I know your conscience on the issue is that you sinned by being too quick to judge and therefore now you are going to defer to the experts and civil magistrates on it. I appreciate that that is your conscience. I am not there and neither are many other brothers and sisters in Christ. I don’t know that we should be binding each others consciences here. Get the vaccine, wear a mask, wear two, stay at home, keep 6 feet from everyone, I personally don’t care what you do. But it is when the sheep of our church are being forced to do these things I think we have to stand up.
I don’t agree with this. Initial predictions of millions of deaths and even now after a year and a half we are at 600k out of 328 million people. That is .18% of the population if those numbers of reported deaths are accurate. I find it hard to believe it is when number of flu deaths were almost non existent last year. I would also like to say that my argument has never been with exactly how accurate the predictions of deaths were, some models may have been accurate. My problem is the significance of this number compared with previous plagues and with the response of the government.
I don’t think we were wrong about the predictions of the election. They held off announcing the vaccine till how many days after the election? Was it even a week? It was clear to anyone that the media, the political machine, and the pharmaceutical companies were playing games with a vaccine. If Covid was so dire and vaccines so important to save lives then any day that they held off reporting it till after the election was murderous. Furthermore it didn’t Biden long to claim victory and to use the vaccine as political leverage. To say Covid hasn’t been used to further policies and programs that will harm Christians is beyond the stretch of my imagination. Were some civil authorities working with motivations that were not vindictive? Sure. Where some doing so? Yes. Did some play God and act in reckless ways with their authority? Yes. Gov Andy Besheer and the Mayor of Louisville were some of these. They made a point to go after churches.
Where we wrong about the economy? Remains to be seen. Inflation is coming. I hope we are wrong. But I know more people impacted by loss of job and income than I do by death due to Covid.
Even if you are right, do we really think the best way to win the trust of people who have little trust of the civil government and large multinational corporations is to entrust those groups with power to mandate vaccines? Maybe I am just a conspiracy nut who needs a tinfoil hat, but how does censoring people who have suggested alternatives help build any trust. How does Dr. Fauci sending emails about masks not working to his friends and then telling us they do work supposed to engender my belief in him.
I know I have told you this before, I genuinely want to be the kind of person that if I was alive during WWII would have joined the national effort and made sacrifices for the nation. I want to be a part of helping the common good. As far as I can know my own motives, I do desire to submit to authority and to be part of solutions. But I cannot bring myself to trust the corporate/government partnership that wants to mandate vaccines. Also as someone who has already had Covid, I believe the risks outweigh the benefits of the vaccine to me. I simply do not trust it and it would be a sin against my conscience for me to take the vaccine now. Perhaps I am wrong and my conscience needs better informed. But until then I cannot support mandates.