Tag: time for a little talk

Well, hello, everyone!

On By Jennifer Mugrage9 Comments

I’m not sure what happened, but for some reason, on Tuesday this week Out of Babel Books got more than 400 views. That is about 3000% more than my usual 14. Most of these views were from the United States.

I don’t know whether to thank you all for visiting, or grumble that you’re going to wreck my stats. (No matter how good of a day I have after this, it will look like views are down dramatically.)

I think I’ll go with Thank You. I am so glad you visited Out of Babel. I hope you found what you were looking for. I hope you were all peoples and not botses. I hope you will all buy my books and leave breathless reviews… (O.K., no need to get greedy …)

Cheers! Have a great weekend!

A Monster Theology Post about the Three Types of Old Testament Law, because it is Theology November

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

A writing prompt from the Internet

Sometimes, you get into a discussion in a comments section that clearly is beyond the scope of the comments section, both because a) it requires really long comments, b) with footnotes, and c) your interlocutor is not actually going to be convinced. In other words, this discussion ought to be a persuasive essay instead.

When you have a theology blog, this is nothing but good news.

I recently got into such a discussion.

The context: Doug Wilson’s interview with Ross Douthat. Douthat asks Wilson whether, in his ideal Christian Republic 500 years from now, every sin would be against the law. Wilson makes the helpful distinction between sins and crimes. Not every sin should be against the law, he says. Failure to understand this concept got the Puritans into trouble, but we have learned a lot since then. Wilson then goes on to mention the well-known classification of “three types of law” found in the Old Testament: the moral law (universal, binding on all individuals before God), the civil law (what was legal and illegal in the kingdom of Israel, and with what civil penalties), and the ceremonial law (regulations having to do with the Temple, the sacrificial system, and various purity laws such as food laws). If you have been around Christian circles, particularly Reformed circles, you will have heard this distinction. (Edit: I’m now not sure whether Wilson brought up the three categories of law in the video, or whether it came up in the comments as we discussed the distinction he was making between sin and crime.)

Now we come to the commenter who kindly gave me a prompt for this essay. I don’t even know whether this person is man or a woman, but I’m going to call him Rufus.

Rufus says,

The problem is that the distinction [between sin and crime] is always arbitrary, and tends to align with the cultural norms of a particular period of time (e.g. USA in the 1950s).

The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)

What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument. The fact you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice is why the Hebrew Roots movement exists. Their position is wrong, but it’s totally reasonable given the premises they’re starting with.

Thanks for the prompt, Rufus. This will give us a lot to chew on.

The trickiness of not knowing who you’re talking to

First, let me clear up just a few simple misunderstandings that Rufus can hardly be blamed for.

Rufus mentions, or implies, that Wilson is just taking a sentimental look back at 1950s America and assuming that, if he can get his Christian republic to look like that, he will have applied the law of God in a culturally appropriate way. Now, it happens that Wilson, in this interview and elsewhere, does mention 50s & 60s America as a place he remembers fondly. He usually brings it up in order to make the point that sodomy was banned back then, and yet America did not resemble the Handmaid’s Tale, which must mean laws against sodomy don’t necessarily produce that kind of society.

However, if Rufus knew Wilson a little better, he would know that Wilson does not look back at the 1950s with a sentimental and uncritical eye. In fact, Wilson has compared the position of the U.S. in the 1950s to that of someone who has just fallen out of an airplane, but is still only a yard below it. Now, we are approaching the ground, but going back to one yard below the plane, if we could do such a thing, would not help in the long run.

If Rufus knew the neoReformed world from within Wilson is writing even better, he would know that, when we do romanticize historical eras, it ain’t the 1950s we usually choose. It’s more likely to be Jane Austen’s England, or Knox’s Scotland, or Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan New England. This shows that Rufus does not really know who he is talking to. He can hardly be blamed for this, on the Internet, but if he wants to attain a “touche” moment, he needs to find out the actual position of his interlocutor, not talk to somebody he has in his mind (maybe a Southern Baptist?).

Then Rufus says to me (or perhaps it’s a general “you”), “What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument.”

