Category Archives: Covid

On the total absence of evidence for the efficacy of masking

Yet again, The Science follows politics

The blogger Eugyppius writes:

The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.

[…]

Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.

In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.

Update (08/02/2023):

Tom Woods writes:

The Cochrane Library describes itself as “a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of medical research.”

It is highly respected, and is known for its serious research methods.

The crazies are hysterical about it. But they can’t refute it.

Vinay Prasad, a political liberal who has been honest during Covid, puts it like this: “It is irrational to mask.”

Prasad sums it up: “Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza-like or Covid-like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone-cold negative. See those effect sizes and confidence intervals.”

(To read the study yourself, do a search for “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses,” from 2023.)

This includes the ballyhooed N95 mask as well.

Everybody in the medical establishment knew masking didn’t do anything, Prasad says:

There was a reason why Tony Fauci went out initially and said it didn’t work. There was a reason why the CDC said not to do it and the WHO said not to do it. And between March 1st and April 15th of 2020, there ain’t no new evidence that was generated of any plausibility. But two things happened.

There was a concerted movement by activists who don’t know evidence-based medicine to hashtag #wearaclothmask and hashtag #savelives and…you know, making stupid TikTok videos.

Why? Because they’re scared. They’re in their house, they’re scared. They don’t know what to do. They just grasp for anything, just like our primitive ancestors would have maybe slaughtered a chicken or done a rain dance. They’re doing the same thing….

They saw that Donald Trump didn’t do it. And the moment he didn’t do it, they knew they were right, because if he didn’t do it, I got to be right on it. It’s got to be right if he doesn’t do it, because he always does the wrong thing.

That was truly how juvenile the universal masking movement was.

Actually, that’s the wrong word. It was frankly sinister.

As with “social distancing,” you were accused of essentially being a murderer if you didn’t go along. It didn’t matter that a scatterplot of places in the US showed no connection between Covid restrictions and health outcomes.

This was never about science or evidence. It was a sinister confluence of some people’s irrational fear with other people’s desire to control, shame, and isolate.

Covid: A good summary of where we are now

Can be found here.

Excerpts:

I suspect that Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, top vaccine officials at FDA, were fired because they would not go along with this, while the feckless Peter Marks had no qualms about issuing a fake license. See the article this past week in Epoch Times about FOIA’d emails of Peter Marks at that time, where he said he would handle Gruber and Krause.

Fake you say? Yes, fake because after the license was issued, only EUA product was used. Because had licensed product been used, FDA could have gotten in trouble and so could Pfizer—because the vaccine had not met the standards for licensure, AND a licensed product had liability attached—it lost that magical liability waiver given to EUA products that were thought to be voluntary. The USG created a massive fraud on the public, making people believe they were getting a “safe and effective” licensed product when they were not.

[…]

What we are dealing with is a criminal conspiracy that includes DOD, Department of Justice, DHS, DHHS (FDA, CDC,NIH and other subagencies), all the 17 intel agencies, the White House and selected corporations. They have been working together for decades. Pharma commits crimes, and DOJ gives them a plea bargain, no one goes to jail, and they get to do it again. Some of the fines go to DOJ’s favorite charities.

[…]

I think that the medical enterprise was hijacked as a means to take over the world, because someone realized it could be used this way. First, it sucks up 20% of GDP, so there is a great deal of money that might be siphoned off. Second, it was a means to gain a lot of surveillance material, with online medical records. Third, it and doctors were trusted. Americans were convinced they had the best healthcare in the world, and it is only in the past 5-10 years that they realized this was far from true. Fourth, vaccines had a shiny patina. People believed in them. And for the 25 years that I have been closely observing vaccines, the federal government, and industry, have put unbelievable effort into shoring up the elusive “vaccine confidence” and demonizing “vaccine hesitancy.”

[…]

I think the desire of the government to inject us with a liquid of their choice, one that cannot be fully identified by the end-user, is the best way to explain why so much effort was put into vaccine propaganda pre-COVID. And also why so much effort was expended to make Americans think they needed a yearly flu shot, despite efficacy in the 30-40% range and a lack of evidence the shots prevented deaths. They were grooming us to accept frequent routine vaccinations as a fact of life. They avoided mRNA vaccines until now so as not to take the shine off the general vaccine ‘brand.’ They avoided trying to develop non-spike-based vaccines for COVID, despite knowing of the spike toxicity after 20 years of research. Thanks, Dr. Fauci.

