On the Inhumanity of COVID Restrictions

“Love thy neighbor,” the cherry-pickers of the Bible proclaimed.  We should have known better.  It sounded all too familiar, like that bunch who pick and fling, “Judge not,” at those who say something that pricks their conscience.  So like sheep we submitted.  How could we argue in the face of…what do they call it?  Oh yes, “science,” that discipline the high priests of which now demand the public’s unquestioning obeisance.   So we wore masks and stayed six feet away from each other.  That was the easy part of loving our neighbor.

But then there were other ways we were required to “love” our neighbor:

• Nursing home residents went months without visitors—the highlight of their final dreary days.

• In some places, small children were forced to wear masks—and thus eat their snot, children being children.

• I’ve recently read of a “mother” who “placed” her son who had the virus in the trunk of her car while traveling to a testing site so that she would not be exposed while seated next to him.  Of course, the judge found no probable cause for child endangerment; after all, it was she who needed to be saved from the inconvenience of carrying her thirteen year-old infectious fetus which (not “who”) just happened to be outside her womb.  I suppose the trunk of her car was a worthy substitute thereof in such a life-threatening situation.  I wonder where she “places” her son when they’re at home!

• We wrecked a booming economy and thereby destroyed millions of livelihoods and lives to boot.  But, hey, it put Trump out of office.

• Worst of all, we violated the sacred bond of marriage as husbands and wives who had been married for fifty years were not allowed to be in the same room together, let alone touch one another, when one lay dying in the hospital or nursing home.

And this was the way we loved our neighbor: We treated the weakest and most vulnerable in society in the most inhumane ways and justified it by prostituting the second greatest commandment.  This is an even worse perversion of Scripture than the other mentioned above!  Lesson to Christians: Never let the world tell you what Scripture means or how to apply it—NEVER!

Eusebius, church historian who lived around A.D 300, recorded how during a plague, Christians ministered to the sick and buried the dead left in the streets  knowing full-well they too would die by coming into contact with the infected.  They welcomed death for the cause of Christ.  But not us.  We cling to this life.  I expect this sort of cowardice from pagans who wince not at Roe v. Wade’s answer to child sacrifice but who cling to life for themselves at all costs as we have observed these past two years.  What else do they have but this life and what they think matters most, namely, freedom to do with their bodies whatever gives them pleasure. 

But Christians should be different.  We failed.  We wore masks to church and stayed six feet apart—which is inherently contradictory to what “church” is supposed to be?  We stayed home watching “cyber-church,” as if it were the same thing.  It’s not.  We stayed away from places where people needed us.  In short, we went along with, and might have even been accessories to, the world’s latest farcical but cruel attempt to save humanity.  And I fear much of it was out of the same cowardice in the face of death that one would expect out of a contemporary pagan.  Love thy neighbor, indeed!

What would Eusebius write about us?