Category Archives: COVID-19

Anglican Church of Canada’s position on COVID-19 vaccines

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The ACoC does not yet ban the unvaccinated from worship services, although all dioceses as far as I know do require vaccine passports from employees and volunteers and universally for non-worship events. Some are more flexible (Edmonton, for instance) than others.

Nevertheless, the dioceses of Toronto, New Westminster, British Columbia, Edmonton and Fredericton are all exerting pressure on their members to become vaccinated and even encourage those who are not to stay away with statements like this:

I strongly encourage all people who are eligible to receive the vaccine be vaccinated.  If you have not been vaccinated you may want to consider worshipping online.

Notably absent in any statement from any Anglican leader – including ACNA/ANiC – is any concern over the fact that all currently available vaccines are dependent, to varying degrees, on organs harvested from aborted babies. I have explained my views on this here and here. I don’t expect the church to agree with me – almost no one does – but I do expect the church, particularly ACNA/ANiC which boasts that it is pro-life, to say something about it.

Correction: As a reader points out below, the US branch of Anglicans for Life has made a statement about abortion derived vaccines. You can read it here.

Naturally, everyone who attends a worship service has to wear a mask. You can even buy an Anglican mask:

It is cotton so it is next to useless at preventing the COVID-19 virus spreading, but at least it offers an instructive metaphor for Anglican Church of Canada clergy: completely ineffective, unfit for its alleged purpose and an empty symbol of posturing theatrical holiness. So the masks are not all bad

Dostoyevsky, vaccines and Ivan

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A passage in the Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov explores the problem of evil. In the passage, Ivan, an atheist puts the problem to his brother Alyosha, a monk. It’s a long, harrowing passage where Ivan describes the death of an 8-year-old boy who has hurt the paw of one of his master’s dogs. The master, on discovering who the culprit is, locks the boy in the outhouse overnight. The boy cries out to God who, seemingly, doesn’t listen. In the morning, the boy is stripped naked, made to run and the hounds tear him to pieces in front of his mother.

Even if at end of history cosmic harmony is somehow achieved in spite of the prevalence of such abhorrent evil, Ivan wants no part of it. He says:

Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket.

My summary hardly does the section justice; if you haven’t read the book, you should do so. I first read it in my late teens when I was an atheist. I found Ivan’s point persuasive.

The passage ends this way:

Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

You can read the whole passage here.

My 19-year-old atheist self found this most convincing. Later on, once I came to grips with the idea that another innocent being was willing to die to set the universe to rights, I changed my mind, although there is still a part of me that resonates emotionally with Ivan’s protest.

What do vaccines have to do with this, you may be wondering. Read on.

Much of what I have to say applies to many vaccines but the vaccines that are on most people’s minds at the moment are the COVID-19 vaccines which are being injected into all and sundry.

The currently available vaccines in North America and Europe rely on either the HEK-293 or PER.C6 cell lines for their production or testing, both of which were grown from babies aborted in 1973 and 1985, respectively.

Both cell lines have been “immortalised” – a Frankensteinian tribute to the resurrection – so HEK-293’s use in vaccine production required only one murdered baby girl. And she was not murdered, we are told, specifically so her organs could be harvested. But we are not told how she was murdered.

Here is an excerpt from the Canadian Journal of Medical Science dated 1952 that describes ideal conditions for harvesting foetal organs (my emphasis):

Human embryos of two and one-half to five months gestation were obtained from the gynaecological department of the Toronto General Hospital. They were placed in a sterile container and promptly transported to the virus laboratory of the adjacent Hospital for Sick Children. No macerated specimens were used and in many of the embryos the heart was still beating at the time of receipt in the virus laboratory.

Yes, 1952. Many of the babies were vivisected. When lab animals are dissected alive, they are anaesthetised; not these babies.

This procedure is not an exception, it is routine, continues today and is mostly ignored by the secular press and, to our eternal shame, by the church and by Christians.

There are many documented examples: this recent one is from the University of Pittsburgh:

The University states the fetal organs do not undergo ischemia—lose their blood supply—until “after the tissue collection procedure”. This means the organs are still receiving blood supply from the fetal heartbeat during the “tissue collection”.

In 2015 in China, scientists on behalf of the vaccine industry aborted 9 babies “intact” so their organs were alive when removed:

WALVAX  2 is taken from the lung tissue of a 3 month gestation female who was ultimately selected from among 9 aborted babies.  The scientists noted how they followed specific guidelines to mimic WI-38 and MRC-5 in selecting the aborted babies, ranging from 2-4 months gestation.  They further noted how they induced labor using a “water bag” abortion to shorten the delivery time and prevent the death of the fetus to ensure live intact organs which were immediately sent to the labs for cell preparation.

