Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is your program
bringing news, views,
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analysis up-to-date information
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and sometimes even
readings of editorials,
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little key to what's
coming on Religious Liberty.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And I'm sitting here
alone without a guest.
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Usually, there's a counterpoint
guest on the other side,
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but I'm here.
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I don't know if it's the end
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but well into the phenomenon
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of the COVID-19
scare in the world
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and in particular
in the United States,
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social distancing,
stay at home orders,
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restaurants closed
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unless you're
willing to eat in the...
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up front on a
table or as yesterday,
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we went somewhere
where they set us up
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in sort of the grassy
section next to the restaurant
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that I don't even
think they earned.
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It's not normal life.
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When this began,
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I wrote my first
editorial for the March issue.
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Immediately after I traveled
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in early March...
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I'm sorry, this was
for the January, February,
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March, April, for the May issue,
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immediately after
traveling in March to Oregon,
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and taking an airport through
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Chicago, Los
Angeles and Seattle.
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I was traveling through
the hotspots of contagion.
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And I entitled the
editorial contagion
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and I want to share
what hit me immediately,
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and then if I have
time, share something else
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I wrote more
recently on this phenomenon.
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This is what I wrote.
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"Back in early
March, I was still traveling
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far afield
promoting religious liberty.
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One of my last trips
before social distancing
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had me largely confined to home
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and walks in my neighborhood
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was to San
Francisco, California.
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Already there was a
rising sense of social panic.
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The airport was a
little quieter than usual.
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Many wore masks to hide
their tight expressions.
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Others like plovers
nesting in the grass,
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tried to hide in quieter corners
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of the concourse waiting areas.
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All paid good attention
to the television monitors
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and the escalating
tiles of contagion.
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At the motel in the screen
in my room had the same cast,
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to escape it in
the sense of siege,
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I took off on
foot crossing the moat
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of the hospitality district
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and after under
passing the freeway
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arriving in the almost medieval
back streets of the city.
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All seemed normal enough,
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although with the
new awareness of threat,
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I could see the hazard
of jostling in the street
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or waiting in
line in crowded stores
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for food likely topped
with descending vapors.
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So I decided to
seek a quieter venue,
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and a used bookstore
seemed to fit that criteria.
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It was quieter,
confirming my view
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that panic for most
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does not necessarily
lead to introspection.
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I scanned the shelves,
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looking for
interest and bargains,
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and quickly found both.
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It was a fat
paperback of 750 pages
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and a price less than a dollar,
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indicating a lack
of reader interest.
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The title jumped
out at me however,
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"The Coming Plague:
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Newly Emerging Diseases
in a World Out of Balance."
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I have been
reading it ever since.
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The 1984 tome,
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the basis for a TBS documentary,
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is incredibly close to a
secular book of Revelation
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in its specificity in predicting
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what we are living through.
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It documents the
efforts of epidemiologists
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and an array of
scientists to combat
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the veritable assembly line
of possible pandemics unleashed
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by changing world demographics
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and the effects
of climate change.
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That was some weeks ago.
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Now the United States
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has more
COVID-19 cases than China,
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where the virus first appeared,
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and New York is caught up
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in a frightening
exponential spiral
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of infection and death.
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For much of the population,
normal life has ceased.
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Empty grocery
shelves reflect panic buying.
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Empty streets are
the Dow Jones proxy
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for an economy in rewind.
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Information on the
crisis is everywhere,
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but yet often
contradictory and incomplete.
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One online
doctor, strain on his face
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as he incongruously
touches his face repeatedly,
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says the most successful outcome
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will be a mere 100,000 dead,
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and by way we
passed that already,
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the worst-case
scenario: many, many times that.
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No wonder some
news commentators,
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reaching into
the purple verbiage
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of the Hindenburg tragedy
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of a century ago,
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keep using the
word "apocalyptic."
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That term, of course, means
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"resembling the
end of the world,
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momentous or catastrophic,"
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but at root it
means an evocation
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of the biblical Apocalypse,
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or Book of Revelation,
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which does prophecy in
some detail the final events
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for this world.
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People are
beginning to wonder at it all.
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I was in my
backyard a few days ago,
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trimming a dead tree,
and the neighbor's wife
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called across the fence
to comment on the contagion.
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"It almost seems, she said,
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like one of the
plagues of Revelation
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at the end of the world,"
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perhaps testing what
my reaction might be.
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"Certainly the type of thing
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we might expect
at the end of time,"
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I said carefully.
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"But it does not directly
answer to the specific plagues
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described in that Bible book."
