Claim: it was just a fluke that we resisted.
Rewritten.
This whole article has been revised. I’ve rethought it and here it is; I think it is better. I was less gracious than I should have been. God have mercy on us all. I don’t think it’s perfect but perhaps it’s the best I can do.
Below was the Scott Adams tweet that spurred this article, and this response by Bad Cattitude, that set me to thinking.
I’m not going to comment on Scott Adams’s tweet or his character - initially in the first draft of this article I was critical of him, something I am sorry about, because I can’t guarantee that I can do any better than him in any way. I certainly can’t. Not without God’s grace, and that is grace that I would extend to Scott Adams too.
But I feel as though God has been preparing me for a time such as this. This is why I am writing these fact checks.
As Mordecai said to Esther, “For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:4)
I have no Royal position, but I feel as though everything in my life was preparing me to understand what was going on and resist it by writing about it and trying to sort out what is true from what is not true.
Even my flaws and faults made me ready, for God uses our flaws and faults as well.
You see, the conservative principle, “Don’t jump unless you have to,” is great for me because it justifies my natural indecisiveness, heh, so let this help me understand that I can’t congratulate myself. So maybe Scott Adams is partly right - maybe it was luck - but I think God guided me not to take the vaccine, but more importantly, to resist the coercion so that others in my immediate circle of influence could see that we actually could resist the coercion.
And if I am suspicious of authoritarian overreach - well, perhaps that’s in the genes of my convict ancestors several of whom were sent to Australia for thieving horses - but who knows? I had many reasons for resisting the coercion, primarily because I could see it was unjust coercion, but at the end, I can only ascribe my understanding of what was going on to the grace of God.
There were so many influences that God used to help me understand that I was vulnerable to coercion and manipulation, and that I am quite frail mentally in a sense and this makes me dependant upon Him. And therefore in this way, through this frailty and vulnerability to influence that I have battled with all my life, He made me aware of what was happening.
So it is that I can only ascribe to God the ability to perceive what was happening and resist the wickedness in high places that we have endured. This is why we must pray for the wicked people - pray that God forgives them, and that he helps them to repent and gives them grace to turn to Him, for they too have been deceived, and they too have been victims of more-than-human wickedness, the dark pall that has fallen over our society, that is, the power of the devil who prowls around like a lion that roars seeking to devour human souls.
But Jesus has already conquered the devil and all his minions on the cross: these are the powers and authorities mentioned here in Colossians 2, and the decrees is the list of our sins that the devil uses to torment us:
When you were dead in your trespasses and in the “uncircumcision” of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross! And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Colossians 2:13-15
And that brings me to the first item in my list of the ways God prepared me to understand what has been happening:
Ephesians 6:10-20 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. We are in a spiritual war, and the weapons against us are thoughts, and the weapons we have are prayers and the Word of God, the truth, the willingness to tell the good news about Jesus, faith, etc (see Ephesians 6).
Reading about Richard Wagner as a teenager. Wagner’s biography strangely enough convinced me that I myself was not trustworthy - for I could see Wagner’s arrogance and some of his odious attitudes in myself - and it was deeply shocking to me that the writings of this man who created such great beauty, such beautiful music, actually were the inspiration for Hitler.
Reading about the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazi Party in World War II and seeing similar coercion and lies. Years ago I read William L. Shirer’s Rise of the Third Reich, Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, Corrie Ten Boom’s In my Father’s house, Anne Frank’s Diary, and Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; I realised that the great majority of a population can go along with something morally wrong, out of fear and in the case of the German population, out of wrong-headed patriotism and fervour.
Reading about the Communist Era. Three authors in particular: Richard Wurmbrand (Christ on the Jewish Road, Tortured for Christ, 100 Prison Meditations), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, (The Gulag Archipelago, A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich), and particularly A Christian in East Germany by Johannes Hamel - several of his essays were simply marvellous (The Courage to Be Truthful, and Conversations with Marxists) and came back to me throughout the lockdowns and the mandates, when I started to realise that nearly everybody I knew had been hypnotised by this massive falsehood, including pastors, everyone in my family, nearly everyone at my church and my workplace.
Reading the Biblical history of Israel. The history of Israel is a history of the vast majority of the people of Israel turning to idolatry again and again - in the Exodus, when they immediately turned to idolatry when Moses was absent on the mountain, times such as the time of Elijah, when Ahab and most of the nation had turned to Ba’al, an evil god to whom people offered their own children in sacrifice - in these times the people who did not turn to evil were in the minority. Joseph’s eleven brothers uniting to throw him in a well and kill him. And many in Israel did not accept Jesus at the time, when he came.
Reading about Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery. It must have been deeply confusing and very difficult for people who had been brought up with the idea that slavery was good and Christian and Biblical to see that it truly was wrong. Abraham Lincoln was a great man in those difficult times.
