Whatsa Meaculpa?
If only some “pastors” knew Latin.
If some “pastors” knew Latin, we’d hear them imploring:
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Because, presumably, they don’t, we offer:
“I confess to Almighty God… that I have sinned exceeding in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous faults…”
Oh, where to begin?
There’s Mark Grenon, who – together with three adult sons - was recently sentenced to five years in federal prison, a piddling $5,000 fine and an order to pay $1,948 for busily promoting and selling Clorox bleach as a “Miracle Mineral Solution” to treat COVID-19. He has accused the U.S. government of kidnapping and is suing for $5.76 million in compensations.
Now that’s chutzpah!
Chutzpah? Audacity!
[The classic description of chutzpah is the defendant found guilty of murdering his parents and pleads for clemency because “I’m an orphan.”]
The Grenon clan members were charged with using their [And we kid you not; this was its name.] Genesis Church of Health and Healing, which Mark Grenon co-founded, to pawn-off their MMW to cure COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and leukemia among other serious diseases.
MMS contained sodium chlorite and water, which, when ingested orally, becomes chlorine dioxide – a strong bleach used for industrial purposes. Even worse: Despite a 2020 court order to stop sales, the Grenons established their “nonreligious church” to “legalize the use” of MMS. “It’s a sacrament,” claimed the patriarch. “You can’t arrest us from doing our sacraments.”
Remember the ole phrase “The family that prays together stays together”?
Well, the family caught with dozens of chemical drums containing almost 10,000 pounds of sodium chlorite powder goes to prison together.
Then there’s Robert Dell, the St. Petersburg, Florida “pastor of The Rock Church & Recovery Program.” The good “pastor” guided his “parishioners” in stealing – shoplifting is stealing after all – about $1.4 worth of high-end power tools from Home Depot stores across Central Florida. The pastor and his wife would then resell the hot – “hot” as in “stolen,” “hot” as in “popular” – materials on eBay using an account inappropriately called “Anointed Liquidator.” The Dells’ minions were busy, often hitting five or six stores a day. Based on the duration and frequency of the thefts, Home Depot officials estimated the losses at upward of $5 million. According to news reports, Dell used his positions as “pastor” and owner of a halfway house at the church to “manipulate other vulnerable people to participate in the criminal scheme.”
“If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat;
if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head,
and the Lord will reward you.”
Proverbs 25:21-22
Since we’ve never met Rick Morrow, “pastor” of Beulah Church in Missouri, he doesn’t qualify as an enemy. Nonetheless, we’ll raise the cash necessary to send him a case of South Florida tap water - just to heap burning coals on his head (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Not celebrating anyone’s reception of a comeuppance, we are relieved to report that a public outcry has forced this “pastor” to resign his post on the Stoutland School Board after he declared diabolic possession – he used the term “evil presence” - to be the cause of autism.
In a livestreamed September 6 sermon, he alleged – “alleged” because not only was he wrong about the cause of autism, but he was wrong about the “cure” - that autism can be cured by casting out a demon.
“Well, either the devil has attacked [children with autism],
he's brought this infirmity upon them, he's got them,
or God doesn't like them that much, and he made them that way...
my God doesn't make junk…
Quit putting a Band-Aid on it and saying, ‘Oh, it'll be okay.
We just need to treat this or treat that.’
How about you just cast the demon out
and then treat all the problems?...
And when I say a demon, you people want to, like I said,
they want to get that Hollywood description
of what a demon is this nasty, so ugly and,
and that's not the case, it's just an evil presence.
It's just the presence of evil…
By junk, I meant autism, that condition,
the illness or the neurodivergence.
All of us have issues; all of us have problems.
All of us have conditions.
All of us have sicknesses and diseases and illnesses.
And I just refuse to blame God for those things….”
Marrow claimed he knows a minister
“who has seen lots of kids that are autistic, that he cast that demon out, and they were healed, and then he had to pray and their brain was rewired and they were fixed.”
Our mothers would wash our mouths out with soap if we accurately described that garbage for what it is.
Even worse, there’s the multiply-bankrupted man from Queens, New York who – in a presidential campaign debate – either lied or ignored science when he declared:
"You take this little beautiful baby and you pump… [referring to medically approved and recommended childhood vaccines] We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic."
Either he lied bold-facedly or he knew (knows?) nothing about the science and history of vaccines.
While both are both possible, there’s another – and probably equally correct – explanation: Few words engender more paralyzing fear for parents and grandparents than “autism.” By feeding that emotion with an outright lie – vaccines cause autism, a candidate hopes to garner the votes of the fearful. Just enough votes to win – like “11,780 votes” in Georgia.