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The ancient Etruscans
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had an interesting
view of their history.
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They divided it
into 90-year blocks,
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roughly equaling
four generations,
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and about as long as
any human being could live.
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The Romans
picked up on the idea,
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but lengthened it to 100
years and then 110 years,
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calling it a saeculum:
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the period when
living memory failed
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and human
reactions tended to reset.
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I think it interesting
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that it is
approximately 100 years
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since a flu pandemic
killed 675,000 Americans
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and tens of millions worldwide.
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We have been here before.
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Of course, coming on the heels
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of the generational
killing of World War I,
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the flu epidemic of 1918 blurred
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into the general
horror of the times
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and the
soon-to-come Great Depression.
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Lest we forget!
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Benjamin Franklin,
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he of the Poor
Richard's Almanack
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and many pithy statements,
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wrote in words
variously reported
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and generally repeated
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as "They who are willing
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to give up liberty for security,
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deserve neither
liberty nor security."
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It is a lesson that
we started to forget
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after September 11 and
that should be kept in mind
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as we adopt draconian and
uniformly accepted measures
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to protect ourselves from
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"the pestilence in darkness
and the destruction at noonday"
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as Psalm 91:6 puts it.
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We have long since
escaped the pestilences
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that wiped out native peoples
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in the New World
and the Antipodes.
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And the depredations
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of the plague now
reside quiescently
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in history book footnotes
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and weapons lab vial storage.
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But we would do well to ponder
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what accompanied the Black Death
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as it scythed down
as much as a quarter
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or even a third of
Europe's population.
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Economic activity all but ceased
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and farms ceased to
function, leading to starvation
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on a level
approaching the plague itself.
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Cannibalism, a repressed memory
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now only hinted
at in fairy tales,
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was an ugly fact
of a desperate time,
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which had been preceded
by decades of crop failure
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and weather change,
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suggesting that
God had forgotten them.
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Lawlessness and war followed
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in the train of social meltdown.
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I could not help but
note that in the midst
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of the COVID-19
troubles in the US,
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there was news of another
North Korean missile launch.
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So much of our
post-World War II peace
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comes from the
world's interconnectedness
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binding nations to a realization
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that they will lose more by war
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than they could ever gain.
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The collapse of the
world economic order
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might well
remove that inhibition.
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The Christian misreading of
Scripture in the Middle Ages
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regarding the Jews had long
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since become a justification
for civil suppression
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in medieval Europe.
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Now, with the
panic of the plague,
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it spilled over into
gross acts of violence:
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In Strasbourg,
France, for example,
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on Valentine's Day 1349,
1,000 Jews were burned alive.
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Flagellants and
religious heretics abounded.
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For many it seemed
the end of the world.
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Even today, religious
freedom is generally supported
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but often an elusive thing.
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It is not easily
judged by society at large.
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And it's worth remembering
that efforts to restrict it
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nearly always have broad support
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and pass as a
compelling societal
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or governmental need.
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We at best pray that
human nature does not react
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against itself
as it did back then.
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And yes, the
scientifically led efforts
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to limit our present
pandemic seem well thought out.
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And yes, the
government is seemingly
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acting with admirable
respect for human life.
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But whether our
extreme measures will work,
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and whether they will bring
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other troubles in their
train remains to be seen.
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The medieval contagion brought
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by the Black Death extended
far beyond the dying time,
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it likely will
be the same today."
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I wrote that early
on in this pandemic
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to really sort of prod people
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with a little
bit of an awareness
00:10:47.24\00:10:48.64
how this dynamic
worked in the past.
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I don't know.
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No one can know
whether this is anywhere near
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even the flu pandemic of 1918,
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or at the worst case
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whether that could
ever possibly be like
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the Black Death
of the Middle Ages,
00:11:03.96\00:11:06.59
I don't know.
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And if this is
not, we don't know
00:11:08.00\00:11:09.90
if the next one will be like it,
00:11:09.93\00:11:11.37
but we should know,
00:11:11.40\00:11:12.90
we should be
somewhat aware of history
00:11:12.93\00:11:15.40
and of human nature,
00:11:15.44\00:11:16.91
and how religious liberty
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and indeed
civil liberties affair
00:11:18.97\00:11:22.14
in these sort of panics.
00:11:22.18\00:11:24.05
And I do believe the
same dynamic is at work.
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I do believe it very
likely that we're suffering,
00:11:27.62\00:11:31.19
going to suffer some
sort of economic collapse
00:11:31.22\00:11:34.22
at least, like we had in 2008,
may be like we had in 1929,
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or maybe even worse,
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because we live
in a house of cards.
