One of the fascinating things I have found during the Covid scam and subsequent fake vaccine push has been the way that it has caused individuals to reveal themselves as to which side they stand in this spiritual war. The Covid scam was the cover to push the poisonous vaccines. Thus, one’s position on the vaxx is a litmus test on the road to battle. Some people, many people I would say, have taken the vaxx in good faith and now find themselves in spiritual as well as physical trouble. For those souls, you have my thoughts and prayers. But caught in their Limbo land they are not actively engaged in fighting us.
It is rather those that pertain to be on our side, on the side of God, and not some woke manifestation but the real God, but who actively side with the Enemy pushing the vaxx that trouble me the most. There is no more dangerous foe than the one in a position of authority in your own camp.
One of those who seems to have revealed himself in this manner is the philosopher and Catholic, Edward Feser. I discovered Feser through the excellent Synlogos feed which is now one of my main morning stopping points. Feser is always an interesting read and he gets many things right. He is also not afraid of taking the fight to the enemy. But in the last two days he has suddenly published not one but two articles as to why the vaxx is not a big deal at all.
The first was titled, Covid-19 Vaccination is not the hill to die on.
What should Catholics think about the Covid-19 vaccines and about vaccine mandates? I keep getting asked about this, so a post devoted to the topic seems in order. As I have said before, I think that the statement on these subjects issued last year by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) gets things exactly right. The vaccines can be taken in good conscience, but authorities ought to keep them voluntary rather than making them mandatory. (For those who are wondering, yes, I’ve been vaccinated, as have several other members of my family.)
This is known as getting with the program. Feser and his family have taken the vaxx so you should too as the CDF says it’s all on the level. You know, unless they make it mandatory, and here is where Feser begins to fall into a hole of his own making.
But how prudent or imprudent a policy is is a matter of degree. A certain tax policy, for example, might be extremely wise, merely defensible, merely ill-advised, outright foolish, or extremely foolish. The same thing can be true of a vaccine mandate.
Feser is presenting the general concept of tax policy as some sort of comparative example. This is a startling strawman argument; it is way beyond comparing apples and oranges. For a start, one does not inject tax policies, no matter how well or how badly written, into one’s body. But according to Feser, it’s just a vaccine like measles, mumps or rubella. Which is another dishonest comparison. These are not vaccines as John C. Wright has clearly defined:
A vaccine provokes the body’s immune response by introducing a nonlethal variant of the disease. This injects messenger-RNA strands into the body to instructs cells to create a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which provokes the immune response. Contrary to what the Orwellian-named so-called fact checkers say, RNA therapy is genetic therapy, not vaccination.
But this is merely the physical side of the argument, not the spiritual. The very big Catholic argument against the vaccines is that they were developed using human fetuses. But Feser thinks that this is a facile argument and tries to casually dismiss it.
Some Catholics mistakenly object to the vaccines on the grounds that they are connected to abortion. Now, some uninformed people think that the vaccines actually contain fetal parts, or that they were manufactured using fetal parts. That is not true. What is true is that cells that are descended from cells taken from an unborn child aborted fifty years ago were used in testing but not in manufacturing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (as they are used in testing all sorts of vaccines, food products, etc.). (In the case of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, these descendent cells are used in manufacturing the vaccine.)
Naturally, it would be better if there were not even this very remote material connection to an abortion. But the connection is merely material and very remote rather than formal or direct, and it is a longstanding and well-known principle of Catholic moral theology that an action can be justifiable in the case of a merely remote material connection to wrongdoing, if there is a proportional reason for taking that action.
Feser is very patronising here, particularly in the first paragraph. Whether or not it is deliberate, it betrays inherent weakness. It is poor rhetoric because it does not achieve its aim and leaves him open to attack. This is strange behavior from a scholar and philosopher who is usually so calm and adroit with his arguments and choice of words. Thus, it is revealing.
The proportional reason that he infers is to save lives and reopen society. But how does that stand up to the worldview of Catholicism? Remember, Feser is not just a philosopher; he is a Catholic philosopher. Such reasoning is very much of this world. As such it is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and particularly from a Catholic standpoint. But it is not only fundamentally selfish; by its actions it condones abortion as being intrinsically good because people stand to benefit from it.
But it gets worse.
I imagine that Feser got some pushback from his first article, because the very next day he came out with another one, doubling down on his earlier assertions. The article is facetiously titled, Covid 19 Vaccines and Jeffery Dahmer’s nail clippings. In it, Feser attempts to defend his position by use of an extremely clumsy example whereby he concocts a scenario around the murdered body of former prison inmate and serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. In it, a guard takes the nail clippings from Dahmer’s body, somehow works out how to clone them, sells the cloned clippings to ghoulish imaginary buyers, and finally someone invents some new nail clippings which they were only able to do so via utilising the cloned clippings of the murdered murderer.
Apparently this is analogous to the matter at hand.
Now, this example is parallel to the way the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines (and many other vaccines, medicines, food products, etc.) were developed using cells descended from the cells of an unborn child aborted fifty years ago …
I have seen this a lot from Churchians desperate to defend the indefensible. The magical ‘fifty years’. I suppose that means that the time scale delivers beatitude to the act of harvesting unborn children for the purposes of prolonging the lives of those who have already lived. If this is indeed the case, where is the cut off point? Is it five years? Or Twenty? Or perhaps twenty five? At what point does this go from being morally and spiritually unacceptable and a mortal sin at that, to we’re all good here, nothing to see, nothing to see, go back to your homes after you’ve had your fifth booster.
Feser concludes by accusing those who have an issue with harvesting fetuses to prolong lives to be ‘hotheads’ who are prone to emotional outbursts and who have been blinded by the awful things that governments have been doing and have thus stumbled into the trap of believing that the vaccines are also nefarious. According to Feser, this is not the case; it is a red herring.
Somehow it has never occurred to Feser that the same governments and world power bodies who have been behind all of the lies, obfuscations, bullying, disruptions, upheavals; those same powers that are hysterically and relentlessly pushing the pretend vaccines against millions of people who don’t want them, somehow the parts are not connected.
Feser is not a stupid man, not by a long shot. I leave it to the reader to decide on which side his loyalties lie.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can-purchase Adam’s books here.
