Life
All posts tagged Life
‘Since mid-July 2020, the Corona Committee has been conducting live, multi-hour sessions to investigate why federal and state governments imposed unprecedented restrictions as part of the Coronavirus response and what the consequences have been and still are for people.’https://corona-ausschuss.de/en/
‘Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you. You know there are differences. Where is the overlap? In diagnosing a worldview, there are various components to understanding it, as some people have or might put it, to see the map of the world. Some of them are knowledge, ethics, purpose, and epistemology, but among the others, I want to explore two of them, reality and truth, as they relate to celebrity conservatives versus true Bible believers. In general, very often true Bible believers are interested in the celebrity conservatives without their being interested in them. Part of their “fan base” are Christians, who listen to their podcasts and watch their shows. One of the celebrity conservatives, Jordan Peterson, the famous PhD professor, author, and public intellectual and speaker from Canada, doesn’t even call himself a conservative. Celebrity conservatives today might call themselves classic liberals (you can look up classical liberalism). Maybe he really isn’t conservative, but you also shrink your audience if you call yourself one. As well, “liberal” might mean you keep your job and other opportunities. Peterson does resonate with true Bible believers and they listen to, watch, and read him. When I write, celebrity conservatives, I’m especially saying, Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the late Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Candace Owens. There are many others. There is overlap between their worldviews and the worldview of a true Bible believer. Before Covid hit and also before he had major health issues, my wife and I and another couple got tickets to hear Jordan Peterson in person in San Francisco, sponsored by the Independent Institute. As I was listening to him, I enjoyed many things he was saying. However, I knew he and I did not have the same worldview. I was glad he could say what he did in public, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me either. The celebrity conservatives like him are disappointing. In the last week, I was thinking about the difference between the worldviews of celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers. Even as I write this, I think about how a true Bible believer could even be a celebrity in our world. I don’t think it’s possible. The greater the celebrity status, the more you must be doing something wrong, and that includes evangelical leaders who have their own celebrity. They in part got there through capitulation and compromise. Their greater celebrity doesn’t speak well. The common ground in worldview, I believe, is that there is more proximity between celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers in their view of reality. I would say that they both attempt to function according to reality, even if it means abandoning the truth. The truth and reality do go together. They overlap completely for a true Bible believer, but they don’t for celebrity conservatives. Even actual reality and the reality of celebrity of conservatives don’t overlap identically. To stay a celebrity, like everyone else who isn’t a true Bible believer, celebrity conservatives forsake actual reality and even more so, the truth. Let me explain. I want to use Jordan Peterson as an example. Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t. Jesus can’t be the greatest figure who ever lived if He wasn’t truth and He lied about the resurrection. Peterson says that he’s not sure if he believes Christianity, but he tries to live like one. He’s also saying, he’s not committing to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, while living like Jesus did resurrect from the dead. He borrows a reality based upon the truth without actually believing the truth. Other conservatives do that, and it’s easy to see. The world we live in is the real world. Celebrity conservatives more than the mainstream culture try to explain positions according to reality, even if they deny much of the truth or many truths, depending how you want to put that. You may live a reality of Jesus and defend a life that fits His existence and deny the pivotal truth of His resurrection. Peterson does that. Complementarianism is the truth and celebrity conservatives borrow from a complementarian reality without the truth of complementarianism. Gender fluidity proceeds from egalitarianism. God designed men and women differently. That’s the truth. Celebrity conservatives deny complementarian truth while defending a complementarian reality. Let me get more simple. Whether you think he’s a conservative or not, let’s consider President Donald J. Trump as if he were a conservative. Trump operates according to a certain Christian reality that results in Christian support, including from true Bible believers. Trump thinks that one thing is better than another. Certain behavior is wrong. He believes that America as a standard of living better than other countries, which can be and should be protected at the border. This is one of the most fundamental conservative beliefs and it is a reality that borrows from the truth. Former President Trump doesn’t believe the truth, but he functions as though there is truth. He is a realist in that we must have standards. Things won’t be better when we can’t discern the differences of one thing from another. This is a reality according to a Christian worldview. The truth is more important. However, people who eject from reality are much further away from the truth. These either practical or positional nihilists must be rejected for something short of the truth, if that’s the choice. The path to the truth won’t come through their relativism. It can come through someone who at least embraces reality, even if it doesn’t mirror actual reality. The answer for humanity is still the truth. It isn’t the reality of celebrity conservatives.’https://kentbrandenburg.com/2021/09/12/reality-and-truth-celebrity-conservatives-versus-true-bible-believers/
Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have been banned for use against Covid here in Australia. Unfortunately, most of the Australian politicians are pushing the experimental vaccines to the detriment of its citizens. What a disgrace for a democracy to do this! What will Australia be like in 2022 or 2023 when so many Australians have been obedient in taking these shots? We will have to wait and see!
