hoax’. He believed and convinced many of his followers that left wing liberals were trying to make him look bad and were trying to interfere with their freedoms. As a result, astonishingly, the richest country in the world became the largest victim of covid-19.

Blow summed up the history this way:

“Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.”

 

This is what a world messed up by politics looks like. Every day I hear stories about people who refused to take the vaccine for the feeblest of reasons. Repeatedly people distrust physicians and government officials in favour of something they have “learned” from the Internet or their friends. How can that be?

Blow recognized that religion brought with it unreason in its trail. And that was not a pretty sight:

“The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.”

 

 

The result of course is frequently disastrous. As Blow concluded,

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.“

 

As Goya said,” the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” What else can one expect?

We Should Celebrate Vaccines

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, The Sleep of Reason

 

I heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Late Show earlier this week. Dr. Gupta pointed out that

“vaccines are 90% effective. I don’t think we can celebrate that enough. They were developed so fast and are so effective, it will fundamentally change science. It will change the pace of medical innovation. Those mRNA vaccines may be therapies for cancer in the future.”

 

And yet astonishingly, many people don’t trust them! Not only that, they don’t even want to take them. They are turning their backs on one of the wonders of science! Instead, people turn to ignorant friends for medical advice. They listen to friends who get their information from dubious sources on the Internet instead of these astounding scientists who have been working their hearts out to help us. How can this be?

Vaccines are one of the greatest wonders of modern science. In the 19th century 95% of all people died from infectious diseases. Now in the 21st century only 5% of people die from infectious diseases.  Vaccines are one of the main reasons that people in the 20th century lived twice as much longer as those in the 19th century. And this is mainly because of vaccines.

And yet so many people distrust them. How can this possibly be the case?

I remember when I was a very young lad in the 1950s  polio was the infectious disease that scared everyone. There was a man living down the street from us, half a block away. He contracted polio.  We feared that like so many others he would have to live in an ‘iron lung’ for the rest of his life.  Many patients died. I remember when the polio vaccine was developed and I could hardly wait to get it. It was new technology, like the Covid-19 vaccines, but we all wanted it immediately.

After the introduction of polio vaccines the illness has been virtually eliminated. The last person in the US who contracted the illness naturally died in 1979.

Sadly, many people today don’t believe in the vaccines. They think they are risky.  Some are waiting for the rest of us to take them and test them out like guinea pigs. They want us to blaze a trail for them before they take them.

Many people were surprised at how quickly scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19. I know I was one of them. But there were things I did not know. Scientists have been working on the mRNA vaccines for about 10 years. This was not magical new technology.

Anti-vaxxers used to warn us that vaccines were very dangerous because they required insertion of the virus into our bodies to generate an immune response. That does sound risky doesn’t it?  These technologies don’t do that, they “teach” our cells how to make the proteins that will trigger an immune response to the new coronavirus SARS- CoV-2.  They don’t require the insertion of the virus into our bodies. Anti-vaxxers should be rejoicing! Then our own bodies make the anti-bodies to recognize the virus when it appears in our bodies at a future time.

We should rejoice that we have so many smart scientists to develop vaccines. We should trust them.

 

Vaccine Unreason and the offspring of credulity

Death of Truth, Evangelical Christianity, reason, religion, The Sleep of Reason

I am still trying to understand why so many people are reluctant to use what many scientists consider the greatest medical achievement of modern times–vaccines.  What is going on?

When we give up critical thinking in favour of things like faith, or wishful thinking we can get into the habit of believing crazy things. That is why Patrick Moynhan an American sociologist, politician and diplomat made this very important statement about truth: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” We must always respect truth and the truth-seeking process. If we are not on constant guard to defend this, we can become easy prey for demagogues.  There have been many of them around the world, not just America.  According to author Kurt Anderson, who was interviewed by Charlie Rose a couple of years ago, “Trump in effect says that anything that is inconvenient to me or that I disagree with is, fake news.”  If we give up on all standards of truth, we become dangerously bereft–babes ready for the slaughter.

