I feel like I’ve entered an episode of The Twilight Zone, although I’m convinced Rod Serling couldn’t have imagined the absurdities of COVID-19 2020 America. Since this is a blog dedicated to the defense of the Christian faith, I try to stay away from politics, but you can’t escape politics now without it, literally, hitting you in the face. I thought in Florida we may have escaped relatively unscathed, and by that I don’t mean cases or deaths for an over-hyped virus, but without our lives being turned completely upside down. Now, unfortunately, because of an “order requiring face coverings,” aka masks, by our county board of commissioners, everywhere I go it’s masks, masks, masks! Of course I refuse to wear a mask because, well, it’s absurd for healthy people to be required to wear a mask! On Thursday I entered The Zone. I went into a local RaceTrac, and three employees pointed at me and hissed, “You have to wear a mask!” No I don’t, I said right back. For this I was summarily refused service, even as I pointed out that there is a very clear exception in the so called “order” (item 10). Kafka himself would have been proud.
There is something perniciously evil about all this, and I’m convinced we can blame it on one man, the president of the United States. Oh, of course, none of it is directly his fault, but it seems the man drives people on the other side of the political spectrum bat**** crazy! I’m convinced that one day in the distant future historians and psychologists will identify Trump Derangement Syndrome as a very real psychological malady, one akin to delusional schizophrenia. How else do you explain a media and politicians pushing a panic narrative beyond all reason? You don’t. They are convinced that the worse things are for America, the worse it is for Trump’s reelection prospects, so America be damned! It’s no coincidence that Black Lives Matter went full-on 1968 at the death of George Floyd at the same time.
I will turn this to apologetics, but if you or anyone you know gets all their information about the virus from mainstream news sources, you and they will be wearing a mask because a scared public achieves the media’s ends. In order to know the Truth, Christians we are compelled to find it, and not accept at face value information by known liars in the media. There are many sites you can visit that consistently question the mainstream media narrative. Some are: American Greatness, Conservative Review, Lew Rockwell, American Thinker, and there are many more. Do I agree with everything I read? Of course not. I don’t agree with myself sometimes! The point is that they question media and Democrat (one and the same) groupthink, and it needs to be questioned!
Given the previously stated purpose of this blog, I see the summer of our COVID-19 discontent as evidence for Genesis 3, and the Christian explanation for why human beings are so completely screwed up. We call that in apologetics (and in other disciplines) explanatory power (what best explains a certain phenomenon). For many people the so called problem of evil is a real problem. How could a good and all powerful God allow evil and suffering. I agree that it’s a problem, but not for God, nor for a belief or trust in God. As always, we need to consider the alternative. If there is no God we can blame for evil, who do we blame? What do we blame? How then do we explain the realities of evil and suffering and death? Nobody denies the reality of these, but some deny that we need an explanation for why they exist. The materialists (philosophical atheists), and secularists (God may be there, but he’s irrelevant), and pantheists would be in agreement in that denial. Evil, suffering, and death just are, deal with it, no explanation required.
We all know how profoundly disappointing that is at a five year old’s funeral. Or standing outside a German concentration camp gas chamber. There is nothing banal about it. Inside every normal human being is disgust for obvious injustice, a hatred for wrong that can’t be righted. In spite of whatever we may believe, we know something is deeply wrong with the world, with people, with me! And it makes us angry. Wrong implies right, just as evil implies good. As Augustine said, there is no evil that is not good perverted. All of it points beyond itself, and not only does Christianity give the best explanation for why it exists, it offers the only real, plausible answer, in God become man, dying on a Roman cross, buried, and risen from the dead three days later!
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