Our politicians are so kind to us peasants that this week-end they are allowing those who have taken both shots of the Wuhan flu shots to go to the Burrendong Dam! Are they not generous? Now, because my wife and I are of the unclean we cannot enjoy this luxury but we thank our local state member for his generosity to those who have submitted themselves to the trial vaccine jabs.
‘One of the silver linings to the Covid cloud is that we now know who “they” are. You know, the mysterious “they” who “say.” As it turns out, “they” are lawless politicians, media propagandists, ignorant experts, and deluded educators. Everything “they” have been telling us for 18 months is nonsense. We know it. They know we know it. And still they speak.
They (as personified recently by President Biden) are getting increasingly shrill, frustrated that they have not yet made everyone insane like them.
But who is crazy – them, or us? It’s hard to believe that mental illness could be as pervasive as it seems to be. We have a strong bias against recognizing mass hysteria. Here are some reality checks for those moments when it seems like you’re the last sane person on Earth.
Absurdity #1: Doing the same thing and expecting different results
An unending need for more Covid booster shots would be proof the shots don’t work. “C’mon, man! Get a shot! The shot will protect you! But not this shot, the next shot. No, I mean the one after the next one – that one will really…you know the thing….”
No, sorry. That’s cuckoo.
I got vaccinated so that fearful people would be reassured that it was safe to be around me, and do business with me. And it does give me a sense (justified or not) that I’m safer. But if two shots aren’t enough, then I’m done. More of what doesn’t work won’t work.
Absurdity #2: Believing contradictory things
“They” will say at 10:00 in the morning that everyone should get vaccinated, to protect us from The Covid. Then they’ll say at 10:02 that the vaccinated should wear masks to protect us from The Covid. Well, which is it? If the shots are effective, no vaccinated person should wear a mask. Ever. Freedom from the face diaper is your reward for getting the vaccine – and it would be proof to the skeptical that the vaccines work. It undercuts their position to say, “vaccines work, but wear a mask.”
These nutjobs may really believe the shots protect you, and simultaneously don’t protect you. Somehow. They live in their own scrambled mental universe where something can be itself and its opposite in the same way at the same time.
As President Biden really said in his speech announcing (illegal) vaccine mandates, “We are going to protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.”
Huh? If your vaccination doesn’t protect you from the virus, how is giving someone else the same ineffective shot going to help you? Total lunacy.
Absurdity #3: Liars demanding to be believed
This one hardly needs elaboration. The frauds who’ve told us one falsehood after another for a year-and-a-half always insist that they are telling the truth this time; that they have only our best interests at heart, and if we don’t comply, they’ll shoot. Because, compassion.
But to give just one example, answer this question: How many Americans have died from The Covid? Now, that should be a pretty solid number. Out of respect for those who have died, not to mention the interests of science and public policy, we should know that number within a small margin of error. But the CDC number is a myth, everyone knows it’s a myth, and “they” know that we know it’s a myth. The real number is not known, and because of the shenanigans they’ve played with incentives and data, it can never be known.
It’s very cynical to lie to people about life-and-death stuff. Or more likely, psychotic. But liars will keep lying to you as long as you keep listening.
Absurdity #4: Insisting on inconsistency
“The vaccine is safe,” they tell us. Yes, as far as we know now, it is – judging by the usual standard of safety for this sort of thing. We call many drugs and treatments “safe” if only a fraction of a percentage of users get sick and die from taking them. Nothing is absolutely “safe” for everyone. We don’t expect that – that would be loony.
But if we were to apply that customary, sane, and normal standard to SARS-CoV-2, we would find that it, too, is “safe.” Few people get The Covid; those who do get it usually don’t get very sick from it; those who do get sick are not likely to die from it. Why is The Covid somehow different from every other danger that mankind has ever faced? Hint: it is not.
Then why is it treated differently?
If we were to apply our Zero Tolerance Covid Policy to other hazards, no one would ever get in a car again. And why don’t we have masking and vax mandates for children exposed to the seasonal flu, which really does kill children? The fact that they do not think about The Covid like they think about anything else is a sign that they’re not thinking straight.
If we’re going to reclaim our individual and collective sanity, we’ll have to deal just as rationally with the dangers posed by The Covid as we do the dangers posed by sugar, swimming pools, and SUVs. We’ll take reasonable precautions, and then go on with our lives.
I wonder whether, if we had kept our heads in the early days of the pandemic instead of allowing them to inflate The Covid into the ultimate bogeyman, we would be over and done with all this by now. More natural immunity, fewer variants, no excuses for carpet-bombing the economy, no endless wars against normality and sanity.
It seems that they’ve “flattened the curve” out to infinity, and the most likely explanation is that they don’t want the suffering and the disruption to end. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is the cry of a sociopath who will prolong a crisis, or create one if none turns up. And we have a lot of those folks.
We’re sane. They’re not. It’s time we told them to “Sell crazy someplace else; we’re all stocked up here.”‘http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/popp/210914
Ivermectin works but not as much money! Follow the money.
whatyareckon 