Why yes, it would be a circular argument, if that were something I was doing. And perhaps there are some people who do that, and these are the people Rufus had in mind as the intended audience for his comment. However, I am not those people. I am a person who lived overseas, trying to get a Bible translation movement started in jungle area that boasted a lot of paganism still, a strong Muslim presence as well, and heavy influence from Christian norms that were not American Christian norms. Both before and after living there, I took anthropology and missiology classes where almost all we did was discuss how the Bible can and should be applied in different cultural contexts. I’ve prayed with native people who use their language’s name for the Creator (Mohotara), and it was glorious. I’ve attended a traditional dance ceremony that had been adapted for Christian purposes to give thanks for something. I’ve listened to people discuss whether Christians can keep in their homes heirlooms that were once used for pagan purposes, and what happens when a Muslim man with multiple wives converts to Christianity.

So no, Rufus, if I was the intended audience for your comment, you have me wrong. I was not just taking a received American Christian practice and backfilling it to make it look biblical. But there is no way you could be expected to know this. After all, I don’t even know whether you are a man or a woman.

O.K., so my claim is that people who talk about the three categories of the Law are not just arguing in a circle, or justifying sentimentality or lazy thinking. What is our biblical argument, then? Let’s address Rufus’s exegetical objections.

Rufus is right … sort of

First, let me say that Rufus is technically right in his comments about Leviticus and Deuteronomy:

The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)

Rufus 100% is correct that nowhere in the Law are there headings that say “Moral Law,” “Civil Law,” or “Ceremonial Law.” He is also correct that all these three types of commands tend to be mixed together, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one a given commandment is. In this essay, I will argue that his correctness about the distinctions being “not in the text” only holds if you confine yourself to the texts of the actual commands, ignore the narrative parts, ignore the New Testament, and play dumb.

Mysterious Accounts and Emerging Distinctions

First, let’s acknowledge that the Books of the Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) strike the modern person as disorganized. These books toggle back and forth between law and narrative. They give the Ten Commandments, and then a bunch of differing elaborations on them in different places, organized in different ways depending upon the book, the passage, and what is foregrounded after the narrative that just took place. Sometimes, Israel acts up, God says He’s going to reject them, Moses talks Him around, and then all the commands are repeated as they are reiterated. In Numbers, new applications and case law are given as new situations arise (for example, how inheritance should work if a man has only daughters). Some of the annual ceremonies (not to mention the daily ceremonies) work differently when the people of Israel were dwelling in tents with the Tabernacle right there, versus when they were living on their homesteads throughout the land, days, or weeks’ journey from the Tabernacle and later the Temple. So, no, the laws are not organized and laid out conveniently, the way modern people would like a code of laws to be. In some ways, they are more like a tribal history, which is how laws often worked back then.

In fact, I’ll do you one better. The narrative accounts from the times of the patriarchs and Exodus are also mysterious and confusing. All this was so long ago, and so little is known about the context, that it can be difficult to re-construct, for example, Israel’s exact route out of Egypt, despite the many, now obsolete, place-names given. So yes, this is an ancient, ancient document, not a simple user’s manual.

But the distinction between ceremonial, civil, and moral law is far from the only distinction that was not present in the ancient mind, and emerged over time with progressive revelation. Another great example of this would be the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Old Testament, we often see the LORD appearing as a man. Sometimes “the Angel of the LORD” does the same thing, and very occasionally, such as in Genesis 18, we see them together. (See Michael Heiser and his discussion of “two powers in heaven” in his book The Unseen Realm.) We also see “the spirit of the LORD” coming upon people in the Old Testament. The result was usually that they prophesied, or had a kind of battle madness come upon them. Thousands of years later, in the New Testament, we see Jesus say that He is God’s Son, and that “I and the Father are one.” We see the Spirit come down upon Jesus in the form of a dove. In John 15 and 16, Jesus talks openly about both the Father and the Spirit. Finally, in Matthew 28, we get “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” You could not get trinitarian doctrine out of just Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but if you take the whole Bible as inspired, you can’t avoid it.

C.S. Lewis has said somewhere, I think in The Abolition of Man, that the ancient mind did not make a distinction between spiritual and physical. When ancient people saw a king’s throne, for example, they reacted to it as a totality. The physical throne and the concept of majesty and authority were one thing. As time has gone by, and humanity has made a sharper and sharper distinction between physical and spiritual, we can readily infer when the ancients were talking about one, the other, or both.

