Leftist are at it again. They are trying to make Christians a scapegoat for all that’s bad in the world. The latest attempt is by Katherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. She has written for nearly a dozen left-wing publications. She has it in for Trump voters.
Here’s the lead paragraph of her opinion article “The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response” that’s published in The New York Times:
Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.
This from someone who most likely believes spontaneous generation is science, that men can become women and women can become men is science, that 75+ different genders exist is science, that unborn babies are not a human beings but a mass of tissue that only become human beings when the mother says “it” is a human being is science so it’s OK to kill “it” until then, and that climate modeling projections are science.
Furthermore, science built on the operational assumptions of atheistic, naturalistic, and materialistic presuppositions should allow the virus to do its evolutionary thing of weeding out the herd by infecting the weak so only the strong survive. Viruses—part of the physical world—neither know nor care about what’s the moral thing to do. There isn’t a moral atom in our body. Viruses, bacteria, human meat machines that we are don’t care what happens to their competitors in an atheistic evolutionary worldview.
Andrew Seidel is an atheist. Why should science or medicine solve this pandemic? It seems to me, if atheists and evolutionists believe we are human animals, who have struggled for survival over eons of time through the operation of survival of the fittest, then the scientific option is to let the virus take its course to its natural end.
It’s religion, specifically the Christian religion, that believes that human beings are created in the image of God and therefore have value. The Declaration of Independence states that we are “endowed” by our “Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” There is no intrinsic value in evolved lifeforms that are nothing more than skin-clothed compositions of chemicals.
The Christian worldview values others, even our enemies (Luke 6:27–36). Within the operating assumptions of atheism, there is no ultimate justification for such a command. In times of plague, given the rationalistic and utilitarian approach to ethics, it’s logical to let the weak die:
The Christian response to plagues begins with some of Jesus’s most famous teachings: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” [Lev. 19:18; Matt. 7:12]; “Love your neighbor as yourself” [Mark 12:3–31]; “Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friends” [John 15:13]. Put plainly, the Christian ethic in a time of plague considers that our own life must always be regarded as less important than that of our neighbor.
During plague periods in the Roman Empire, Christians made a name for themselves. Historians have suggested that the terrible Antonine Plague of the 2nd century, which might have killed off a quarter of the Roman Empire, led to the spread of Christianity, as Christians cared for the sick and offered a spiritual model whereby plagues were not the work of angry and capricious deities but the product of a broken Creation in revolt against a loving God.
But the more famous epidemic is the Plague of Cyprian, named for a bishop who gave a colorful account of this disease in his sermons. Probably a disease related to Ebola, the Plague of Cyprian helped set off the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman world. But it did something else, too: It triggered the explosive growth of Christianity. Cyprian’s sermons told Christians not to grieve for plague victims (who live in heaven), but to redouble efforts to care for the living. His fellow bishop Dionysius described how Christians, “Heedless of danger … took charge of the sick, attending to their every need.” (Foreign Policy)
Evolution would never have gotten off the ground if “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was in operation.
Author: Gary DeMar
Gary—who served as President of American Vision for thirty-five years—is a graduate of Western Michigan University (1973) and earned his M.Div. at Reformed Theological Seminary in 1979. Author of countless essays, news articles, and more than 27 book titles, he has been featured by nearly every major news media outlet. Gary also has hosted The Gary DeMar Show, History Unwrapped, and the Gary DeMar’s Vantage Point Webshow and is a regular contributor to AmericanVision.org. Gary has lived in the Atlanta area since 1979 with his wife, Carol. They have two married sons and are enjoying being grandparents. Gary and Carol are members of Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA).