[…]

Now the government, in cahoots with pharma, is developing flu and RSV mRNA vaccines. Maybe all of them will be made of mRNA. What can we trust right now? Why should we trust the FDA to do the right thing by us for any product it regulates?

But vaccines are only a part of the problem. There is the vaccine passport—which is still a “thing” in much of Europe, even now that we know the darn vaccines are worse than useless and the passport protects no one’s health. But it is both a great way to monitor vaccine compliance and establish a platform to which CBDCs can be added, with unknown additional mechanisms of surveillance and control. The goal of ultimate control is still with us.

[…]

COVID showed us that we had more useful drugs in the pantry (repurposed drugs) than we expected. If there is no Fauci, Walensky and Woodcock to suppress them next time, it won’t be so scary.

[…]

We all need to get a grip, and protect ourselves from propaganda, and stop the destruction of what we need to survive. Everyone needs to learn how to distinguish fact from spin. Start practicing as you read a news article, or watch TV. Which part of the story is fact? Which is spin/opinion/designed to make you believe something?

Once enough of us recognize what is going on, we can make a big enough stink and stop much of it. I think we can, if we are smart and work together. There are 8 billion of us, after all, and just some thousands of them. We need to educate their minions to come over to our side. Let’s create ourselves as the warriors we were put on this planet to be at this time in history.

Pfizer Exposed For Exploring “Mutating” COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines Via ‘Directed Evolution’

Project Veritas video. (Update 30/01/2023: Youtube of course took the video down. No worries, it can be found here. And, BTW, here‘s the total meltdown of the exposed Pfizer employee.)

Paul Joseph Watson comments on the fact that this is being suppressed by the mainstream media here.

Update 30/01/2023:

Blogger Eugyppius has some competent things to say about the whole matter. Excerpt:

I’ll be honest: I don’t think what Walker describes is necessarily dangerous. The virus is already training itself against vaccine-elicited antibodies in billions of people. That’s a powerful force that I’m not sure Pfizer’s scientists have any hope of outpacing. Were such a tweaked virus to escape a laboratory, it would just have the antibody-evading properties of many other strains; we might not even recognise it as a lab product. Still, Walker’s revelations are significant, for they reveal how easily demand for vaccines becomes pressure to tinker with viral evolution. Similar research on potential pandemic pathogens that are poorly adapted to humans would indeed be truly dangerous.

Robert Malone, MD comments from the middle of the fray:

Almost immediately after the first Veritas video dropped, we all got a masters class in the amazing power and capabilities to control narrative and information which Pfizer has assembled. Important to remember that it was already well known that there is a very tight relationship between Pfizer and Thompson-Reuters. In fact, revealing that clear conflict of interest was the thing that got me kicked off of Linked-In the first time. The UK-based Daily Mail, one of the largest daily publications in the world, puts out a story summarizing the Veritas video, and it is almost immediately deleted. A decentralized army of internet warriors quickly goes to work seeking any intel concerning Jordon Walker, M.D.. I receive screen shots which fully dox the young physician, including email addresses and phone numbers. Do I dox or do I not, that is the question. Decision = not.

People are hitting Google like crazy with queries regarding Jordon Walker, Pfizer and Veritas. As they did when I said “mass formation psychosis” on Rogan #1757, Google manually interferes with the searches, returning wishy washy “these results are changing rapidly” screens instead of actual links. So, now we have a pretty clear smoking gun involving collusion between Pfizer and Google to suppress the story. Then everything, anything, having to do with Jordon Walker, MD gets memory holed. Wiped from the internet, including the Wayback machine. And then the chaos agents, bots and trolls descend on all social media channels. Sowing doubt that Jordon Walker is even a real person. Floating paranoid conspiracy theories that this is all a big deep-fake set up of Veritas, O’Keefe and myself. Which of course get amplified by the usual actors. Now THAT is an example of Fifth Gen Warfare power! And by the way, I gently advise that readers who were aware of this as it was happening set a check-bit in their brains on the names of those chaos agents who actively promoted this false narrative. Some show the signs of true controlled opposition, and some appear to have been acting as pollinating bees. By their actions you will know them. My advice, if you were one of the bees, is to own up and clearly acknowledge the documentation demonstrating that this Pfizer nightmare is real.

