Perhaps the most alarming Gospel reading that exists confronted us last Sunday, at least in my church:

‘If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.

And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off. It is better for you to enter into life crippled than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna, where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’ (Mark, 9)

Sometimes You Have to Go Cold Turkey

What should we take away from that? We know that the abuse of a good thing doesn’t vitiate its proper use, in principle. The fact that some wars are unjust doesn’t make the case for pacifism. Sins of lust shouldn’t drive us to embrace universal celibacy (though it would solve all our social problems in 70 short years, I’m just saying).

Instead, it seems that Jesus was making a narrower, completely valid point. If any of us, or our organization, or our society, is grossly abusing something, and making it into an idol that threatens to damn us, we might just have to renounce it. Altogether. Swear it off as the alcoholic renounces even a midnight toast on New Year’s. Once something has proved that it exerts a toxic, hypnotic hold over us that cripples our reason, we need to yank it out, root and branch. That might sound extreme, but desperate times need desperate measures.

There’s No Healthy Dose of Addiction

Generally, we should seek the Golden Mean in our search for virtue. But there’s no “right amount” of toxic addiction, no healthy dose of idolatry. And once a slogan, or program, or political principle has proved that it can’t be used in moderation — at least for us — then we need to lock it away in a medical waste dumpster. As the Japanese had to lock up militarism, for instance, in the wake of World War II.

It’s in that sense that I think we need to reject “Public Health,” the idea that it’s the government’s job to extend our lives and manage our health. Just straight up, decide we’re against it. We must unite against Public Health, defeat it, and not stop our attacks until we achieve unconditional surrender. If we don’t, we have seen exactly where we’ll end up: Locked down, harassed and shot by our own local police, like the citizens of Australia. Censored, fired, and bullied, like the residents of Italy. Harangued, betrayed, and replaced like the health care workers of New York City.

A Public Health Dictatorship

We now live in a dawning Public Health dictatorship as overreaching and unhinged as the dictatorship of “virtue” that the French Revolution became. Those with power are scapegoating anyone who clings to old ideas like “medical privacy,” “personal autonomy” or even “natural acquired immunity.” A cult of the Vaccine has emerged, with schoolchildren dutifully composing prayers to the Jab, state governors preaching wild sermons about it in search of “apostles,” and researchers putting the Vaccine into communion wafers.

For that matter, the Nazis were in the end a public health dictatorship, too. Hitler’s ultimate loyalty was to the biological survival of a particular community, and he wasn’t slow to label outsiders and dissenters as “virus spreaders” or indeed as “typhus bacilli.” The Nazi obsession with biological health led to large-scale sterilization and later euthanasia of those “unfit” to pass on their genes.

We’re watching the birth of a cult, folks. A mortality cult, designed to play on our desperate, pathetic fear of death, and our shadowy uncertainty about what happens after it.

Cowards Forge Their Own Chains, Link by Link

There are deep cultural reasons why Public Health has morphed from “a pretty good idea that could be taken to extremes” into “Leviathan, Moloch, and Juggernaut,” all rolled up into one. The crucial cause operating here is that too many of us are effectively post-Christian, and that includes our churches. We aren’t really sure if there was an historical Adam, an original sin that necessitated redemption, or a miraculous resurrection that conquered eternal death. We kind of vaguely hope for life after death, but our sense of it is as shadowy as what the Greeks and Romans had.

One difference: those pagans vaguely imagined the afterlife would be somber and miserable. We pagans shrug and hope that instead it will be pleasant and rewarding — the kind of hearty attaboy each of us feels we really deserve. A bachelor party, maybe, or a lively pre-game tailgate. Perhaps a folk-song singalong at a nice community center, with bright inclusive murals, and lots of food trucks.

We certainly don’t fear judgment or condemnation as possible outcomes. A “Good God” wouldn’t punish good people like us.

Better Safe, Then Sorry

As happy-clappy as we might try to imagine the afterlife, we’re by no means certain of it. In the back of our minds the three Victorian stooges — Darwin, Marx, and Freud — hold our coats and snicker. We haven’t read them in detail, or considered counterarguments. But their three shadows loom over us, reminding us that death might well be the end. The universe might wink out at the moment when we flatline. So we better grab all the gusto we can while we’re still breathing, and avoid any needless suffering or sacrifice. No sense in taking chances.

Especially not for the sake of other people’s freedom, or human dignity, or religious scruples at benefiting from human sacrifice. That’s what it was when Nazi leaders arrested Anne Frank and her family as biological threats to Germany, and killed them in extermination camps. And it was human sacrifice when Prof. Alex van der Erb worked with an abortionist to remove Johanna Vera Alderliesten from the womb, likely alive, and harvest her kidney in 1972.

Johanna’s kidney, cloned, was used to develop or test the COVID vaccines your pastors are telling you to inject. Hundreds of other children have been likewise removed from the womb alive by the University of Pittsburgh, to harvest their organs for more research on more vaccines. Who funded that? Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who also funded the biowarfare lab in Wuhan that made the virus, and who now for some reason Americans trust on how to fight it.

Live Free or Burn in Hell

If a majority of Americans are so desperately clinging to their biological lives at any cost, to the point that they’ll embrace dictatorship like Santa Claus on Christmas morning, they deserve the grim, impoverished, bullied future that they’ll get. But the rest of us don’t. We fear tyranny more than death, and God more than man. That’s why we will prevail.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”