Learning about the Stanley Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Asch Conformity Experiment when I was at University. I learned about these three experiments at university doing postgraduate studies. These studies were deeply disturbing to me. The Milgram Experiment shows that many people will obey authority figures, even to the point of murdering someone. The Stanford Prison Experiment shows that given the opportunity, ordinary people will easily take on the role of jailer and prisoner, and jailers soon become abusive. And the Asch Conformity experiment shows that many people will disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes under peer pressure. The question arose, which side would I be on? Would I believe the lie? Was I one of the people who would conform when it mattered deeply not to? I had no reason to be confident in myself. I knew I had to cast myself upon God in such a time.
Bullying in primary school. When I was a child I observed the way the other children in the class would sometimes gang up on someone weak, particularly if the victim started to behave like a victim. I observed my own cowardice often in not standing up for the victim. Sometimes perhaps I did, and opposed them all, and was the conscience of the group - not very often thought - mostly I didn’t, because I was afraid of the others turning on me.
The Christian doctrine of Original Sin. This doctrine, which I gradually came to believe, in opposition to Rousseau’s idea that we are all inherently good, helps us to be prepared for the real society that we live in, and is the source of the essential self-doubt of our own goodness and wisdom that we each must have in order to turn to God and receive His grace and help. The Communists, who perpetrated the greatest tyranny in history through Stalin, teach that humans are innately good. The Bible, which arguably has been the source of every good in our society, hospitals, mercy towards others, charity, loving your neighbour, treating others as you would like to be treated, forgiveness, and the exposure of hypocrisy, teaches us that human beings are inherently sinners.
The question: if a time such as this arrived, which side would I be on? I went through a period of reading a lot of Jung and writing down my dreams and keeping a diary, and one thing I became convinced throughout all of this was my own unreliability, the unreliability of my own thoughts and decisions and opinions. I realised that if I was in a situation such as the abolition of slavery, the Holocaust or the Communist era, or even the more recent era of civil rights, or an Israelite in the time of the coming of Jesus, I had no clue what kind of a person I would have turned out to be. This is why I sought out the other opinions, the dissenting voices, and tested what they were saying. I had no great confidence in my self that I would see the truth, that I would not be one of the people persecuting others or following in the wrong way or agreeing with the Nazi party. This lack of confidence in myself made me turn to God wholeheartedly during the lockdowns and coercion, deeply mistrustful of the nastiness and persecution of the unvaccinated. I had decided as a young man that if I was in a future analogue Nazi era, I would side with the Jews. If I was in a future analogue to the Communist era, I would side with those who opposed Stalin.
A Bible verse: Proverbs 6:1-5. “My child, have you promised to be the guarantor for someone else's debts? Have you been caught by your own words, trapped by your own promises? Well then, my child, you are in that person's power, but this is how to get out of it: hurry to him, and beg him to release you. Don't let yourself go to sleep or even stop to rest. Get out of the trap like a bird or a deer escaping from a hunter.”
This may seem off-topic but it is not. An incident arose when I was a young man that made me realise I could think an action that was intrinsically wrong and incredibly stupid to be the right thing to do in the heat of the moment. A friend who was a drug addict, and who was in fact trying to get money for drugs, pressured me to be the guarantor for his loan. Despite feeling the pressure of friendship to help him, and virtually believing it was the right thing to do under the coercion and pressure he was exerting, following the advice of this passage from Proverbs I resisted and did not make a decision that would have turned out to have been disastrous. (btw thank goodness I read it in the Good News Bible; I may not have related the instruction to reality quite as well if I had been reading another more complex, wordy translation) The wisdom I gained from this episode turned out to be good practice for enduring the continuous pressure from others, from society, from the media, from my workplace, and from Mark McGowan’s public statements that I resisted underneath the era of vaccine coercion.
The conservative principle - “Don’t jump unless you have to.” This little principle helped me a lot, to simply delay the decision of the jab until it was absolutely necessary to make the decision; of course that was also my innate difficult in making decisions, a flaw that God undoubtedly used. I eventually decided not to take it in late December 2021, against the coercion of the authorities and despite the fact that I would not be allowed to work in January if I didn’t take it.
Doing preparation for writing a novel about a Pharmaceutical company that I never wrote. In the research for this novel I read about pharmaceutical trials and knew that it took 12 years of trials to get a new medication into market. I also knew that mRNA vaccines caused a massive inflammatory response in mice and that they still hadn’t solved all the problems; i.e. they were experimental.
Having read about the Nuremberg Code (People must not be coerced to take part in medical experiments) and the Hippocratic Oath (first do no harm). I knew about these moral codes, the Nuremberg Code formulated after the Nuremberg trials of the top Nazis, and the historic code that Doctors used to take (today they no longer take the proper Hippocratic Oath, but a watered down version); I knew that I was being coerced and I knew that the medication we were being told to take was experimental. In the end I could see clearly that my Doctor was not obeying the Hippocratic Oath either; she was recommending me to take something that was likely to do more harm than good; especially when she refused to give me an exemption after I had caught the virus, found it to be quite mild (when following the FLCC treatment protocols), and was over it in six days.
