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All I see is a mind applying reason.

My wife is dying of kidney disease, so I’ve had a lot of opportunity to learn how to read medical research papers, to learn how medical scientists really think about their subject matter. Coming back to FR after all these years and seeing this conversation is truly horrifying for me. I never saw this here before. Maybe I was just blind to it.

Palmer is right. The smallpox vaccine started out over 200 years ago as a deliberate infection with cowpox, a weaker version of the human strain. It was a deliberate stimulation of the natural immune system. All vaccines are an attempt to train the immune system to meet and defeat a new pathogen. That’s not remotely controversial.

And certainly not a lie. I once was a Christian. I’m not anymore. This conversation, what I am witnessing here, is one of the main reasons. Disagreements over science are fine. It’s perfectly normal and healthy to debate cause, correlation, effect, etc. Those conversations keep us all honest.

But turning it all dark and sinister, so that anyone who questions your orthodoxy is branded as a liar or a fool or somehow evil is just primitive emotional manipulation that has no place in reasoned discourse. It creates blindness, not illumination. Yet it seems to be essential to Christianity and Abrahamic theism generally. Black and white thinking. We are the good guys and all those others out there are the bad guys and it’s the end of the world anyway, so let’s just go down this spiral of having our apocalypse and signalling how righteous we are by trashing anyone who doesn’t share our ‘vision.’

Which is why I’m out. I’m so, so tired of it all. Sick to death of it. I’ve been into medical science since I was 3 years old. I couldn’t read yet, but I loved looking at the cardiopulmonary diagrams in the old Encyclopedia Britannica, back before the internet. Then I had friends, neighbors living across the street, getting paralyzed with polio, dying from polio. I remember how quiet that house next door became. It could have been me. But we had the vaccine. It was keeping a bad situation from becoming even worse. There was no grand plot. Bad things just happen, and most people try to make things better and help people, even if that help isn’t perfect.

And there isn’t any grand plot now. Human evolution is complicated and risky. We’ve faced down big threats before and hopefully we’ll do it again, and again. This is just life on planet earth. It’s a good and beautiful thing. Why taint it with false accusations of lying etc? Why not just back off for a moment when you hear something that challenges your orthodoxy and ask, is there a way that might be true? Is the evidence for my own position so obvious and bulletproof the other person must be lying? Or am I missing some fact of science or history, which if I knew, I’d actually be in agreement with this person?

Anyway, no, I have no expectation of that happening here. I’ve been among Christians for nearly 70 years. I fully expect a doubling-down. That’s why, for me, this conversation is over.