In the same way, once we have been given the “three categories of law” as a tool to help us in reading Leviticus, it’s usually pretty easy to tell which kind we are looking at. Civil laws usually come with some kind of civil penalty, anything from remuneration to death. Moral laws are usually just commands: “If you see the donkey of one who hates you falling down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure to help him with it.” (Ex. 23:5) Ceremonial laws are often prescriptions of how to handle ceremonial objects and what sacrifices to offer; the subclass of ceremonial laws called purity laws usually come with some kind of purification ritual if someone becomes “unclean.” All this may not be explicit, but neither is it arbitrary.

Now, we acknowledge that these categories are not completely watertight in the context of ancient Israel. Some offenses are both civil and ceremonial, and these often call for death. Examples would be a wide range of sexual offenses that not only wrong the victim, but also defile the nation and dishonor God. Some offenses are just ceremonial but not civil or moral: touching a dead body. Some are both moral and civil (false testimony in court), where others are just moral (envy, gossip). Having said all this, you can usually tell the category(-ies) of the offense by using common sense.

Also – ahem – the New Testament

Finally, I’d like to call Rufus’s attention to the fact that the New Testament exists. The question of the difference between a sin and a crime, and of what parts of the Old Testament Law were binding on non-Jewish believers, occupies large swathes of the New Testament. I mean large swathes. This is discussed at length.

The entire book of Hebrews establishes that the ceremonial law was a preparation for Christ, was fulfilled by Christ, and now is no longer necessary. Hebrews was written not too long before the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. It warns repeatedly that the whole sacrificial system is “passing away.” Galatians discusses at length whether circumcision, a purity ordinance designed to differentiate Israel from other peoples, is necessary for a Christian to practice (answer: No). Large chunks of Acts are devoted to early believers trying to figure out which parts of the Law are binding on Gentile converts to Christianity. God Himself reveals to Peter that the food laws no longer apply. This gives us a pretty good case that the ceremonial laws associated with temple system, and the purity laws associated with separateness, are their own category.

But there were some prohibitions that were moral, civil, and ceremonial offenses in old Israel, which now are just moral offenses. Fornication, adultery, and sex with temple prostitutes are prime examples. These things were legal in the Roman empire. They are not ceremonial offenses for Gentiles who are no longer under the ceremonial law. But Paul is at some pains to point out in his letters that they are still moral offenses against God. (“Then they should not be illegal in a Christian republic!” Whether they should be civil offenses, they were not in the Roman empire. This shows there is a distinction between moral law and a civil law.)

There is also a fair amount of discussion in the New Testament as to what should be the Christian’s relationship to the civil magistrate — the legal system of the country they live in. In Luke 3:14, when Roman soldiers ask John what they should do to demonstrate repentance, he doesn’t tell them to quit working for Empire, but he tells them not to be corrupt and oppressive. Paul says that Christians should be known as law-abiding (Romans 13:4). He seems to feel that the civil magistrate has actual real authority to enforce civil laws, but that he should not get involved in disputes within the church (I Cor. 6). Similarly, Jesus tells us that paying taxes to pay for law enforcement and national defense should not burden our conscience (Matthew 22:15ff). If someone who has legal authority over others becomes a Christian, Paul (Philemon 1 – 25) and Jesus (Matt. 24:48) say that they should use their authority to do good. Jesus also says that we should use our wealth to do good (Luke 16:9). The general picture is of two different spheres of authority, which overlap in commonsense ways. A Christian may have to engage in civil disobedience if ordered to bow down to the golden statue, but he is not culpable merely by virtue of participating in the system in which he finds himself, and should be law-abiding except in extraordinary circumstances. A Christian who finds himself with some civil power should use that power like a Christian: don’t be corrupt (the prohibition on taking bribes goes all the way back to Exodus), and try to use your influence to do as much good as possible. Long-term, this was going to lead to things like the abolition of sex slavery, then polygamy and wife-beating, and then slavery in general. But the early church could not dream of such influence.

In sum, the New Testament has a lot to tell us about ceremonial, moral, and civil law, but it is not neatly organized. It is in the form of letters and narrative history.

Looking Matthew 5:17 – 22 in the face

So now we can address Rufus’s claim that “you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice.”

