Worthwhile news on the subject:
Basis of the exemption is that he had acquired immunity by getting Covid-19.
3 Likes
Or they’re less aware of them.
They’re also a little niche (sick with high risk of admission but not sick enough yet to be admitted). We have outpatients report to the ER, call on arrival, and go into a negative pressure room for the infusion.
I think there are medical questions that loom large as well. The emphasis on a vaccine that is, for the young and healthy, seemingly unnecessary, feels strange. True, politics and medicine are now on this issue inextricably intertwined. But I think there were significant medical questions that predated some of the more recent politics of vaccine mandates.
6 Likes
The difference is also the fact that vaccines and masks are being mandated while these other treatments are less known and are not currently being talked about being mandated. There is a huge difference between voluntary medical treatment for sick people and mandating medical procedures for even the healthy.
1 Like
As I said. Political.
Edit: I could expand a bit more by saying that I said the resistance to the vaccines, not the resistance to the mandates. Being resistant to the vaccine is silly if you’re going to tout other options as alternatives that have the same problems you are supposedly concerned about with the vaccine. This is the issue that Mr. Hess is raising, as I understand it.
2 Likes
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.
Is your contention that we miscounted flu deaths as Covid deaths even though literally millions of flu tests have been run and been negative?
Or is your contention that the government is simply lying about how many total people have died of all causes in the last year?
Or is your contention that something other than flu or Covid is the cause of the hundreds of thousands unexpected deaths?
Damned if they release it before it’s fully approved and damned if they don’t, I can understand. But faulting them at the same time for being too early and too late seems a bit far.
1 Like
I have not contended that Covid is made up. It is real. I had it. But I do think there is something fishy going on with the official death toll. A recent Forbes article talking about Covid and the Flu suggested some overlap for the reason the number of flu cases were low. We can point to examples of people dying of things that were counted as Covid deaths when they should not have been. But my main point isn’t changed whether the reported number of deaths are accurate or not. You are welcome to believe that they are and I’ll assume if for the sake of the argument. Has the response been anything remotely proportional? What for example did the lockdowns last year actually do other than to cost jobs, set up the passing of bills that enslave future generations that would not normally be passed, strip people of liberties, and give civil government more authority over aspects of our lives that it has not had in our lifetimes? My point was that the response goes beyond what we argued in our statement on quarantines last year about measured and proportionate responses.
My contention was not about it being too early or too late but about the timing being political. If they are playing politics with Covid and vaccines than I don’t trust them to be operating out of concern for my health.
Joseph, do you believe that civil government has the authority to mandate vaccines and if so that I am in sinful rebellion to authority if I do not get one?
It set up the bill that was passed here that prohibits the health departments from mandating masks. That’s opposite of what you claim. Whereas in Moscow, it was the refusal of certain men that led to the passage of a law expanding the city’s authority. I’m struggling to think of any other bills that have been passed that strengthen state authority. I might be forgetting obvious ones, or you might have some in mind, but my examples still prove the results are not nearly as clear cut as you claim.
Sidebar on the possibility of flu numbers being transferred to Covid
I haven’t seen the article, but the actually, the concept makes sense and I hadn’t thought of it before. Since we know that flu cases were low (practically non-existent), it follows that flu deaths were basically zero. But the normal process for counting “flu deaths” doesn’t require flu tests. It includes all deaths from influenza-like-illnesses (ILI’s) and it groups in death from pneumonia when it’s not caused by something else. Some of those deaths aren’t actually caused by flu, obviously. The question is how many? And if it’s a large number and they all happened to have Covid and get counted there when in normal years they would be counted in flu deaths, then we have an overstatement of the effect of Covid.
So I took a look at the data. Thankfully, the CDC already knows this data is important and provides a nice chart so I didn’t have to look through the spreadsheet:
And what we see is that there was no difference to speak of in 2020, but there is a difference in 2021. So some of the deaths in 2021 that might have been counted as flu in previous years might be being counted as Covid deaths this year. How many? Eyeballing it looks like in the neighborhood of 10,000. Big enough to see, but not noteworthy when it means 640,000 instead of 650,000 Covid deaths. I expected more when I started. Oh well, I thought that was worth teasing out.
My position on the civil magistrate is that, having the power of the sword, there is much he can do that is unwise, much that is unjust, much that is tyrannous. I agree with the authors of the Magdeburgh Confession. Unless the goal of a particular tyrannous command is the utter destruction of the Christian faith, we should do our best to submit, assuming we can morally.
2 Likes
@jtbayly, we really need a post about the Magedeburg Confession, opening up the stand they took and how different it is from the defy tyrants thinking today. Who’s going to write it, you or me? One two three not it!
3 Likes
I’ll do it. Thanks for the exhortation.
2 Likes
Another key area of playing politics with Covid was public health authorities endorsing cops killing unarmed black men as a greater public health threat than Covid.
They also made sure to use the opportunity very early in the crisis to make sure to call Covid hawks rubes and racists for wanting to avoid Chinese New Year celebrations in light of the brewing epidemic.
2 Likes
I’m thinking about every stimulus bill or recovery bill.
Are you with Todd Friel that if the civil government says we must wear pinwheel hats we must submit?
It seems to me that gives the civil government almost unlimited jurisdiction over our every area of our lives apart from some little cultic element.
What does it mean to have the goal of utter destruction of the Christian faith?