I could go on. The point is, as I said, this process is routinely used by abortion mills and the vaccine industry.

No-one knows how the baby girl who gave us HEK-293 met her end. She most probably would have been removed “intact”. She could have been dissected while still living. What we do know is, for her kidneys to be useful for the vaccine industry, they had to be “fresh”.

For my part, then, I must borrow from Ivan:

To save mankind from a particularly nasty disease, imagine it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature, a baby girl. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.

No, I wouldn’t consent.

Too high a price is asked; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not the scientists that I don’t accept, only I most respectfully return them the ticket.

Calaveras Presbyterian Church stands against coerced acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines

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Calaveras Presbyterian Church based in California is the only church that I know of to take a stand against vaccinations that rely on cells derived from aborted foetuses.

You may agree or disagree, but at least this church is making a clear statement on its view of the use of the HEK-293 and PER.C6 cell lines in the production of COVID-19 vaccines.

Read it all here:

STATEMENT OF CALAVERAS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ITS MEMBERS AND ADHERENTS CONCERNING COERCED ACCEPTANCE OF COVID-19 VACCINES

Calaveras Presbyterian Church hereby sets forth its sincerely held beliefs and proscriptions against the following cited COVID-19 Vaccines:

Bases of the Position:

Calaveras Presbyterian Church holds to the sanctity of human life at all stages from conception and it holds to the absolute inadmissibility of medicines/pharmaceuticals  prepared using fetal therapy.

The Church believes it to be definitely inadmissible to use the methods of so-called fetal therapy, in which the human fetus at various stages of its development is aborted and used in attempts to treat various diseases and to “rejuvenate” an organism. Denouncing abortion as a sin, the Church cannot find any justification for it even if someone may possibly benefit from the destruction of a conceived human life. Contributing inevitably to ever-wider spread and commercialization of abortion, this practice presents an example of glaring immorality and is spiritually criminal as a violation of Divine Law.

Calaveras Presbyterian Church firmly holds that Scripture defines appropriate Christian behavior. Because of this, it would be a violation of our faith to receive the following coronavirus vaccines…… [go to the link to see the full list etc.]

The University of Western Ontario, the place where irony goes to die

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Dr. Julie Ponesse, professor of ethics at the University of Western Ontario discusses why she believes compulsory vaccination is wrong.

She is now an ex-professor since the University of Western Ontario fired her for taking, you guessed it, an ethical stand.

Calgary church to require vaccine passports

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It was inevitable, I suppose, and the Marda Loop Church in Calgary has the distinction of being the first: it has decided to refuse entrance to those who have not been vaccinated or who cannot provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test.

The church’s vision statement claims that the church exists “to help [vaccinated] people Engage God Everywhere“  and that it “will be a church where [vaccinated] people who don’t go to church feel at home.”

All this is being done in the name of science and to protect the vulnerable – even though there is increasing evidence that the vaccinated can be just as infections as the unvaccinated. Still, Jesus did say “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and vaccinated, and I will give you rest”, so pastor John van Sloten must be on to something.

From what I can see, this is a new church. As an experiment in exclusion, I wonder how it will fare.

Read more about it here:

Taking in the ever-evolving news on vaccine passports this past month, I kept wondering why nobody ever mentioned churches. If gyms, bars, entertainment venues and places of work merited strict vaccination policies, why not places of faith?

Given the nature of churches — places where children and adults closely intermingle, where seniors and the immunocompromised regularly gather, where diverse groups share food, sing together, and meet in often small, old, poorly ventilated buildings — wouldn’t a mandatory vaccination policy make sense? Wouldn’t it be the Christian thing to do?

And yet, I’ve haven’t heard of any churches making this call. Which makes it hard to be the first.

This week, our church leadership team decided that when our church opens for live gatherings next month, all attendees 12 and older will need to be fully vaccinated.

Even though it’s a temporary measure, and there will be online alternatives, and unvaccinated people will still be able to attend with proof of a recent negative COVID test, it still feels wrong. Churches  should never turn people away, should they?

Yet we do. The moment we accommodate the unvaccinated we alienate those who want to shield their unvaccinated children, immunocompromised individuals who are still vulnerable to breakthrough infections, and anyone else who’d rather avoid the risk.

Either way we make a choice. So, our little faith community has decided to side with the majority of civic-minded, science-trusting Calgarians for practical and theological reasons.

