Professor Jay Bhattacharya - Professor of Medicine, Stanford University.
"The Truth shall set you free".
Jesus.
Back in the 1970s, I spent pretty much every Saturday on the streets witnessing about the Gospel. There were lots of 'weird' religions also out in those days - everything from the Unification Church to Divine Light Mission - also trying to peddle their wares upon unwitting and unaware young minds, and it was sad to see just how many were taken into the fold of such bizarre beliefs, which principally taught you could 'become' divine in some fashion if you gave yourself over to the "guidance" of their gifted leader, who, of course, was beyond question or reproach... whatever they did.
Then came Jim Jones and the people's temple, and some began to realise just how dangerous such 'alternatives' could be.
The issue at the centre of such abuse is that of two agendas. The people who often joined these cults were certainly in part gullible when it came to being duped by those 'selling' such wares, but they were often wanting even needing something more in their lives than just the everyday materialism that was the norm. The people running these groups, however, were of a very different nature - they understood what they were about and their intent was to lead and thereby manipulate others for their own particular purposes - principally power and wealth. "Fathers" like David Berg, Sun Myung Moon, Guru Mahoraj and many more proved very successful in gaining all they had been intending through such means.
It would be refreshing if I could write here about how the Christian church escaped such manipulative behaviour - that as fringe and strange groups ranted, the mainstream side of our faith carried on as normal, but tragically, that wasn't the case.
The rise of the Charismatic Movement at the end of the 70's, bringing in a whole jumble of teachings and practices, especially from America, swamped the Christian world, and quickly established forms of instruction and "ministry" that would have been far more at home in some extremist sect than in the mainstream of the faith back to the earliest days (in the rise of Dualism) of the church. The key issue wasn't, when looked upon with hindsight, whether a person could manifest a particular "gift" because they had received the 'second blessing' - it was whether they were 'under' the Apostleship of God's "anointed" shepherds in respect to being in proper submission to what they taught and required of you. If you 'sinned' (questioned) such Spirit-lead work, you were in sin, and could only become right again through repentance and usually public confession and admonition.
Much of the "spiritual" church became a breeding ground for all manner of delusions, destructive beliefs and damaged lives, many of those casualties never returned to the fold again - the damage was too great.
When power is employed in such a ruthless and blanket manner, you can be certain that these kind of consequences will inevitably follow.
Which brings us to the present, and Professor Bhattacharya's observation concerning the abuse of power in respect to health care in this current crisis.
Is he correct?
The aim of his (actually, a number of leading scientists) new scientific analysis site* is to show how the key data gathered over the last 14 months declares this to be so - the misconduct has been comprehensive and extensive towards all parts of our society, and is thereby a very dangerous abuse of power and structures to bring about dire consequences.
So, if this case is shown, where does this leave us?
Perhaps, like those gullible people approached by a cultist on a seventies street, we're not sure to make of what we've seen and heard this year, in which case, opening up materials like those now being provided (*see the above link to the site) could help educate us in respect to what needs to be understood, and why we should engage with the issues to avoid such pitfalls occurring again.
What, however, if we have up to now, just accepted the 'message' that's been given from the media and powers around us as being perfectly correct, and just behaved and responded accordingly? What if we still think that's fine?
I'd suggest, in the light of what's now becoming apparent, that you are in very dangerous waters, because there's a bigger truth to face about many of the issues we've seen unfold in recent times. This is why Jesus taught His disciples that they should let no man deceive them (Matthew 24:4).
The time is right to ask questions, to look further and deeper than has been "allowed" (encouraged) by the media and the authorities throughout this entire crisis.
Truth is absolutely imperative to the church - we need to feed from it, share it and live by it; it's the only vehicle for genuine freedom.
If we're sincere in our wanting to conform to that, if we're hungry to live as we're intended to by God's good grace, then we will pursue this cause whatever the cost and wherever it causes us to look and see what is going on (just take a look at the example of the Prophets if you want to see this - God directs them to see and then say what isn't popular to His people continually).
Empty words, warns Paul, are the means often employed to beguile others into a web of deception which leaves them paralysed towards the truth (Ephesians 5:6). God's anger is active against such heinous disobedience, because it thwarts the truth from liberating us in respect to what is truly good and necessary in our thinking and thereby our living.
Let us truly seek to be those who are faithfully holding out the totality of God's truth - the untainted word of life - to these chaotic times.
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