Anderson also pointed out on the television show with Rose, and in his book FantasyLand, that “America has always been exceptionally religious compared to the rest of the world… Outliers in our religiosity compared to the rest of world, not just a little bit, but a lot. We are not like the rest of the developed world, we are much more religious.” According to Anderson that had radical consequences for America. That made Americans credulous—ready, willing, and eagerly able, to swallow all kinds of fantastic beliefs for which there was no evidence.

Anderson spoke before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was the perfect example of what he meant. Instead of trusting in science, many of us, too many of us, have placed our faith in the Internet instead. That has led directly to catastrophic consequences in our failure to defeat Covid-19. When we experience an international health emergency, as we recently have been,  we need our best defences open to us. That in such circumstances is science–not fanciful Internet “research.”

All of this, as I have been saying for some time, has serious consequences well beyond religion. Anderson put it this way, “Once as a culture you are more inclined to believe in magic, in supernatural events, it won’t stay in its religious realm. It will leach out into not believing in climate change say.” Or it will leach out to distrusting medical experts like Anthony Fauci in favour of demagogues. And that can–as it did–cost an enormous loss of life and health. Credulity has serious consequences.  We are experiencing them now.

 

Kurt Anderson also pointed out how credulity, as bad as it is, can easily be supercharged by what he calls the “fantasy industrial complex.” This includes not just organized religion but everything in the entertainment industry. In the US, he pointed out, everything becomes entertainment. Real estate business for example, becomes entertainment. Everything becomes part of show business. Religious leaders are show men. Politicians are showmen. This fantasy industrial complex uses modern technology skilfully to convince us of dubious truths and bald faced lies. Then the Internet came along and jacked this tendency up to the stars.

As a result, we should not be surprised when ordinary people believe outrageous claims. Ordinary people are part of a culture that leads them to believe without evidence. When critical skills are lost, and we learn to believe without evidence, we turn ourselves over to fake news and the demagogues that take advantage of it.

Disarmed by people who love us

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

So why do so many people reject official doctrine in favor of wild conspiracies? Why are so many of these people evangelical Christians or right-wing zealots, or both?

First there is some evidence that this assumption is true.  In my community, I am sorry to report, vaccine up take has been slow. The  Winnipeg Free Press has recently reported this way about our region (“Falk’s riding”),

“As of Aug. 4, 81.7 per cent of eligible Manitobans have had at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, but the uptake has been much lower in some of the public health districts in Falk’s riding.

In Hanover, which borders Steinbach, just 44.8 per cent of people aged 12 and up have had one shot. The vaccination rate stands at around 60 per cent in Steinbach and further east in the La Broquerie and Ste. Anne area.”

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times described what was happening in the United States:

“A recent Monmourth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”

From such statistics it is clear that our region is not doing a great job at getting vaccinated. Frankly, I am not surprised. I have encountered many people here who are not getting vaccinated. At least not yet.  Most people I know outside our region have no such hesitancy. Why is that?

At the same time my community, and others in southern Manitoba where vaccine uptake has been slow, voters routinely vote for conservatives unless more extreme views are available. What is the connection between the two?

I have a theory. Get ready for it: It is their parent’s fault. What did their parents do you ask?  They indoctrinated them. That was the debilitating sin.  Through indoctrination parents taught their children to listen to them and believe. Forget, about what others say. Forget about what scientists say. Believe what the parents say. When children are young it is important for them to believe their parents. If a parent says the element is hot the child must believe the parent. It is important. And it is important that the parent is always right about such admonishments. Such indoctrination is good, but only for a limited time. It is good only until the child has learned to think independently. But such training can go over the top. And most parents do go over the top. In fact, they go way over the top.

The problem with believing things without evidence that they are true, is that this becomes a habit–a dangerous habit.   Such a habit makes us suckers for every crackpot theory, no matter how outrageous. We are really seeing how that happens now. Someone near and dear to me has been taught by a parent that pedophile Democrats eat babies. This is a wild conspiracy theory promulgated by Qanon, believed by many conservatives as gospel truth. She believes this is true because her parent tells her this is true.  She has also been taught by that parent that vaccines are not trustworthy. She has been disarmed. She cannot think critically about this. We need our critical intelligence to keep the crazies at bay. That job is getting increasingly hard. This is particularly true in times of an international pandemic amplified by disinformation on the Internet Without critical thinking skills we can be hoodwinked easily.

