Shortly after the Berlin Wall had crumbled, I was teaching at a university in Eastern Europe. I had quickly, and unexpectedly, become accustomed to faculty speaking approvingly of the former Communist system. While many professors were just pining for the privileges they had enjoyed (bribes had provided a good lifestyle in the midst of all that deprivation), more than a few were actual, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. One such comrade was the philosophy professor with whom I had an argument one fine, Spring morning. Shortly after early lectures, he made a right nuisance of himself by standing in the courtyard and viciously haranguing the students. For what seemed an eternity, I fought valiantly to ignore him. Unfortunately, the pleasant atmosphere of the outdoor café was insufficient to distract me from his constant Marxist drivel.
“We must help the poor and the working class!” he thundered over and over again to anyone within earshot.
Finally having enough, I walked over with my little cup of espresso and demanded, “Why? Why aren’t only the wealthy, healthy, and successful important?” I knew him, from prior encounters, to be a militant atheist in this most Catholic of countries.
He spluttered with outrage. “Because it is the only right thing to do!” he screamed at me.
This kept going for awhile, alternating between Polish and English. He’d assert the need to help the poor and the downtrodden, and I kept asking, “Why?”
Finally, he spun on his heel and stomped off. He had no answer, because from his point of view, there was no answer. Well, at least not one that he could utter publicly and maintain any credibility whatsoever. His preferred classes of people mattered because his Marxist philosophy simply asserted they mattered. The need to “help” them provided the rationale for his party to rule in their name and wield unchecked power. As for any objective reason for why the people he so passionately spoke of mattered…. well, that didn’t and couldn’t exist in his philosophical framework, grounded as it was on a strict, uncompromising atheism.
Either man is made in the image and likeness of God, in which case his well-being is cosmically important and he possesses some measure of inalienable rights, or he is simply a clever ape with no more value or rights than any other beast in the jungle. The ultimate guarantor of the value and rights of the individual is not a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution or a Bill of Rights – it is the teaching of the Church on the nature of man. The last few decades have made this so apparent, that even proudly secular liberals have been forced to this conclusion – without God there is no foundation for human worth or liberty of any kind. Where atheism reigns, oppression is inevitable.
As Western nations have secularized, they have progressively lost sight of this foundational teaching of the Christian Faith. Thus, the trend towards stripping away the rights and dignities of individuals predates our current COVID nightmare by a wide margin, but the war on a virus has rapidly accelerated it far beyond our wildest fears.
There are many effects of the downgrade of humanity from the image of God to a mere animal to be controlled. For the first time in history, the entire human race is facing possible mandatory vaccination with COVID vaccines that present substantial safety risks (enlarged lymph nodes, miscarriages, anaphylactic shock, death, RISING case numbers in heavily vaccinated areas, etc.) effectiveness concerns (may not stop spread, may not protect against infection), and moral quandaries. A fact often overlooked, the vaccines are still experimental and are only available under emergency use authorization. The most heavily vaccinated nation so far is Israel, and the results are not at all encouraging:
Despite all that, businesses and governments all over the world are openly discussing requiring vaccination to participate fully in society. Those in power are simply ignoring the problems, and plunging ahead with various schemes to require proving your status as either COVID negative or as a vaccinated person to travel, go shopping, attend events, attend church, or possibly even to just earn a living. “Vaccine passports” are expected to become “widely available” during the first half of 2021. The passports will be attached to cell phone apps that track and trace your COVID-19 test results and vaccination status. No phone? No problem, as there will be “smart cards” that will take the place of the app as a digital “health credential.”
Over and above the concerns with the vaccines, we should all be nervous that 24/7 population tracking, under the cover of protecting “public health,” has now gone from the realm of science fiction to science fact. It may not even be your government that is doing the tracking, as private business is on-board with intrusive monitoring and surveillance. In a speech to business leaders in Chicago, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said he supports vaccine passports for air travel and even for everyday activities such as concerts and going to the movies. Kirby was very clear, “It gives people a pretty strong incentive, because that’s the way they can get their life back. We think it’s a key to opening not just international borders and aviation, but the economy.”
