Tomorrow, I will be getting a second Moderna vaccine. At that point, I will be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, joining my wife and millions of other Americans.
The sheer magnitude of the accomplishment cannot be understated here. In the last presidential administration, we discovered that if you peel away the red tape enough, good things can happen. The bureaucracies do more harm than good in stifling innovation, and that is something we should be better able to realize.
I don’t have much to say this morning except this: The vaccines are safe, they are working, and I highly encourage you to get it. It’s not a partisan issue. I’ve been asked by friends on all side, because they are skeptical for differing reasons, and I’ve told them all the same thing: Get the COVID-19 vaccine.
On a slightly different note, I wanted to share this, from my friend Erick Erickson, because there is always so much going on that we really do forget what this week is supposed to be about.
Two thousand years ago on planet earth, there were no civilizations, religions, or mythologies that had anything akin to an account of Jesus’s resurrection.
When atheists and skeptics argue it would have been easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes two thousand years ago, they take a narrow and bigoted view of culture at the time. They believe something for which there is ample evidence to the contrary.
N.T. Wright showed in The Resurrection of the Son of God, contrary to claims of today, literally no civilization had anything like what the early Christians claimed. It has all the hallmarks of recorded history — a recounted real event.
The Jews had only two beliefs in their entire culture. Either they did not believe in resurrection at all or they believed we all were resurrected on the last day of history. They had no story to even contemplate a single person’s resurrection in the middle of human history.
The Romans, Greeks, Indian subcontinent, East Asian, Norse, Egyptian, African, and Western Hemisphere cultures that existed lacked the language of the Christian resurrection. Overwhelmingly, the pagan religions globally rejected resurrection at all. The few stories that considered resurrection either did not exist or came in one of two very distinct forms.
First, a resurrection involved a human coming back to life as godlike with a shining appearance, in almost all cases too bright for humans to lay eyes on. More commonly, the human came back to life pale and cadaverous, looking like one who had withered in the tomb.
That is it. On planet earth two thousand years ago, that was all there was and almost to a culture regardless of its place on the planet, they rejected the idea of a physical, bodily resurrection back to human form.
I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not often particularly religious, but there is a lot of comfort to be found in the Bible and faith. Like the vaccine, comfort for the soul is something we could do with a lot more of right now.