If enough people are so gullible as they currently are this can be dangerous for society. Abandoning Covid-19 vaccines for example, leads easily to too many cases of the disease. In Manitoba our health care system was recently overwhelmed. We were very lucky that Ontario and Saskatchewan were able to take our overflow intensive care patients. What would have happened had those provinces experienced their peak level of Covid-19 cases at the same time as Manitoba? This could have been a disaster. An entirely avoidable disaster because we had the tools to handle covid-19 and too many of us chose to ignore the best instrument of our survival–i.e., vaccines.

This is what happens to a credulous society–like Manitoba–which had too many vaccine hesitants.  Although he wrote the book  before the current pandemic, according to Kurt Anderson, the author of a  FantasyLand, we encountered such  dangerous situations because of  our abandonment of critical intelligence. It has “allowed preposterous thinking all over the map.”  He wrote the book before Covid-19, but it is relevant. Very relevant.

Anderson believes this idea of defanging critical thinking, which we learned at a very young age from our parents, led to the expectation that there is no objective truth and this has seeped into a large portion of American thinking. As Anderson stated, “it is part of the American operating system.”

Anderson said this tendency has been amplified by the arrival of the Internet and as a result “The Internet gave the alternative fact universe its infrastructure.” Part of the problem, says Anderson, is that the Internet through its search engines “rewards the excitingly false.” Instead of truth, the Internet gives us ever wild conspiracy theories. For example, he said, people are attracted to conspiracy theories for the same reason we are attracted to religious speculation.  Both make it easy for us to believe there is a puppet master controlling the world which is an attractive point of view because it gives us a ready made explanation for what otherwise often seems fantastical.

Conspiracy theories make the world seem simpler than it really is.  According to Anderson, “Conspiracy theories make a tidy fiction in the way that reality is not tidy.” Conspiracy theories teach us to ignore science and evidence and instead believe the theorists.

This is the mess into which credulity has thrust us. It is not pretty. Especially in a time of a health crisis this is dangerous stuff.

 

We Should Celebrate Vaccines

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, reason, The Sleep of Reason

 

I heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Late Show recently. Dr. Gupta pointed out that “vaccines are 90% effective. I don’t think we can celebrate that enough. They were developed so fast and are so effective it is astonishing. It will fundamentally change science. It will change the pace of medical innovation. Those mRNA vaccines may be therapies for cancer in the future.”

 

And yet surprisingly, many people don’t trust them! Not only that, they don’t even want to take them. They are turning their backs on one of the wonders of science! Instead people turn to friends for medical advice. They listen to friends who get their information from dubious sources on the Internet instead of these astounding scientists who have been working their hearts out to help us. How can this be?

i know someone who does not trust vaccines, yet she believes that leading Democrats are kidnapping young children and drinking their blood , because she read it on the Internet.  She believes stuff like that rather than leading scientists around the world.

Vaccines are one of the greatest wonders of modern science. In the 19th century 95% of all people died from infectious diseases. Now in the 21st century only 5% of people die from infectious diseases. Vaccines are one of the main reasons that people in the 20th century lived twice as long on average as those in the 19th century. And this is mainly because of vaccines. And yet so many people distrust them. How can this possibly be the case?

Sadly, many people don’t believe in the vaccines. They think they are risky. Some are waiting for the rest of us to take them and test them out like guinea pigs. They want us to blaze a trail while they wait to see if they are safe. I have talked to people who take this approach.

Many people were suspicious of them because of how quickly scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19. I know I was one of them. But there were things I did not know. Scientists have been working on the mRNA vaccines for about 10 years before anyone heard of Covid-19.

Anti-vaxxers used to warn us that vaccines were very dangerous because they required insertion of the virus into our bodies to generate an immune response. That does sound risk doesn’t it. These new technologies “teach” our cells how to make the proteins that will trigger an immune response to the new coronavirus SARS- CoV-2. They don’t require the insertion of the virus into our bodies. Anti-vaxxers should be rejoicing! Then our own bodies make the anti-bodies to recognize the virus when it appears in our bodies at a future time.

This is such amazing technology developed by scientists we should be immensely grateful. Yet too many people are suspicious. while we believe outrageous stuff from the Internet. That is a dreadful pity.