Helpful friends - FH, DE. Friends can be a great grace and encouragement. These two, FH and DE, are friends who gave me work when I didn’t have enough and encouraged me with prayer and fellowship.
Another Bible verse that helped me see: Luke 16:10 “Whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.” This saying of Jesus’ is a good guide, firstly for ourselves (how often are we are untrustworthy with little things?) But I have also found that it is a good guide as to when to trust others. It was clear to me that the government and the TGA were being dishonest about Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, in fact, they were contradicting their own advice on safety (as anti-malarial and anti-parasitical drugs respectively both are touted as completely safe; drugs are often used for off label purposes and Chloroquine was already known as a potent anti viral from the era of the first SARS virus.) I asked the question that seemed obvious to me, “They are lying about these medications. Why should I trust what they are saying about the vaccine?” For if the government was not faithful about small things, I knew they would not be being faithful in large matters.
Another Bible passage: Matthew 6: 25-34 Consider how the lilies of the field grow: They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was adorned like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? …seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.
This whole passage reassured me that if I obeyed God and disobeyed the government that God would look after me. The stories of Elijah being fed by ravens during the famine (I Kings 17:2-16), and the story of Israel in the wilderness (Exodus, Numbers), and also stories of God’s supply to Corrie Ten Boom and her sister in the Nazi camps helped me to realise that I could survive even without work, if it came to the crunch and I was banned from working for being unjabbed, and that following my conscience in making a stand about the vaccine, something I believed God wanted me to do (though I was admittedly full of many doubts and still have doubts sometimes about whether it was the right thing to do); but to me, obeying God through my conscience was more important than earning an income.
Another Bible passage: Revelation 13:16-17 And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark— the name of the beast or the number of its name. The coercion to take the vaccine or to be banned from earning a living seemed to me to be highly reminiscent of this coercion to take the beast’s mark. I believe the Covid vaccine was not the beast’s mark, but it was something very similar to it, particularly in that ‘no one could buy or sell’ unless he had the vaccine. And this habit of coercion our governments have lusted for may eventually grow into the reality the Bible describes, if we do not stand up against it now.
Another Bible passage: The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you assist the Hebrew women in childbirth, observe at the delivery: If it is a son, kill him, but if it is a daughter, she may live.” But the midwives feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.
Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and let the boys live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women—for the Hebrew women are vigorous; they give birth before the midwife gets to them!”So God treated the midwives well, and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he made households for them. This Biblical passage tells us that there are times when the government must be disobeyed.
Psalm 146:3 “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man in whom there is no help.” Someone at my Bible study said, “But as Christians we have duty to trust the government.” This Bible verse says otherwise, and was in my mind a lot in those times.
The love and support of Christian friends who agreed with me. Having some friends to pray with and talk with about these issues was wonderfully helpful. Thankyou to WC and SR (SD).
The love and support of those who disagreed with me. My parents in particular were supportive of me and still affirmed their love, despite my decision to remain unvaccinated and lose my main source of income for - how long it was going to be at the time I didn’t know - turned out to be only three months ultimately but still…
They agree now that it was a good decision.
Those who believed the lie and took the vax
At this point in time I have compassion for those who took the vax. They live with uncertainty now, the uncertainty of not knowing what this experiment is still doing to the inner workings of their cells, and what it might have done to them in four or five years’ time, for that future is still unknown and untested. And many of them live with ongoing injuries and tiredness, heart problems, chronic illness, repeated infections. And many also are saddled with guilt, for having coerced their friends and family to take the vax, and for having taken their children to get the vaccine, some who now have died or suffered injuries.
The forgiveness of Christ is greatly needed - His sacrifice on the cross is the only thing that can take away guilt.
Pray
So please: pray for our vaccinated brothers and sisters, pray for the leaders, especially the wicked ones who cursed the unvaccinated and coerced many to take the vaccine, for they need prayers more than anyone, for their wickedness is greatly deserving of God’s wrath and yet He loves them as He loves us, for we were all God’s enemies before we turned to Christ - and they may still be able to be plucked from the fires of hell like a glowing firebrand before it’s too late, for Jesus died for the sins of the whole world, and if we sit in judgement on them, we must say to ourselves, aren’t we just as deserving of God’s wrath ourselves? Yet God forgave our sins.
For it is true that only the humble can be saved, and so we must lift up the wicked leaders in prayer, for none of us can stand in judgement on another. Only God can judge.
And we must pray for our brothers and sisters, our workmates, our friends, our partners, children, parents, and even our enemies, this is what we must do.
For this is the work of God: to believe in the One He has sent. John 6:29.
And if we believe in Him, we pray to Him.
Extra thoughts…
My greatest disappointment from those days was that I couldn’t convince very many people not to take the vax; there were some I tried so hard to convince, so fervently, that I overloaded them with information and facts and data.
If anything I hope I’ve learned not to overload people with information: you need to give the strategic bits of information, but the reasons for your decision are important as well.