Misreading Providence for Personal Gain
Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God, and the rest would be added (Matthew 6:33). There are no exemptions to this. Even if life has you busy with your job, family, school, or other pressures, these things never exempt us from our duty (and pleasure) to seek God first. Instead of seeing these challenging providences as reasons to put ourselves first, we should view them as trials and tests God has given us to prove that the faith he has provided us has the power to overcome the world.
Matthew Henry once suggested we can sometimes neglect to obey God because we misinterpret trials and challenges as permission to shirk our responsibility when, instead, God allowed these hardships to test and exercise our courage and faith. Here is an example.
Imagine you are a pastor the Holy Spirit has called to preach the whole counsel of God. As you are expositing a book of scripture over several months, you come to a difficult passage that goes against the cultural zeitgeist. Not only does the culture not want you to speak the truth plainly, but some church elders also start to counsel you against it.
Your church and ministry have a large online following, and to preach these truths and post them in the usual outlets could lead to big tech taking away your platforms. This conflict with big tech could arise because this teaching of scripture violates their standards of conduct.
The church’s ministry is doing wonderful things, reaching hundreds of thousands of people. You begin to rationalize that it is better to bypass this passage or gloss over it because the benefits of doing so far outweigh the costs for your ministry.
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The Silencing of the Scientists
The science we never share risks being a finding we never found. As the pile of unshared science grows, our scientific understanding of crises like pandemics suffers from the attrition of the science it doesn’t know. It should be in the interest of all scientists to facilitate the sharing of scientific ideas to ensure no science goes unshared from fear of ridicule or public execution.
Early in the Covid pandemic, Michael Levitt noticed a gradual decay of case growth rates over time in Wuhan, and many dismissed or ignored his observations on account of what they viewed were improper credentials and unconventional mathematical methods (Gompertz curves, as opposed to conventional compartmental models in epidemiology).
Some researchers went so far as to call Michael Levitt’s work “lethal nonsense,” saying he was being an irresponsible member of the scientific community by not being an epidemiologist and presenting work that Levitt’s critics believed downplayed the coronavirus.
On March 17, 2020, John Ioannidis argued that Covid severity was uncertain and extreme containment policies such as lockdowns could possibly cause more harm than the pandemic itself, provoking a persistent culture of animosity towards Dr. Ioannidis, from false claims of conflicts-of-interest in 2020 to people accusing Ioannidis of “horrible science” and more.
My Experience as a “Deviant” Epidemiologist
As a mathematical biologist studying viruses jumping from bats to people for a few years prior to Covid, and as a time-series analyst with nearly a decade of experience forecasting by early 2020, I was also studying Covid since January 2020.
I noticed the wisdom of Levitt’s Gompertz curves – Levitt found an observation I myself had found independently, of regular decays in the growth rate of cases well before cases peaked in Wuhan, and then in early outbreaks across Europe and the US. In my own work, I found evidence in February 2020 that cases were doubling every 2-3 days (midpoint estimate 2.4 days) in the early Wuhan outbreak at a time when popular epidemiologists believed Covid prevalence would double every 6.2 days.
We knew at the time that the earliest cases were exposed in late-November 2019. Suppose the first case was December 1, 2019, 72 days prior the approximate early-2020 peak of cases in China on February 11, 2020. If cases strictly doubled every 2.4 days over that 72-day period, as many as 1 billion people, or 2/3 of China, would have been infected. If, instead, cases doubled every 5 days, we’d expect roughly 22,000 people to be infected in China.
If cases doubled every 6.2 days, we’d expect 3,100 people to be infected in China. The slower the case growth rate one believed, the fewer cases they expected, the higher the infection fatality rate they estimated and the more severe they worried the Covid-19 pandemic would be. These findings led me to see the merit in Dr. Levitt’s observations, and to agree with Dr. Ioannidis’ articulation of the scientific uncertainty surrounding the severity of the Covid pandemic the world was about to experience.