If you don’t get the vaccine and the ability to prove your status when demanded, you could end up in forcible “quarantine.” Many European governments are discussing the concept, but the Irish Government has been among the most outspoken. The Irish Government is considering the introduction of mandatory hotel confinement for arrivals into the country, according to Minister for Enterprise Leo Varadkar. The minister said he has been talking to his counterpart in New Zealand (which actually did this), and while hotels might be used, they would in effect be detention centers.
Mass population control measures and tracking set a horrible precedent for the inevitably arriving next “public health crisis.” Anything from gun violence, to racism, to climate change, to new viruses could be used to justify continuation and expansion of efforts to destroy the liberty of billions of people worldwide.
The overreaction to COVID is not the only threat to civil liberties we now face. After the 1/6 Capitol mini-riot in Washington D.C., an entire social media platform got the death penalty. This was done solely through collusion between private companies, and with absolutely no evidence that Parler had been involved in anything other than allowing users to speak freely. Even as platforms are taken down and many remaining ones increase their level of censorship, citizens in multiple English speaking countries have already been arrested solely because of their social media posts.
To make matters worse, calls have gone out to expand the scope of law enforcement in the United States to combat “domestic terrorism.” Last year a domestic terrorism bill died in Congress, but it is back this session and will target “white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.” Obviously, the U.S. government will get to define what those terms mean, so please don’t assume being a regular, middle-of-the-road conservative exempts you from those labels. Even more chilling, commentators have actually called for the creation of an American secret police – the kind free Americans used to criticize and even mock.
Even without new laws or new Stasi-like law enforcement organizations, monitoring / controlling the lives and speech of citizens is accelerating as part of a public-private partnership. Tucker Carlson broke the story on his show of Bank of America colluding with the FBI, in the absence of a court order, to provide information on innocent customers of the bank.
“This show has obtained, exclusively, evidence that Bank of America, the second largest bank in the country with more than 60 million customers, is actively, but secretly, engaged in the hunt for extremists in cooperation with the government,” Carlson said. “Bank of America is, without the knowledge or the consent of its customers, sharing private information with federal law enforcement agencies. Bank of America, effectively, is acting as an intelligence agency. But they are not telling you about it.”
The Constitution of the United States is supposed to guard against such broad-ranging “fishing expeditions” in which law enforcement trolls through data “searching for a crime.” However, like many of our other procedural safeguards, that one appears to be non-operative. Privacy and free speech increasingly look like relics of a by-gone era.
In the face of this catastrophic erosion of liberties, most Western churches have at best remained silent, at worst they have collaborated by adding a moral gloss to the tyranny of unjust arrests, free speech restrictions, lockdowns, travel restrictions, invasion of privacy, curfews, church closures, quarantines and mask orders. It’s selfish, so say the ordained apologists for authoritarianism, to want to live your life the way God intended. We must all comply for our own good, and for the good of society, otherwise we are horrible people who want to kill grandma and unleash extremist violence in the streets. Remember, say our moral leaders, all of this is only temporary and absolutely necessary to save us. If you say otherwise, you are a nutty conspiracy theorist. So shut up, livestream your church services, and enjoy the 11th-month of “15 days to flatten the curve,” now with a dash of political paranoia thrown in for good measure. Oh, and please send us a donation.
The situation in the world is so upside down, that as an American, I cannot believe the words I am about to write – thank God for the Russian Orthodox Church standing up for the inherent rights and dignity of man.
The Russian Church has taken a firm stand in favor of voluntary, informed consent for vaccines as illustrated in this statement from the Patriarchal Commission on the Family:
It is well known that, along with the risk of infectious diseases, there is also a risk of serious complications — even death — as a result of prophylactic vaccination. In such a situation, it is the patient himself who should make the choice. In the case of a child, the parents should make their choice in each particular case, taking into account the advice and recommendations of specialists, as well as other information. No one has the right to make this choice for them, even if guided by the child’s own well-informed understanding.