The following day, as promised, Veritas drops another amazing video in which James O’Keefe confronts Jordon Walker in some New York city eatery, and Dr. Walker comes unglued for all the world to see (I think that is about the kindest description possible). Veritas provides more documentation that Walker is/was, as advertised, a senior Pfizer employee with global Director-level responsibilities relating to their mRNA vaccine portfolio.

Clearly Pfizer has decided that the best response at this point is no response. They have disabled comments on all of their websites and social media outlets (except for those that they are “following”). Pfizer has managed to block every single major corporate news outlet from covering the story (except Tucker, who has considerable content freedom by contract with Fox). Jill posts a warning basically stating that we should expect the Empire to Strike Back.

And here‘s a link to a short video on Twitter by Project Veritas leader James O’Keefe commenting on the fact that Youtube deleted the above video. Sounds like PV are going to fight back. That will be interesting to watch.

Here‘s Tucker Carlson’s take on Fox News, the only mainstream outlet that reported on this so far.

And here‘s Dr. Malone again in a half-hour interview about the matter. I haven’t viewed it in full yet but want to keep the link.

Update 03/02/2023: Same Pfizer employee in the same sting as above admits (video) that his company is worried about the effect the “vaccine” is having on menstrual cycles.

The constitutional condition of England

A traditionalist laments

In his recent article, “Shakespeare and the Redundancy of Conservatism“, Alan Bickley laments the downfall of a country that once could rightly be proud of itself.

Excerpts:

I spent the 1980s and 1990s predicting and lamenting the death of our Ancient Constitution. This was not the provisional work of more or less stupid intellectuals. The English Constitution was part of the organic unity of our nation. It was one with our language and our history and our general beliefs about ourselves. It needed no justifications, no hierarchy of laws, no entrenchment, no supervisory panel of judges. We had trial by jury not because some piece of paper required it, but because we had agreed, since before the Norman Conquest, that a man should suffer punishment only after the lawful judgement of his peers. We had a privilege against double jeopardy because we agreed it was fair that a man should be troubled only once by the authorities with an accusation of some specific wrongdoing. We had freedom of speech because it was our birthright. We knew who we were. We looked down on foreigners, and we took it for granted that they should look up to us.

The last two sentences may be indicative of what went wrong: Pride cometh before the fall. (In fact, Proverbs 16:18 (KJV) says: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”) That is not to say that England didn’t have something others could rightly look up to. But it did invite the wrong kind of pride.

I have given up on lamentations during the present century. I have given up on them because my predictions turned out to be broadly correct. The English Constitution is something nowadays to be discussed in various past tenses. In 1997, I looked forward with particular horror at what was now certain to come. I was like a man in fine clothes who found himself compelled to cross a sea of pig filth. I fussed and tutted over every speck on the national shoes. A quarter of a century later, we are spattered up to our waists, and it hardly seems much if we trip and land on our faces. The forms of our Constitution have been changed in random though generally malevolent ways. Even those forms that remain have been drained of their ancient substance and filled with something new and wholly malevolent.

Bickley is a traditionalist, but despairs of the current Monarchy:

The Conservative Party has not only failed us. It has betrayed us. It has conserved nothing. It has joined in the work of destruction. We now face the prospect of another Labour Government. This will almost certainly complete the draining of substance and the changing of forms. But I no longer greatly care. The Monarchy is much in the news at present. A few months ago, the Queen died. We have a coronation approaching. More importantly in the past few weeks, the younger son of the King’s first wife has published an extended ghost-written whine of self-pity. The response of the fake conservatives who are allowed into the media is to complain that he is bringing the monarchy into disrepute, and even endangering its existence. So far as they believe what they are saying, they deserve the comment that Tom Paine made on Edmund Burke – that he “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” What has the Monarchy done in living memory to uphold the Ancient Constitution? The answer is less than nothing. The late Queen was a woman of notable uselessness. Of all the documents put before her to sign, she seems to have queried only personal cheques. The new King is stupid or evil, or possibly both. What I have read of his coronation plans involves a repeat of the woke pantomime that opened the London Olympics. His son appears to be no better.