However, when I saw the world’s treatment of Levitt, Ioannidis, and many more scientists with contrary views that mirrored my own, I became fearful of possible reputational and professional risks from sharing my science. I tried to share my work privately but encountered professors claiming I was “not-an-epidemiologist”, and one told me I “would be directly responsible for the deaths of millions” if I published my work, was wrong, and inspired complacency in people who died of COVID.
Between these personal encounters from scientists in a variety of positions and the public stoning of Levitt and Ioannidis, I worried that publishing my results would result in me being publicly called not-an-epidemiologist like Levitt, and responsible for deaths like both Levitt and Ioannidis.
I managed to share my work on a CDC forecasting call on March 9th, 2020. I presented how I estimated these fast growth rates, their implications for interpreting the early outbreak in China, and their implications for the current state of COVID in the US. Community transmission of Covid in the US was known at the time to have started January 15th at the latest,
I showed how an outbreak starting in mid-January and doubling every 2.4 days could cause tens of millions of cases by mid-March, 2020. The host of the call, Alessandro Vespignani, claimed he didn’t believe it, that the fast growth rates might just be attributable to increasing rates of case-ascertainment, and ended the call.
Just 9 days after I presented on the CDC call, it was found that Covid admissions to ICUs were doubling every 2 days across health care providers in New York City. While case-ascertainment could be increasing, the criteria for ICU admission, such as quantitative thresholds of blood-oxygen concentrations, were fixed and so the ICU surge of NYC revealed a true surge of prevalence doubling every 2 days in the largest US metro area.
By late March, we estimated an excess of 8.7 million people across the US visited an outpatient provider with influenza-like illness *ILI) and tested negative for the flu, and this estimate of many patients in March corroborated a lower estimate of COVID pandemic severity.
Having watched Levitt, Ioannidis, Gupta and more get mobbed online for publishing their evidence, analyses and reasonings for a lower-severity pandemic, I knew that publishing the ILI paper was an act of deviance in an extremely active online scientific community.
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Christian Nationalism is Biblical and America-First, but It’s Not White
The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.
If you want to know what the establishment’s all-seeing eye is maniacally fixated on, the amount of energy the corporate media orcs spend bludgeoning “Christian nationalists” provides a clue. Over the past 48 months, there have been dozens of hit jobs on the terror of “Christian nationalism”; there have been about a score of these smear pieces just this past month alone.
Their Pavlovian function is to condition Americans to associate the term with a bunch of extremists and racists who pose a Hitleresque threat to this country’s democratic institutions so that they will dutifully freak out. These articles rely on the same tactics: straw man arguments that misrepresent both Christianity and nationalism, and phony attempts to depict the movement as white.
“Christian Nationalism is an un-Christian concept,” opines the New York Times. The Christian right “is beginning to part with democratic norms,” laments NPR. “Christian nationalism has a long dark history … of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi party,” warns MSNBC. “The movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America,” explains CNN.
The trusted media sources who sold you Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation hoax, and “transitory” inflation, are at least this time right about one thing: Christian nationalism is real, and it’s gaining traction. It’s biblical, it’s America First, but it’s not “white.” It’s not about a white supremacist “Christian Taliban” installing a theocracy, idolizing the nation, or in any way rewriting this country’s great Republican constitutional model.
In fact, Christian nationalism is entirely consistent with that model. The Declaration of Independence vests the sovereign power with the people, on loan to the government, and entrusts the state with the responsibility of safeguarding the individual’s Creator-endowed rights. In asserting that “the United Colonies are and ought to be Free and Independent States,” the signers appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions” and committed themselves to “the protection of Divine Providence.” If nationalists believe that government should prioritize the interests of the country and the people, Christian nationalists believe, as did the Founders, they should do so under the banner of God.
The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.Related Posts:
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The Woke Wrecking Machine
New woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds. Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough.
Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.
Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline.
If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes.
Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful.
Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of “science.” No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness.
Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers.
Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before.
Take the COVID pandemic.
The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not “racist.” China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others.
The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy.
Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes.
But woke ended all that—substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment.
Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns—if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers.
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