Practically, more than 76 per cent of Albertans 12 and up have received at least one dose of vaccine. Clearly most Albertans trust the science. We want to honour their choice and make our space as hospitable and safe for them as possible.

Theologically, the argument is stronger. To be a Christian is to model one’s life after Christ. Jesus always put others first. He gave up his individual rights for the common good and sacrificed for the sake of the weak. He loved others as he loved himself and would have surely done anything to best protect the unvaccinated children in his neighbourhood. A Christian ethic always puts the vulnerable first.

A Christian worldview, historically, has also been very pro-science. Shouldn’t Christians be first in line when it comes to celebrating God’s good gifts of vaccines? There is a direct line connecting Jesus’ first century call to heal the sick to the hospitals that fill our cities today. Western health care started in early churches and monasteries, as did the movement that would lead to modern universities (and their capacity to do scientific research). For 2000 years, the spirit of Christ has been growing humanity’s capacity to understand the biology of the human body — so that we can better care for it.

The plague, the vaccine, and our Jeremiah moment

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Most people are uninterested in what priests from mainline denominations have to say. I can hardly blame them since so much of it is utter nonsense. We still have a priestly caste that has authority, though: doctors, scientists, experts in general and politicians, although the lustre of the latter has become tarnished of late. The reason for this is that we like to be told what to do: freedom, as Dostoyevsky noted, is a burden which we are only too eager to give away to whoever offers to relieve us of it.

As a result, we sheep listen keenly for our shepherd’s call and follow him where he leads.

Jeremiah encountered false prophets who insisted that everything would turn out fine:

Jeremiah 23:16ff
[16] A Message from GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies: “Don’t listen to the sermons of the prophets. It’s all hot air. Lies, lies, and more lies. They make it all up. Not a word they speak comes from me.
[17] They preach their ‘Everything Will Turn Out Fine’ sermon to congregations with no taste for God, Their ‘Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to You’ sermon to people who are set in their own ways.
[18] “Have any of these prophets bothered to meet with me ,the true GOD? bothered to take in what I have to say? listened to and then lived out my Word?
[19] Look out! GOD’s hurricane will be let loose— my hurricane blast, Spinning the heads of the wicked like tops!
[20] God’s raging anger won’t let up Until I’ve made a clean sweep, completing the job I began. When the job’s done, you’ll see that it’s been well done.

We have been assured by our medical experts that taking one or a combination of the readily available COVID-19 vaccines will save us. Such is the fervour of these priestly panjandrums and their devotees that the vaccination ritual has taken on a eucharistic aura. Selfies of the first dose rite are posted on Facebook, garnering enthusiastic approval and congratulations; new converts feverishly – literally in some cases – proselytize their friends to partake of the Dose; scorn is heaped on the reluctant.

What lies underneath all this? Does it have a spiritual aspect?

It now seems plausible that the COVID-19 virus was man-made in the Chinese Wuhan laboratory as part of their gain of function research – a process partially funded by the US National Institutes of Health. Which goes to show that the existence of a conspiracy theory is not evidence of the absence of a conspiracy. So, the havoc that has been visited on mankind was, in all likelihood, self-inflicted.

Our efforts to extricate ourselves are mainly focussed on vaccines, all of which (in North America, at least) have been produced or tested using a kidney dissected from a baby girl aborted in 1972 (the HEK-293 cell line) or the iris of another baby aborted in 1985 (the PER.C6 cell line). This may or may not fill you with unease; in my case, it does.

The Catholic church is one of the few denominations that have made a statement on the morality of taking a vaccine whose development relied on an aborted baby (the Anglican Church – even ACNA- has yet to make an even flabby pronouncement on it). To summarise the Catholic position: it is morally acceptable to take such a vaccine if no alternative is available because the abortion was not performed for the express purpose of harvesting the baby’s organs for sale to a laboratory; that was incidental to the abortion and the use of the vaccine is not encouraging further abortions. There is no material cooperation with the evil act of abortion. In my view, the argument is flawed for a couple of reasons. Here is one: it has recently come to light that the university of Pittsburgh has been aborting babies by induction so that they remain intact, a requirement for optimal organ harvesting. The babies may still be alive when they are induced; indeed, they may still be alive when they are dissected. The organs, once removed, are sold to laboratories for medical experiments, just as the kidney and iris were to develop our COVID-19 vaccines. To consume the vaccine is to grant tacit assent to a demonic abomination, an abomination which would have no reason to continue if all refused to inject the fruit of its macabre experiments.