Bickley is particularly scathing about the Church of England:

I could continue. I could say the Church has been colonised by probable atheists, there for salaries that, if not generous in themselves, are higher than their personal market worth, or for easy access to under-age boys. The Bench is a committee of authoritarian leftists. The chartered institutions are the same. The whole administration is a mass of incompetence and petty corruption. The Ministers no longer try to hide that they are taking bribes. Corruption beams from their horrid faces. The classics are rewritten to be goodthinkful, and hardly anyone complains. We have indeed dropped into the filth, and those dragging us through it make a point of kicking anyone who declines to wallow in it with the approved show of enthusiasm.

But I will not continue. I have said enough. We have fallen, and, looking at those countries with a less fortunate history than our own, there are lower depths yet awaiting us. Should I care? Should I not give up altogether on writing and focus what time I have left on securing the least uncomfortable life possible for me and mine? Though always desirable, national improvement is possible only when there is a nation still fit to be improved. I am no longer as sure as I was about England. Before the spring of 2020, I could tell myself that the people had always voted for improvement when given the chance. The English had voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. They had pinched their noses and voted in a team of corrupt mediocrities when these turned out to be the only group in politics who seemed willing to go through with the Referendum result. Surely, though oppressed, the nation was still sound?

I am no longer so sure. I live in a middle class area. Every Thursday during the Lockdown, I was troubled by the sound, from every front door in my street, of people banging their pots and pans in required solidarity against a virus that plainly showed itself from the start to be no worse than a mild seasonal flu. I then saw the hundred-yard queues of people waiting patiently to be injected with an untested vaccine they had already been warned was at least dangerous. More recently, doubts regarding the wisdom of our war with Russia have been routinely treated in private conversation as equal in their morality to defences of pederasty. Everyone in England but the rich is cold. Everyone but the rich may soon be hungry. There are no demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. When the Ministers tell us we are all in the same boat, there is no replying shout that they are in first class and we in steerage. If every nation gets the government it deserves – government, that is, in the wider sense – the English have no right to complain; and they do not complain. Richard Lynn once assured me that IQ in England had been falling by one point every decade since 1901. 1901 was many decades ago. Whether IQ means as much as people tell me I will leave aside. There seems little doubt that the English who once defended their ways and liberty with fists and more deadly weapons, who began the scientific and industrial revolutions, and who planted their flag in every corner of the world, are as extinct a people as the Athenians of the age of Pericles were when Hadrian visited the city.

So, what is to be done?

There is, however, no doubt that the days of lamenting the death of the Ancient Constitution are past. It has gone beyond recall. Any restoration now must be much more of a new beginning. There is a case for reconnecting the most vital threads from our past to a future settlement. But I do not believe these threads involve a privileged role for the family of Alfred the Great, or any of the outward forms of the Ancient Constitution. We have been notorious, since the eighteenth century, for our indifference to questions of political legitimacy and national identity that consumed other peoples. Now that the mostly unspoken consensus has passed that allowed us the luxury of smiling at the antics of foreigners, we must begin to think about first principles. This will often be painful. It may lead us in directions that we once thought undesirable. Even so, we are left with no alternative if we are not to continue our slide towards, and perhaps below, the level of other nations. And, if I cannot be bothered to explain myself more clearly than I have, a period of Labour government may not be quite so regrettable as I regarded the advent of Tony Blair in 1997.

On Forgiveness and “Amnesty”

With regard to Covid measures and mandates, including the "vaccines"

Writes Bretigne Shaffer:

This conflict we are in, the same one that has torn apart families and cost people their jobs and had them pack up and move across the country, it is, at its foundation, a conflict between light and dark, good and evil. In this war, the side of darkness has certain strengths, certain weapons, and the side of the light has strengths, weapons. They are not the same. The dark uses lies, fear, and brute force. The weapons of the light are the inverse: Truth, fearlessness, and love.

[…]

What she [Emily Oster] is asking for is something we’ve all had quite enough of already, thank you. She is asking for a waiver of accountability for all who are responsible for what has been done to us these past three years: The mendacious mathematical models; the deliberate public fear-mongering; the rights violations, the forced closures of businesses, schools, churches; the forced isolation of some of society’s most vulnerable people; forcing masks on children; teaching children to fear other humans; the centralized suppression of effective treatment; the suppression of information about effective treatment… and of course, the coerced, experimental, medical interventions, and the suppression of information about the harm those interventions cause.