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

You are right, Rufus, but again, you are only right if we squint and play dumb. I can certainly explain it if you back up and include Matthew 5:17:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets. How does He do it? By being the last High Priest we’ll ever need (Hebrews 7), the last sacrificial lamb we’ll ever need (John 1:29), the true temple (John 2:19 – 22), the true Ark (I Peter 3:20 – 21), the one for whom the prophets searched intently (I Peter 1:10 – 12), the second Adam (Romans 5:12 – 21), and so on. When His ongoing work is done, then “everything will be accomplished.” At the moment, He has accomplished a lot of it, including making the ceremonial law obsolete. At the time He was speaking in Matthew 5, He had not yet accomplished a lot of this, so the ceremonial Law was still in full force. For a little while.

Jesus did take major issue with how the Law was being applied (all out of emphasis, and contrary to its own spirit). He had been so outspoken about this that some people got the impression He was throwing out the whole thing, and they didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified. In Matthew 5:17 – 22, Jesus hastens to clarify that He is still on the side of the Lawgiver. He wanted us to know that, although large parts of the Law were shortly going to be “accomplished,” they were never going to become wrong. That book is closed, you might say, but it is not burned. It will never be the case that God was wrong to give the Law He gave to the ancient Israelites. It will never be the case that that Law was not good. We cannot accuse God of giving an imperfect Law, which I think is the main point of this passage.

O.K., that’s it. Rufus, if you’re out there, you say that you have looked into these issues deeply, “for decades.” I don’t know what your experience has been. Clearly, it has differed from mine. I hope we can stop talking past each other.

Theology November: A Review of a Book about New Thought

On By Jennifer Mugrage13 Comments

Happy Lies by Melissa Dougherty, Zondervan, 2025

This review was originally posted, in a slightly different form, on Goodreads in June 2025.

This book is a capable history of New Thought in the Christian church, particularly in America. The author first sketches how she grew up around a lot of New Thought and mistook it for Christianity. Then, she sketches how after she realized many of these beliefs were wrong, for some years she was calling them New Age because that’s what everyone else called them. She discusses how she learned of the term New Thought and how it differs from the New Age.

Both belief systems partake of Gnostic/Hermetic cosmology and theory of human nature. However, New Age embraces neopaganism and the occult, whereas New Thought instead tries to cast these Hermetic ideas in “Christianese” and read them back into the New Testament. This is made easier because many New Testament writers were talking directly back to Gnostics, and even re-purposing their terms.

Melissa unpacks the Gnostic/Hermetic assumptions behind such common “Christian” practices as the Prosperity Gospel, visualization, affirmations, “I am” statements, and the like. But instead of just dismissing these practices as “ppf, that’s pagan,” she actually shows where they originated and how they differ from orthodox Christianity.

This book does not dive deeply into the pagan side of Gnosticism and Hermeticism. It doesn’t discuss these philosophies’ relationship to Western mysticism, Eastern mysticism, Kabbalism, or German philosophers like Hegel. It doesn’t discuss the attempts in the early centuries after Christianity to integrate Gnosticism with Christianity. The history of these philosophies is a huge topic that could take up a lifetime of study.

Melissa’s book is not meant to be an intimidating doorstop of a book that covers all of this. She’s zooming in on one little twig on this big, ugly tree: New Thought and its influence on American Christianity. Her book gives well-meaning Christians the tools and vocabulary to recognize this kind of thought and to talk about it. I have bought copies to give to all the women in my family. New Thought can be difficult to talk about because it portrays itself as “what Jesus actually taught.” If you know someone who is into New Thought, you cannot just dismiss it as “No, that’s Gnostic.” Even though you are right, to them it will sound like you’re just brushing them off. This book might be useful in such a situation.

If you want to find out how Hermeticism gave birth to Marxism through Hegel and Marx, there is a fantastic series of lectures about it on YouTube by James Lindsay. I also recommend Melissa’s YouTube channel and the YouTube channel Cultish.

Quote that is either terrifying or frustrating

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

I believe that history will judge the tick-borne disease outbreak that began in 1968 as one of the worst public health failures of the last century. In the beginning, we were slow to recognize the triple threat. A situation that is now out of control, spreading far and wide, could’ve been contained with an early intervention of tick-control projects and a public education campaign.

The myopic focus on only of the tick diseases, Lyme disease, has led to treatment delays and fatalities in patients with serious mixed infections.