“Hear now this, O foolish people,
and without understanding;
who have eyes, and see not;
who have ears, and hear not.”
Jeremiah 5:21
“There are none so blind as those who will not see.
The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore
what they already know.”
Jonathan Swift
You don’t have to be a prophet or fortune teller with tarot cards or a crystal ball to know that desperate-to-win candidates will resort to vaccine fears. And they’ll spew non-science and out-right lies about vaccines and autism.
Curriculum vitae is a Latin phrase probably unknown to the shameless “pastors” noted above. Literally, it means “course of life,” but in the worlds of academics and science it is the documented summary of the education, professional work, research and publications of men and women dedicated to knowledge.
Few have a more impressive CV than Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD – a renowned researcher, virologist and pediatric physician whose third of four children, Rachel, born in 1992, is autistic. Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine, his career spans decades working on vaccines for Human Hookworm, which affects 400 million people worldwide; Schistosomiasis, the deadliest disease among the seven most prevalent Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs); Chagas Disease and Leishmaniasis; SARS; roundworm and whipworm infections; and Coronaviruses for people in India and Indonesia.
His books Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey As A Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad and The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning are fairly easy (and quick) reads. (We’ve read them twice! So you don’t have to. But if you know folks who spew anti-vaccine bunkum and malarkey, we encourage you to read them.)
Anticipating the fearmongering about vaccines to which some politicians and “pastors” will resort, here’s some key quotes:
“Childhood vaccines save lives… Through widespread vaccination against more than a dozen diseases, including diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) disease], polio, rotavirus, pneumococcal pneumonia, measles, mumps, rubella, and others, that number has been cut to about 4 million childhood deaths every year. The only thing protecting your child from these diseases is scheduled vaccinations. Diseases such as measles are not benign illnesses.”
“Childhood vaccines do not cause autism, plain and simple. This truth has been shown over and over again in clinical (epidemiological) studies published in the medical profession’s finest and most rigorous biomedical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and PLOS Medicine. The studies show that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine does not cause autism; thimerosal-containing vaccines do not cause autism; and administering vaccines closely together in time does not cause autism. Alum in vaccines does not cause autism.”
“The causes of autism are something other than vaccines. The science further provides overwhelming evidence that the changes in the brains of children with autism begin prenatally, well before children receive their vaccinations. So far, at least 65 genes have been identified that result in these brain alterations. While you might have heard that some children become autistic after receiving their vaccines between one and two years of age, the science shows that while children often first display overtly autistic behaviors at that time, or even begin regressing in language, speech, and communication between those ages, we can now show by MRI that those children had brain changes far earlier — when they were about six months old. In turn, those children had changes in their brains even when they were still developing as a fetus.”
Dr. Hotez also presents a number of “myths” that we hear all too often. Here’s a quick summary of some of his points.
“Myth: Mandatory vaccination is part of a conspiracy… One of the hazards of trying to persuade someone that there is no conspiracy is that you risk making that individual think that you yourself might be part of the conspiracy. The truth, of course, is that there is no conspiracy. Anyone who has worked with the CDC — or any part of the government bureaucracy — realizes pretty quickly that, even if it wanted to cover something up, the concealment would last about one afternoon, if that.”
“Myth: The diseases are gone, and we no longer need vaccines. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are now seeing the return of measles to the United States and Europe, as well as mumps, pertussis, and several others. These are diseases that kill or cause permanent brain and neurologic injury. Worldwide, approximately 750,000 children under the age of five died in 2015 from vaccine-preventable diseases such as pneumococcal pneumonia, rotaviral enteritis, measles, Hib, pertussis, tetanus, and diphtheria.”
“Myth: More children in the United States die from vaccines than from the diseases they prevent. This point is a corollary or follows from the previous one. We have done a good job in preventing deaths from diseases for which we now have vaccines. But only if we continue vaccinating. Regarding the actual assertion about more people dying from vaccines than the diseases they prevent, it is a false one… If we focus only on children, then approximately 32,000 American children under the age of 15 died in 2014. These deaths include 122 from influenza, 271 from pneumonia, 248 from ‘certain other intestinal infections,’
8 from meningococcal infection, and 12 from whooping cough. In all, this number represents 661 childhood deaths.”
“Myth: Our body’s own ‘natural’ immunity is adequate. Almost a million children who rely on their ‘natural’ immune system die annually from vaccine-preventable diseases.”
There’s more. We encourage you to read Dr. Hotez works.
And the next time some balderdash-spewing “pastor,” schlock “expert” or vote-seeking – “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” - politico goes on an anti-vaccine rant, please teach him or her some Latin, beginning with mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.