00:11:41.50\00:11:44.90
Our modern life,
wonderful as it is compared
00:11:44.93\00:11:48.60
to the poverty and rudeness
00:11:48.64\00:11:54.21
of the medieval era
00:11:54.24\00:11:55.58
where even the king, you know,
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didn't have glass
in his windows and,
00:11:57.11\00:12:00.32
you know, might
have seemed great to be
00:12:00.35\00:12:01.68
a potentate then.
00:12:01.72\00:12:03.05
But they didn't live like
00:12:03.08\00:12:04.42
the poorest of the
poor in a western country.
00:12:04.45\00:12:07.59
So it may seem great,
00:12:07.62\00:12:08.96
but we're headed into a time
00:12:08.99\00:12:12.23
perhaps of a reckoning when,
00:12:12.26\00:12:15.00
you know, our
chips and our silicon,
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and our thin barriers between us
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and barbarism can
disappear quite easily.
00:12:20.40\00:12:23.94
Very few people realize that
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we're on the knife's edge,
00:12:25.37\00:12:26.71
even though it's
a wonderful life,
00:12:26.74\00:12:28.81
just like flying in a plane.
00:12:28.84\00:12:30.65
It's 500-600-mile an
hour, beautiful, slim,
00:12:30.68\00:12:34.38
shiny tube that it's barely
thicker than the soda pop can,
00:12:34.42\00:12:37.95
you're carrying as
much explosive gasoline
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as you are passengers.
00:12:40.46\00:12:42.42
It's minus 50 or
70 degrees outside,
00:12:42.46\00:12:45.56
your tube is under pressure,
it could explode at any moment.
00:12:45.59\00:12:49.36
The engines could
cease functioning.
00:12:49.40\00:12:51.30
We hardly give a thought to it
00:12:51.33\00:12:52.73
because this is a
wonderful jet set privilege.
00:12:52.77\00:12:55.70
And yet, you know,
moments dislocation
00:12:55.74\00:12:58.21
and it's all a
flaming massive debris.
00:12:58.24\00:13:02.98
In some ways,
modern life is like that,
00:13:03.01\00:13:06.35
in some ways, and in many ways,
00:13:06.38\00:13:08.98
Bible prophecy shines
through the human progress,
00:13:09.02\00:13:14.06
whether it's the Tower of Babel,
00:13:14.09\00:13:16.09
or the Twin Towers of New York,
00:13:16.12\00:13:19.23
or, you know,
some sort of treaty
00:13:19.26\00:13:21.76
that we established,
00:13:21.80\00:13:23.13
it's not
necessarily peace in our time.
00:13:23.16\00:13:25.50
In our time is
always the moment of truth.
00:13:25.53\00:13:28.80
And I believe,
well, we shouldn't panic,
00:13:28.84\00:13:32.61
and we should do whatever we can
00:13:32.64\00:13:34.74
in a responsible
way to help our fellows.
00:13:34.78\00:13:37.81
We should be
thinking introspectively,
00:13:37.85\00:13:40.22
how do I relate to this?
00:13:40.25\00:13:42.55
How will I use my faith
00:13:42.58\00:13:44.82
to traverse
these difficult times?
00:13:44.85\00:13:47.89
Is it going to carry me
through or will I be swept away
00:13:47.92\00:13:50.96
by the illusion of the time?
00:13:50.99\00:13:53.09
The Bible is very
plain, it says, you know,
00:13:53.13\00:13:54.53
those before the
flood, they ate and drink,
00:13:54.56\00:13:56.56
gave in marriage until they came
00:13:56.60\00:13:57.93
and swept them away.
00:13:57.97\00:14:00.10
I mean, maybe Jonah
00:14:00.14\00:14:02.57
was the only one and his family,
00:14:02.60\00:14:04.14
but it's likely others
thought a little on it,
00:14:04.17\00:14:07.88
and yet didn't take advantage.
00:14:07.91\00:14:09.84
We've been given the privilege
00:14:09.88\00:14:11.35
I think in this
case of a warning.
00:14:11.38\00:14:13.52
How do we follow
up remains to be seen?
00:14:13.55\00:14:16.05
Stay with me.
00:14:16.08\00:14:17.42
I want to share
something else after a break
00:14:17.45\00:14:19.35
that I'd written
after some months very close
00:14:19.39\00:14:23.69
to where we are now.
00:14:23.73\00:14:25.23
We'll be back shortly.
00:14:25.26\00:14:26.59