Bitten by Kris Newby, p. 249

Dr. Oz’s Good Intentions

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Back in August, I got thoroughly shook when I heard a conversation between Dr. Oz and Ben Shapiro, on the Ben Shapiro show. I have saved my reaction for October, a month when I post about scary things, because Dr. Oz does not seem to realize how scary his plans are.

They are discussing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again-) government initiative. Ben asks about the problem that patients have difficulty getting ahold of their medical records (their “charts”), which makes it difficult to get your information from one specialist to another.

Dr. Oz’s solution, though he doesn’t articulate it in this short, is that each patient chart will exist in a big government database. It will be tied to your social security number, and to “facial recognition, like in airports.” There will also be a big database of MAHA-approved healthcare providers, so these people can have instant access to your patient records. The MAHA bot can recommend to you an approved provider in your area, and, as Dr. Oz forecasts in this short, the MAHA bot can also call your attention to incipient health problems that you may have, and recommend, say, an app to help you lower your blood sugar. And it can tell you not to eat that thing that you’re about to eat. All this, said Dr. Oz on The Ben Shapiro Show, will be “completely optional.”

What could possibly go wrong?

I believe that Dr. Oz has good intentions. He wants to help Americans be healthier, and direct action on this by a massive, centralized government department is the only way he can imagine to get this done.

Whenever we create an awesome new power, we have to game out all the scenarios. We have to imagine not only how it will be used by people with good intentions, but how it could be used by people with bad intentions. Because every awesome new power will fall into the bad-intentioned hands eventually.

So, what could go wrong?

First of all, how long will participation in this system remain optional? And how “optional” will it really be? Will there be any health-care providers who accept patients whose charts haven’t been uploaded into the Leviathan database? Will this system, in fact, make it more difficult to find niche specialists who can help you with your particular problem? Because I gotta say, everyone I know who has become healthier, has done it by using resources outside the official healthcare system.

What happens if an error gets encoded in the official system? We saw this last week, where the diagnostic criteria for Lyme disease were dead wrong. Anyone who wanted to get diagnosed needed to find a rogue doctor. What will we do when Dr. Oz has gotten rid of all the rogue doctors?

Even if you try to opt out, you probably have some former doctors who would willingly turn over their records about you to Leviathan, to be listed next to your face scan and social security number. So you now have a, possibly outdated or incomplete, patient chart that is going to follow you around. Perhaps this chart will include an earlier misdiagnosis, like hysterical hypochondria instead of Lyme disease. Or “drug-seeking behavior” instead of chronic pain.

And how might our bad actors use this chart that is linked to all your other citizen data? Let me count the ways. You could be denied medical care if you don’t comply with a new, untested treatment. (Nevermind. That has never happened before.) Your taxes could go up if you are pre-diabetic; after all, you are costing the taxpayer more money! Never mind that you tried to opt out of Medicaid. You could have your grocery-store purchases restricted (card turned down!) if you try to buy something that the app deems inappropriate for a person of your health status. (These are the same people, recall, who apparently taught us the wrong food pyramid for sixty years.)

And, since this is October, let’s go for the really scary, but still plausible, scenario.

You’re walking down the street in your neighborhood. A drone buzzes up to you, identifies you using face-recognition technology. A friendly little Clippy pops out and chirps,

“Hello! It looks like your blood sugar is high. You have one year to get it down, using this app, or my brother drone will find you and euthanize you in order to save money for the taxpayers.”

Happy Halloween, my friends!

Blackpilled by Bitten

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

I have a friend who, shortly after he was married, came down with a mysterious illness. It was causing fatigue, pain, digestive problems, and a bunch of other debilitating symptoms. This guy is young (or was when he first became sick), handsome, and looks fit. He is not in a demographic that you would expect to have trouble being believed, but he had trouble. He’s been accused of faking. He’s been yelled at by a doctor. He and his wife used up all their money, and the illness made it difficult for him to work his job as a builder. Finally, after years of seeking solutions on their own, outside the traditional medical establishment, my friend found a doctor who was willing to look at his blood under a microscope.

Turns out, he has Lyme disease.

It took him fifteen years to get this diagnosis.

As I found out when I read this book, this sort of experience is not unusual for a Lyme patient.