One of the enduring conceits of mankind has been that we are in command of our own destiny. “The vaccine will give us our freedom back”, we are told. “It will ‘flatten the curve’” – remember that? “You will be able to travel, take off your mask, eat in restaurants, hug your grandchildren, go to baseball games” and so forth. I vaccinate, therefore I can ….. hug, dine out, travel – insert your choice distraction.

But what if God is in control, not us?  What if this is His judgement on an evil generation? What if He is waiting for us to repent?

Countries that have instigated draconian lockdowns and mask mandates have not done significantly better than Sweden that didn’t.

Israel was the first country to start vaccinating people. The majority of the population has received two Pfizer injections. Yet this was the headline in yesterday’s Times of Israel:

Health officials predict thousands of seriously ill COVID patients within month

It goes on to say:

Israeli hospitals have to prepare for an influx of nearly 5,000 coronavirus patients within weeks, half of whom will need acute care to deal with severe bouts of COVID-19, health officials have warned Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, according to reports Wednesday.

An old friend of mine used to like telling me: “If you sup with the Devil make sure you use a long spoon”.

I’ll leave you with some questions: are we in control of this pandemic or is God? Is our priestly caste spouting piffle when they assure us that everything will be fine if we just do as they say or are we at a Jeremiah moment? If you take the vaccine, is your spoon long enough?

A Prayer as I Put on My Mask

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For those who are still unconvinced that all but the most stubborn have become glassy-eyed disciples in a new and seemingly irresistible cult, I give you this – sorry, I don’t know what to call it – thing, allegedly written by The Right Reverend Richard Bott, Moderator of the United Church of Canada.

Creator,
as I prepare to go into the world,
help me to see the sacrament
in the wearing of this cloth –
let it be “an outward sign
of an inward grace” –
a tangible and visible way
of living love for my neighbours,
as I love myself.

Christ,
since my lips will be covered,
uncover my heart,
that people would see my smile
in the crinkles around my eyes.
Since my voice may be muffled,
help me to speak clearly,
not only with my words,
but with my actions.

Holy Spirit,
as the elastic touches my ears,
remind me to listen carefully –
and full of care –
to all those I meet.
May this simple piece of cloth
be shield and banner,
and each breath that it holds,
be filled with your love.

In your Name
and in that love,
I pray.

May it be so.
May it be so.

Canadian Pastor arrested for breaking COVID rules

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From here:

Christian pastor Tim Stephens was arrested a second time by members of the Calgary Police Service yesterday for allegedly breaking COVID-19 health rules. The pastors’ kids were in tears as they witnessed their father being hauled away by cops from their home.

Previously, police had searched for and discovered the location of Stephens’ underground church service last Sunday by using a helicopter.

What exactly are these COVID rules, you may be wondering. I have no idea because, although this G7 bunch appear to be breaking them, no one is arresting them. Some animals are more equal than others.

Pastor arrested for inciting church attendance

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No, not in China, in Alberta.

Pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for inciting people to attend church.

It took a heavily armed squad of brave police officers to subdue the dangerous ecclesiastical criminal who can be seen in the video below in his Sunday best being made to kneel on a wet motorway.

Luckily, the constabulary was fully masked up – as North Americans like to say just to irritate me – to protect themselves from any deadly projectile sneezing that the unmasked pastor may have secretly weaponised. It goes without saying that if the pastor had had the forethought to wield a Black Lives Matter placard, it would be the police who would be kneeling on the wet tarmac.

Prior to this, Pastor Artur had not endeared himself to the local constabulary. He tossed them out of his church, hurling the epithet “gestapo” at them. Not at all inclusive but, then, they were trying to shut down his church service and only the most intrepid or foolhardy will interrupt a preacher when he is in full swing.

I make no claim that the Pastor was right to continue church services in person – my church isn’t – but the police cannot imagine that this episode will do anything but heap ridicule and derision on any attempt to maintain the illusion that their job is to serve and protect. As PR people like to say: “the optics are bad.”

“Take your vaccine” says the World Council of Churches

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Before I start, let me be clear: I am not trying to convince anyone not to take a vaccine. The choice is yours and I have no wish to influence anyone.

The WCC, however, does think it’s the church’s job to convince people to be vaccinated:

Is the new term for clergy “faith actors”? I didn’t know that. We can only assume it’s because Christian clergy see themselves as thespians playing a role rather than the genuine article.

We all suffer from a fatal disease. It’s called “sin”. There is no vaccine against it. The solution is Jesus. The church has forgotten that that is its primary message.