It seems to me that this argument on the surface could have been used to justify Daniel not praying for thirty days. It’s only thirty days Daniel. It doesn’t destroy your whole religion not to pray publicly for thirty days. Don’t revile Daniel just be patient and wait the thirty days. Surely God will understand besides no one is saying you can’t pray quietly in your heart.
How does one morally obey a tyrannical command? Isn’t a tyrannical command unlawful or immoral by definition?
You missed this part: “assuming we can morally.”
I covered that here. You seem to suggest we are under moral obligation to obey tyrannical commands.
I say no we are not. We may go along with some things out of wisdom. But I’m under no moral obligation to submit to something like the covid vaccine
First, I think it’s worth noting that the topic under discussion was supposed to be private sector. I don’t think anybody had suggested a moral requirement to get vaccinated for such reasons. So far as I can tell we aren’t discussing the private sector at all anymore, so I’ve moved us to the vaccine mandate topic you started.
You think that any time a command is given that is tyrannous that the only moral thing to do is to disobey? Absurd. You contradict this idea yourself:
It is precisely for this reason that I’ve been opposing you and others saying things like “Resistance to tyranny is obedience God.” You claimed I was misunderstanding in the past, but now here you are saying that it’s impossible to obey a tyrannical command without being immoral in the process. If you are confused into thinking precisely what the words mean, in spite of your claim that it means something else, I think it’s fair to say that I can take the statement at face value.
As to your second question:
It seems, given the immediate context that you are simply restating your previous question—meaning it is immoral to obey. If so, as I said above, this is wrong. I would ask you to demonstrate such from Scripture. If you mean it is immoral for the magistrate to be tyrannical, of course, but then your second question doesn’t build on your first question and I don’t understand why you’re asking.
It’s actually quite easy for most people to see how a law forbidding prayer is tyrannous and that obeying it is immoral. It’s equally clear that a law requiring your niece to marry the king is tyrannous. It’s a lot less clear that obeying is immoral in this case. It’s also clear that it is tyranny for a soldier to require a man to stop his work and carry his equipment for him. We also know quite clearly that obeying is not immoral. Or tax collectors collecting too much. Tyrannous. Giving them what they demand? Not immoral. Trying to avoid giving them the extra? Also not immoral.
It seems you cannot abide any answer besides “every tyrannical command must be disobeyed” or “every tyrannical command must be obeyed.” My answer was that it depends on the command, but that we ought to start with the understanding that submitting is better, if possible, for the reasons laid out in the Magdeburg, which I plan to talk about more later.
1 Like
I may have been unclear in my question so let me restate the question, how it is a moral duty to obey a tyrannical command. I am not arguing that you may not out of wisdom go along with some command that is tyrannical but I am arguing against the argument that we have a moral duty to obey a tyrannical command.
That is not what I am arguing and if my question was poorly worded to reflect that I apologize. I am arguing against the notion that we must submit to tyrannical commands out of a moral duty. Yes you may do so out of wisdom. You may even think its better. I may disagree depending upon what it is. I am under no moral obligation to submit to unlawful commands as such. Now there may be other obligations I may have to deal with that may lead to a submission to these commands. Wisdom is needed here.
It is my opinion that if I have been unclear you have as well. You seem to be arguing that yes I must submit to vaccine mandates by civil government or by corporations, and lets face it we live in a corporate/government cooperation so that the lines are very blurred there. As I mentioned to your father, the constant calling other reformed people beligerants, revilers, and such along with the defense of the official narratives and saying that submission is better, leads many to suspect that your position is simply “wear a mask, get a vaccine, and shut up.” It seems to me that if the long term negative effect of the defy tyrants crowds is to create an antagonistic attitude towards all authority, the long term negative effect of your messaging is to put our children and grandchildren under increasing tyranny without any will to fight it.
For example when you mentioned you didn’t know of any bills passed except those limiting mask mandates, those bills would only be passed because of people have had the will and rhetoric to fight it. The fact that courts have awarded victories to pastors like John McArthur or others for standing up is because they had the will to oppose it both with their speech and their actions, speech and action I have heard people here be very critical of.
Therefore if you think its wise and best in your situation to submit to vaccine mandates, go ahead. I won’t judge you. I’ll defend you. But I will also defend those who believe that its best and wisest to fight this tyranny now using all the tools at their disposal including using their speech and public platforms.
Baloney. If you want to pretend that Kroger’s employee vaccine mandate is actually the government requiring the whole country to get vaccinated, that’s on you. In the meantime, whether you want to do it is up to you. You can get it or quit or try to fight it out with HR. I’ve never said you must “submit” to it. I’ve simply said I can’t think of a reason to recommend quitting. I also posted an article explaining how one man did successfully fight against it at a university.
1 Like
If you want to believe that these large corporations are not in bed with the civil government so that they can do mandates without the civil government and politicians having to feel the heat, than I guess thats on you too. My point is not that corporations are the civil government but that we live in the age of soft tyranny. Its CS Lewis: Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
1 Like
Applying Occam’s razor yields the simpler explanation that vaccines have popular support. The more popular an establishment is, the more likely it will align itself with views that have widespread support. That’s why big corporations in the US have the stances they do on climate change, LGBT issues, and so on. No conspiracy is needed to understand why corporations align themselves with popular political views.
This is exactly the sort of soft tyranny you referenced. The CS Lewis quote is an appropriate lament.