All of this is supposed to be “forgiven”, because “we didn’t know.” As if ignorance grants some sort of free pass for human-rights violations on a massive scale, because when you “don’t know” (they did know), the obvious response is raw, unbridled authoritarianism. As if people who have committed similar acts in the past have not faced criminal prosecution.

So here’s our dilemma: If society is to function at all, there needs to be accountability. We need to be able to hold people accountable for their actions, or we end up with a criminal class that can inflict harm on everyone else, free of consequence. Indeed, this is very much where we find ourselves at this moment in time, and if we cannot find ways to hold the perpetrators accountable, then we should only expect that things will continue to get worse.

[…]

So I just seek out – with an urgency – opportunities to stay connected to humanity. Whether it’s expressing appreciation for a shop assistant or call-center operator, or taking time to write up a review of the guys who delivered my washing machine, I recognize the urgency of maintaining the strength of those threads in our social fabric, those connections, however small they may seem.

When there are forces arrayed against human connection, forces that thrive and grow stronger the more we are divided against each other, the task of connecting, and of loving one another becomes all the more urgent. We don’t have to forgive the unforgivable – or anything at all, if we’re unable to. And we certainly don’t have to abandon the endeavor of holding criminals accountable for their crimes. But our capacity for love is what separates us from the darkness. It is one of the only weapons we have to fight against it. We need to take it seriously.

Pro-vaxxer tacitly admits: They cannot find an error in Norman Fenton’s paper

Which shows a strong correlation between vaccination rate and excess deaths

Steve Krisch’s newsletter.

Also, related to this, Dr. Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH writes:

Almost everyday in the news is another reported case of sudden, unexpected cardiac death. The vaccination status is carefully concealed in the report and any mention of past SARS-CoV-2 immunization appears to be scrubbed from the internet. Families maintain an airtight silence on a simple medical query—did they take a COVID-19 vaccine? Yes or No? Prior to COVID-19 vaccination, the usual causes of death were almost always known antemortem, and were roughly 40% cardiovascular, 40% cancer, and 20% other causes. Chaves and colleagues have shown these proportions have been dramatically shifted to sudden cardiac death.

Shocking Lab Investigation of Covid Vaccines

The real science is catching up with corrupt scientists, evil officials and naïve clergy

Dr. Mercola writes:

December 12, 2022, The Highwire posted a fascinating and shocking lab investigation of the COVID shots. Del Bigtree begins by reviewing some of the many alleged findings by organizations looking at the shots using various technologies.

Continue reading here.

Also, watch the 1 hour video at the top of the linked page. It is posted on Bitchute here as well.

At the 11:50 minute mark, the interviewed medical scientist, Dr. Ryan Cole, states: “Real science should always involve humility and the willingness to say: ‘It’s not about my ego, it’s about the issue and we’re trying to get to the best scientific truth we can with the methods we have now.'”

Contrast that with the infamous statement by the hugely (worldwide) influential and powerful US (now ex-)chief medical advisor to the president Dr. Anthony Fauci who said in an interview, when asked about people critical of his Covid policies: “I represent science”. In other words: “La science, c’est moi.”

Fauci was one of the many scientists on government payrolls around the world who kept repeating the “safe and effective” mantra about the still only experimental injections against Covid. Dr. Ryan Cole was never one of them.

I know who I trust more.

Contrast that also with the statement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on 21st December 2021, said, without knowing the science:

“It’s not about me and my rights to choose, it’s about how I love my neighbour. Vaccination reduces my chances — doesn’t eliminate — but it reduces my chances of getting ill and reducing my chances of getting ill, reduces my chances of infecting others,” Welby told ITV news on Tuesday evening.

“It’s very simple, so I would say yes, to love one another as Jesus said, get vaccinated, get boosted,” he added.

Welby needs to repent.

For vaccine-hesitant people, it was never about “my right to choose”, at least not primarily. It was primarily about trust. How can one trust scientists in the pay of government, when same scientists propagate a policy that gives governments what they have craved down the ages: More power for themselves. They might be right in this case, but, because there are massive conflicts of interests involved, the circumstances demanded more proof than was available or provided.