Let’s start with another Lyme testimony

The author, Kris Newby, and her husband were both bitten by Lyme-bearing ticks while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. It didn’t take them 15 years to get a diagnosis … but the disease did ruin their professional lives, use up all their money, and cause them to search through more than ten doctors.

We had brain fog: we couldn’t think, multitask, or remember simple things. The crushing fatigue continued. Our necks felt like they were locked in a vice-grip. Paul’s symptoms were more muscle and joint related. He didn’t have the strength to lift his leg over a bike or press the trigger of a portable drill. Mine were more neurological. I was no longer capable of reading books aloud to my sons before bedtime … I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year. … One day I found myself at a stoplight unable to remember what the red, yellow, and green lights meant.

Rather than admit defeat, Dr. B decided that I was an attention-seeking, hysterical female whose husband was suffering from sympathy pains. He diagnosed us with a “psychosomatic couples thing.”

I spent weeks pulling strings to get an appointment with another infectious disease specialist, this one at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our first few appointments were with a young physician/fellow whom I’ll call Dr. C. …During my final appointment, Dr. C told me, “You’d have more chance of winning the lottery than both of you getting Lyme disease.” Then he strongly recommended that we both seek psychological counseling for the depression we were experiencing.

Dr. D came in at the end of the appointment, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “Sorry, we don’t have the tools to fix what is wrong with you.” Then he dismissed us as patients.

ibid, pp. 85 – 88

As it turned out, most Lyme ticks are also infected with rickettsia, another tick-borne illness that is even harder to detect than Lyme in a blood test: “If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it.” (231) More in a moment about the reasons for this double infection.

Years later, when Newby had been researching Lyme and rickettsia, she found herself again sitting in front of Dr. D., this time as a journalist rather than a patient.

As I sat in his office, I wondered if he remembered me, but I didn’t mention our previous meeting.

At the end of the meeting, I took a chance and asked him, “Are you screening for any rickettsias?”

He said he didn’t know. The genetic sequencing was being done at Columbia University … Dr. D. opened the study protocol on his laptop and realized there were no rickettsias on the screening list. He said he’d see if rickettsias could be added to the search.

As I got up to leave, he added, “When you came by my clinic before, we weren’t allowed to treat chronic Lyme disease. It was department policy. I’m sorry.”

ibid, pp. 236 – 237

The diagnostic standards: made-up

He was not wrong. The diagnostic standards for Lyme specifically deny that chronic Lyme exists.

In the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.

ibid, p. 121

It gets worse. In preparation for her documentary Under Our Skin, the author put in a FOIA request to obtain emails between CDC employees and IDSA guidelines authors. She got the runaround for five years, so they completed the documentary without it. Eventually, she received 3,000 pages of emails which revealed that “a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease … tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders. ” (124) Furthermore, “part of the group’s stated mission … was to run a covert ‘disinformation war ‘ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists … ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks.'” (123)

This pill is not just red, it’s black

The Jen of ten years ago would have been very skeptical of this kind of expose. It would have struck me as too similar to Marxist conspiracy theories where all the bad stuff in the world is caused by “capitalists,” which means primarily “big corporations,” but then is applied to anybody who doesn’t want socialism. Journalists, and Hollywood movie directors, love their government/big business conspiracies. It’s one of the very few kinds of story that get them going. Ordinarily, when I am presented with a “corrupt capitalists” narrative, I sympathize with the supposed villains of the piece because I know that the authors of the piece, if they knew my views, would probably villainize me just as readily.

However, when it comes to health, the Jen of ten years ago has seen some stuff since that time. I’ve met people with Lyme (my friend above is the most poignant example, but there have been others). I’ve met people, particularly women, who have had an extraordinarily hard time getting autoimmune type physical complaints taken seriously. I’ve even had that happen, on a small scale, to myself.

Then there have been the scandals. The ADD drugs scandal, the depression drugs scandal, the cross-sex hormones scandal, and the one we don’t talk about, which involved financial incentives for drug companies to discredit victims of their product and doctors who tried alternative treatments almost exactly like the incentives in relation to Lyme described in this book.

So yeah, I’m not that Jen anymore. I do think Newby is a little leftie (maybe a lot leftie), but that’s not why she wrote this book. She wrote it because she got Lyme disease and a series of doctors called her crazy.