God bless the Russian Orthodox bishops for their outspoken defense of our right as humans to bodily integrity. No one should ever be coerced in any way into submitting to a medical procedure. American Orthodox bishops have issued a statement regarding the vaccine, but completely omitted any reference to support for voluntary, informed consent. All Orthodox Churches should embrace this rejection of mandatory vaccines, whether enforced by government, by private businesses or by schools. This is a moral issue as well as a medical one, so our moral leaders are derelict in their duty if they fail to speak up.
In addition, the Russian Church has come out forcefully against use of digital technology to control and silence citizens. The Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, had this to say in his Christmas interview:
“Nothing like this could have happened in the past. Human thought, technical civilization today have reached a level where, by implementing digital technologies, it is possible to ensure total control over the human person. Not just observing a person, but managing human behaviour.”
He reminded that the book of Apocalypse speaks of total control over the person, accompanied by the coming of the antichrist.
“These words are not used there, but it is quite clear from the content that we are talking about the ability to totally control human behaviour,” said the Primate of the ROC. “It says that the seal of the antichrist will be placed on a person’s forehead, and without this seal, it will be impossible to buy, sell or participate in any social relations – a person will be doomed.”
According to him, the devil is not in the form of a villain, but in the form of an angel of light (see 2 Cor. 11:14), and the coming into the world of the antichrist will be accompanied by the appearance of an amazing man who, by his intellectual power and influence will be able to bring humanity out of the crises in which it has fallen. This person will suggest that in order for all crime to leave our lives, let us be guided by the fact that each person has a key to everything he/she needs. For example, it can be a card – you apply it and get access to food, education, and if you do not have this card, then everything is lost.”
The head of the ROC explained that he cited the example of the Apocalypse and the Antichrist, “to convince those people who may not have thought about it yet, that the maximum development of total control over man means slavery, and everything will depend on who will be the master of these slaves.”
“That is why the Church is categorically against the use of digital technologies in ensuring total control over the human person,” said Patriarch Kirill.
Earlier, the Synod of ROC declared that the use of digital identifiers and wide collection of personal data has to be controlled by the society and the Church as a public institution.
“Total control over man means slavery, and everything will depend on who will be the master of these slaves.”
That is a very clear summation of what we are facing. Many religious leaders are content in going along with these developments. Either out of fear or lack of supernatural faith, they lecture us that we must be good citizens who get our shots, download our tracking apps, submit to censorship, and accept being controlled each second of our lives. In exchange for their collaboration, one would expect these counterfeit shepherds will be richly rewarded in this life.
In the life of the world to come – not so much.
The silence of American Orthodox bishops on issues of human worth and freedom is distressing. Even more distressing is that freedom, the birthright of every human made in the image and likeness of God, is increasingly seen as some kind of “far-right” concept. There is no doubt that this article, by virtue of quoting the Russian Orthodox Church, will be denounced by some as anti-American and/or far-right. Human dignity and freedom are neither left nor right. They are not even political. Thank God at least some Christian leaders in this world still understand the full implications of the Church’s teaching on the nature of man.
Equally concerning are the Orthodox Christians who question the entire concept of human rights. It is true that the Western Enlightenment and its aftermath pushed the concept of “rights” too far, and severed the connection between human rights and human responsibilities. Despite that philosophical error, we cannot ignore the dignity due to the image of God in mankind. To do so makes man the slave of any authority that claims power over him.
Are we entering into, or are we in the midst of, the prophesied Apocalypse? Patriarch Kirill doesn’t know that for sure, any more than anyone else does in this world. It doesn’t really matter. The truth is the same, whether we have minutes or centuries before the return of Christ. Only the Orthodox Church is fully capable of defending human worth and human freedoms (including the freedom to choose salvation) as only she teaches us the fullness of the truth – including that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Without that fundamental truth, all of us stand defenseless before the powers of this world. Upon us is a great moral struggle, the results of which will echo throughout all eternity.