The same vaccine-hesitant people observed how real debate and discussion about the safety and efficacy of the Covid injections was massively suppressed by the media. This behaviour raised suspicions. That is something the Archbishop has not addressed.

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, Christian clergy were the most important people standing between governments and their access to total, tyrannical worldly power in the style of Ancient Egypt or Rome. For they understood the dangers of worldly power. They understood the ungodly path any worldly power is in danger of treading. Worldly power is one of the three things Satan attempted to tempt Christ with in the desert. However, most of the clergy don’t even seem to know that any more. Worse: Even if they did, it seems most of them wouldn’t care anymore.

It’s one reason among many why Christianity is ripe for a complete reconstruction. Even more so now that, as the blogger Eugyppius writes, the “pre-pandemic world is gone forever“:

Mass containment has permanently transformed our societies and our cultures. It has cemented the cooperative relationship between the regime and the press, and it has changed the content and the tenor of our media. Drama and panic have always sold newspapers, but our new era is characterised by an unending self-reinforcing cyclone of hyperventilation journalism, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. For the foreseeable future, I think, we will careen from one crisis to the next.

The pandemic has also changed politics. We have all learned that our alleged liberal rights and freedoms are quaint fictions, which will evaporate in the face of any false emergency. This is one reason that the unceasing hysteria of the press is so ominous, for it represents a continual attempt to restore those extraordinary conditions in which the managers wield absolute power. Under the pretense of emergency, everything is permitted. The government can seal you inside your home, forbid you from seeing friends, and outlaw all protest. It can banish all criticism from the media, and with a bit more hyperventilation, it can probably even force-medicate you. In the pre-2020 world, of course, our governments could do all of these things as well. What is different now, is merely that many more people know that they can, and approve nevertheless.

P.S.: If you have read the above links, or have watched the video, and you have received one or more injection against Covid, you may be starting to worry. If so, please go to the bottom of the page of the Mercola text linked here and above and read the section titled “What to Do if You Got the Jab”. Of course, not being a medical expert myself, I cannot recommend any of the advice there personally. As stated before, it’s all a matter of trust.

Pope Benedict vs the calculating elites

O'Neill defends the late Pontiff

In this interesting obituary of (ex-)Pope Benedict XVI, Brendan O’Neill, a self-proclaimed atheist, castigates “preening macho rationalists of the New Atheist set”, who, as humanists, were, according to O’Neill, more anti-enlightenment than the Pope himself:

There was also a profound irony in this Benedict-bashing spectacle. Because this man they loved to hate, ‘Pope Ratzinger’, as they demeaned him, was a far keener defender of reason than they were. He was a more rigorous student of Enlightenment, too. And he did more than they ever will to challenge the real menace to truth in the 21st century – not religion but the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, as Benedict called it. There was more humanism in Benedict’s brave, often lonely battle against today’s tyranny of nothingness than there is in the New Atheists’ snotty rage against religion.

The obituarist gets to the point:

In short, absent any notion of universal truth, devoid of social standards we might define ourselves by (or against), we’re left with just the individual, playing around in his own prison of identity.

[…]

Indeed, Benedict held that Christianity was a ‘religion according to reason’. He argued, rightly, that the Enlightenment sprung from the traditions and tensions within Christianity itself – ‘the Enlightenment is of Christian origin’, he said. One of his most striking utterances was to say that the Enlightenment had ‘given back reason its own voice’. That is, it took ideas of reason from Christianity and expressed those ideas in the voice of reason alone. 

O’Neill hints at the fundamental problem the enlightenment has, without discussing it:

Benedict’s beef was not with reason, then, as his ill-read critics would have us believe, but with what he referred to as ‘purely functional rationality’. Or scientism, as others call it: the modern creed of evidence-based politics that judges everything by experiment rather than morality.

Here’s the fundamental problem: Without morality, rationality will become ‘scientism’, the consequences of which we were able to observe since WWI in the liberal use of weapons of mass destruction, genocides and lately the Covid tyranny, environmental tyranny and other attempts at building a Tower of Babel 2.0.

O’Neill is right to defend the late Pope against the “New Atheist” set, but he does not touch the question that begs: How do we arrive at morality, without God? Rationality alone doesn’t seem to suffice.