My friend with Lyme also has a lot of food allergies and substance sensitivities. During You-Know-What, when one of his kids broke an arm, he was worried about bringing her to the hospital, because they might force You-Know-What on her as a condition of treatment. They got the arm treated without a jab; happy ending. But we live in a relatively red state. This is a horrible position to be in: where you’ve basically lost all trust in the people you need for critical care.

And that’s not even the bad part.

The Bad Part

Most of Bitten is neither about IDSA scandal nor about the author’s personal experience with Lyme. Instead, it follows the life of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American scientist. Chapter 2 opens with Willy’s triumph when, in 1981, he discovered spirochetes, similar to those that cause African relapsing fever, inside the midgut of a blacklegged deer tick. Burgdorfer became a hero in the medical and scientific communities after he and his team proved that these tick-borne spirochetes were what was causing the mysterious Lyme disease. He received awards and honorary degrees. (13 – 15)

Willy called his discovery “serendipity,” a happy accident.

Shortly before his death, Willy was videotaped saying that he believed that the outbreak of tick-borne diseases that started around Lyme, Connecticut, had been caused by a bioweapons release. [This] could explain why the condition we call Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose and treat–and why the epidemic is spreading so far and so fast, [but] Willy’s confession was vague and fragmented because he was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease.

ibid, pp. 15 – 17

The book then backs up and starts with Willy’s childhood in Switzerland and his Ph.D. work there on ticks mailed from East Africa which caused relapsing fever and African swine fever. He does a postdoctoral program at the University of Basel (25), then accepts a research position at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever. More ticks! In fact, the biggest tick collection in North America. “The U.S. Public Health Service, which would later be renamed the National Institutes of Health, paid for the lab by developing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines for … diseases transmitted from animal or arthropod vectors to man.” (35) As the chapters roll by, we follow Willy as he falls in love with and marries a fellow scientist who is a U.S. citizen. Already working for the U.S. government during the Cold War, he soon found himself involved in programs testing nerve gasses and biological weapons.

America’s first deployable incapacitating biological weapon was an aerosolized mix of a toxin, a virus, and a bacterium, designed to create a prolonged period of incapacitation across a population. The first component … SEB, was a toxic waste product of the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In three to twelve hours, [victims] would come down with chills, headache, muscle pain, coughing, and a fever as high as 106 F. The second component, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, would, in one to five days, cause a high fever and weakness and fatigue lasting for weeks. The third component, Q fever, would cause debilitating flulike symptoms for weeks to months … Q fever could be chronic and sometimes even fatal.

When exposed to this mass-produced germ cocktail, theoretically, few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission, making an invasion easier. And no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how nonlethal these weapons could be and wryly noted that they would be nonlethal only for someone with two nurses.

ibid, p. 145

In other words, this was a way to bomb civilians without bombing civilians.

In other words, weapons developers were mixing different germs and toxins deliberately and putting them into a form that could be easily spread.

Meanwhile, Willy was force-feeding pathogens to thousands of ticks.

Near the end of his life, Willy was interviewed on video by Tim Grey, an indie filmmaker, who later shared the tape with Newby.

“If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”

“Yeah. It sounds like, throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have …”

Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper … the paper from 1952?”

In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds–an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.

ibid, pp. 100 – 101

So now you know why I’m blackpilled when it comes to “science” and “medicine” and the NIH. This is why Lyme is going around ruining people’s lives. Because it was designed to.

Black-pilled, but still not a hippie

The book closes, as all hippie books must, with the obligatory chapter blaming Western colonialism.

Big Hole [Montana] was the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce. … U.S. soldiers ambushed them while they were sleeping. The Nez Perce lost eight-nine people, mostly women and children, and the U.S. soldiers lost twenty-nine, with an additional forty injured.

Two months later, Chief Joseph surrendered.

The Native Americans who used to live here understood that they were part of nature, not the overlords of all living things.

When the white settlers arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, they clear-cut the trees around Hamilton for their houses, railroad ties, and mine shafts. This fostered the overgrowth of brush, which led to a proliferation of small mammals, the blood meal hosts for the wood ticks that carry Rickettsia rickettsi. The spotted fever epidemic at the turn of the last century was fueled by this disruption of a previously balanced ecosystem.

ibid, pp. 245 – 247

Now, you know that I have a special interest in American Indians, and feel as much sympathy for them as anybody. And just for the record, I am against the massacre of civilians. That said, it is ridiculous to imply that the settling of North America by Europeans is responsible for the existence of the Lyme epidemic, or of disease in general.