Vladimir is a member of the Orthodox Church in America
Catholics, yea even Popes, embrace Darwinism; ergo Catholicism is false and papal infallibility is Satan’s doctrine. Very simple actually.
Greetings! I wasn’t sure where to post this. It will probably get taken down soon–but I wanted to share what people are doing about Covid here in Ohio. https://www.facebook.com/OhioAMF/videos/244133277347003
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a short essay in February, 1974, titled “Live Not by Lies.” That same day, secret police broke into his apartment, and the next day he was exiled. I thought I’d sit down and re-write it as it might fit America today instead of the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century. What I discovered was disturbing: Most of it needed no rewriting. The whole Western world today -especially here at home, sits under a tyranny of lies. Our situation is no less dire than Solzhenitsyn’s 50 or more years ago, it’s heading in the same fatal direction.
Let’s remind ourselves of the situation here in America. A whole Marxist-based political party is pushing the same socialism that’s destroyed freedoms across half the globe. It’s not just that party, though, but an entire “progressive” establishment. And it’s doing it on the basis of lies.
In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent.
In such gloomy times the example of the martyrs can be encouraging [esp. the New Martyrs of Russia]. Those who laid down their lives for Christ and His Church in worse times than ours are beacons of light, dispelling the darkness with their baptism of blood. “Upon such sacrifices,” King Lear tells his soon to be martyred daughter Cordelia, “The gods themselves throw incense.”
It is said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and, if this is so, more bloody seed has been sown in the past century than in any of the bloody centuries that preceded it. Prepare for your martyrdom, Christians, our time is upon us. As for the Orthodox Christian, he has nothing to fear but his falling into the pride of despair. If he avoids becoming despondent and retains his humility, he will receive the gift of hope which is its fruit. Where there is hope there is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
As we await the fall of the latest manifestation of Marxist-socialistic-secular fundamentalism, we need to remember that the culture of death is a parasite. It does not give life; it only destroys or corrupts it. Like all successful parasites it kills itself when it kills the host culture on which it feeds. It is not merely deadly but suicidal. It is unsustainable. It cannot survive.
Let’s not forget that Hitler’s promise of a Thousand Year Reich lasted only twelve years. In similar vein, the communist revolution which according to Marx would usher in the end of history, is itself a ruined remnant of history. Little could Solzhenitsyn have known when he languished as one of the many millions in the Soviet prison system that he would outlive the Soviet system and, furthermore, that his own courage would play an important part in that very system’s collapse.
We should remind ourselves that clouds and the shadows they cast are transient. Evil is nihilistic, which is another way of saying that it is ultimately nothing. It is only a temporary blocking of the light. “Above all shadows rides the Sun,” as the ever-humble Samwise Gamgee proclaims in The Lord of the Rings. Even in these dark days, as Solzhenitsyn reminds us, every cloud has a silver lining.
I offer these quotes from his Harvard Address for all or us to ponder… May God grant us courage, steadfastness,stoutheartedness and wisdom!
Doxa to Theo, John
20 Key quotes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address by Joe Carter • June 8, 2018
Forty years ago today, Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a shocking commencement address at Harvard University. The Nobel-prize winning Russian novelist’s criticism of the West was a stinging rebuke at the end of the “Me Decade.”
Although largely forgotten, the speech remains an important, and prophetic, reminder of the sickness that plagues Western culture. Here are 20 key quotes from the 1978 speech:
1. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”
2. “The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?”
3. “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.”
4. “The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
5. “Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”
6. “Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency — all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.”
7. “There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb.”
8. “Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed everyday, confusing readers, and then left hanging?
“The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)
“Hastiness and superficiality — these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.”
9. “Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.”
10. “It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current. I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative.”
11. “There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.”
12. “[I]n early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.”
13. “The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.”
14. “All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.”
15. “Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.”
16. “Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.”
17. “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West.”
18. “If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
19.”It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.”
20.”If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”
“Are we entering into, or are we in the midst of, the prophesied Apocalypse?”
I don’t know but it sure looks like the Great Apostasy (II Thess. Ch. 2) taking place in the Orthodox Church here in America.