Saturday, 29 January 2022

Faith and politics part 4: Covid conspiracy crisis

 

Covid control conspiracy crisis

The majority of the world population when faced with Covid had grown up with every advancing medical science. Just a hundred years ago before antibiotics, when so many conditions could not be ‘cured’ only nursed people would be astonished to look forward to hospitals and medicine today. Meanwhile science and technology opened up so many things that we (at least in the richest countries) could barely imagine living without. 

I don’t like the idea of dividing populations into generations (I am a late Gen x-er apparently), the post war generations, baby boomers, whilst fearful of the abuse of science (nuclear bombs) largely saw science as positive and hopeful, that it will in time have all the answers. In the move away from religion was there a trend to see science as the new faith?

Well in the new millennium doubt came into the faith in science. We started to wonder more often whether what can be done should be done.  Not that the question was never asked before, but the voices got louder. At the same time we face the limits of science and medicine – antibiotic resistance, few answers for the dementia that more people live long enough to develop – and the implications of our previous technologies on the climate.

So now we move on from the proclamations that ‘God is dead’ to ‘Science is playing God’ and adverts that used to see someone in a lab coat as reassuring to a mindset that scientists are playing with fire and not to be trusted.

Enter a pandemic and a time when there is a need to follow guidance, and listen to the science. 2020 populations are used to deciding for themselves, and whilst most of us may follow the guidance as our choice to care for the community and limit the spread etc, others rebel against anything. This is magnified in the USA where the faith related anti-science was already more widespread, and then the vaccines…


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