It is a fact of history that people groups move, expand, colonize, and kill each other. And as a result of these people movements, ecology changes, and new diseases spread or become prominent. All this is true. It does not follow that, before any given people movement, the ecosystem was perfectly “balanced,” or that there was no disease and no death. There would have been different causes of death, different diseases, and different wars. The Anasazi, for example, were severely malnourished. The Aztecs were systematically wiping out all the other peoples in central Mexico. Montana was not Eden. It’s a fallen world.

Rather than blaming the U.S. soldiers who killed the Nez Perce for the Lyme epidemic, let’s blame them for what they actually did; namely, killing the Nez Perce. And call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I feel that the blame for the Lyme epidemic should fall on the Cold War era government bioweapons bureaucrats and scientists who actually infected ticks with Lyme and rickettsia, and apparently allowed them to escape somewhere on Long Island. I feel that Occam’s Razor would lead us to point towards them as the culprits, rather than to something big and vague like colonialism. Just a thought.

And I do blame them. Despite my semi-defense of colonialism as the way of the world, no, I do not think it’s a good idea to create a cocktail of infectious agents that result in chronic, debilitating, hard-to-diagnose disease, and then to put this into a form that is easy to disseminate. You don’t have to be a naive, anti-war hippie to realize that this is a terrible idea that is sure to bring Murphy’s Law crashing down upon your head. In the same way, I am just a humble non-scientist but I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a genetic “vaccine” packaged in a lipid particle that instructs the body to make a disease, for which you cannot control the dosage or where it goes in the human body. And I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to stop testing this concoction halfway through, turn up your nose at long-term testing, bill it to the public as safe and effective, ignore contrary data, suppress alternative treatment methods, and then demonize and gaslight people who report injuries. It just seems that there are a few things that might could go wrong there. Just a thought.

Word that Mean Things, Part III

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Capitalism, n.

  1. A term invented by Karl Marx to encapsulate his view that money, and owning private property, is spiritually degrading for people, in his book Das Kapital.
  2. A general term for modern post-industrial society, with special emphasis upon corrupt corporate bureaucracy, commercialism, and the “rat race” as distinctive features of “capitalism” and not just its byproducts.
  3. An all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong in the world, such as diseases, poverty, imposter syndrome, environmental degradation, stress, and death.
  4. Private property; the idea that people should be able to own their own houses, land, clothing, vehicles, etc., and keep the fruits of their labor.

You might notice some tension between definitions 3 and 4.

Long story short, Marx coined the term capitalism so he could make private property the world’s whipping boy, and boy howdy, did it work out for him!

Quote: Stop the Presses!

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

The [journalism] instructor stressed his formula for writing the ideal headline to describe the story below it–a job in which every letter in every word counts (and W’s and M’s, being fat, count double …). You look for the specific word first. Use the specific “pistol” and switch to the general “gun” only if pistol is too long for the line.

I took this dogma with me to the newsroom of The Daily Oklahoman … The slot man … handed to me [a trivial story] that reported a woman filing suit against a doctor who had operated on her eleven years earlier. A subsequent surgery had revealed that the first surgeon hadn’t extracted one of his forceps before stitching up the abdomen.

I wrote: SURGEON’S FORCEPS / LEFT IN WOMAN / ELEVEN YEARS.

The slot man told me the line was too long and tossed it back to me to revise. Forceps is specific of what? It’s a tool, right? The first line became Surgeon’s Tool. That fit. Hours pass with more headlines written. The bulldog edition comes up from the printing plant. The night city editor scans it. Reaches page 27. Shouts: Stop the press, glowers at the slot man, and says, “Who wrote this!” I am identified as the culprit …

That Stop the press shout is often heard in old movies, but that was the only time I ever heard it in real life. Professor Herbert called me in, and … seemed perfectly satisfied that I could be blamed only for innocence in a world full of night city editors with dirty minds. I got a “B” in the course.

Tony Hillerman, Seldom Disppointed, pp. 172 – 173