A high-quality, large-scale D4n1sh study finds no evidence that wearing a face m4sk significantly minimizes people’s risk of contracting C0VID-19. The randomized-control trial found no statistically significant difference in coron4v1rus infection rates between m4sk-wearers and non-m4sk-wearers. In fact, according to the data, m4sk usage may actually increase the likelihood of infection.
“The recommendation to wear surgical m4sks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general m4sk use,” the authors summarized their results.
While m4sk-wearing has been advertised by health officials all around the world, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony F4uci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to prevent the spread of the coron4v1rus, the Danish researchers found that there was no statistically significant difference between wearing a m4sk or not in preventing people from contracting C0VID-19.
“In the third post hoc analysis, which investigated constellations of patient characteristics, we did not find a subgroup where face m4sks were effective at conventional levels of statistical significance,” researchers found.
The randomized-control trial, which is considered the “gold-standard” design for scientific research, had a large sample size of more than 6,000 people. Most studies conducted on various kinds of face m4sks against various coron4v1ruses are neither randomized, controlled trials nor conducted regarding the specific virus currently affecting the world.
This clinical trial was conducted from April through June in Denmark, a largely unm4sked area with government recommendations only to social distance and wash hands frequently as the country began to reopen in May. Roughly half of the 6,024 participants, 4,862 of whom completed the study, were randomly assigned to wear surgical m4sks “outside the home among other persons together” while the other half continued to operate in public without a m4sk.
Note: this study doesn’t not prove that masks don’t protect OTHERS from people who have the virus. That was not the topic of this study. And that would also be hard to measure in any case.
No one has issued a more forceful challenge to Christians to become intellectually engaged than did Charles Malik, former Lebanese ambassador to the United States, in his address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. Malik emphasized that as Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Our churches are filled with people who are spiritually born again, but who still think like non-Christians. Mark his words well:
I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy.
Malik went on to say:
It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes—and by then where will these universities be?
What Malik clearly saw is the strategic position occupied by the university in shaping Western thought and culture. Indeed, the single most important institution shaping Western society is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our lawyers, our teachers, our scientists, our business executives, our artists, will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture.
And:
The great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen warned on the eve of the Fundamentalist Controversy that if the Church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism would become immeasurably more difficult in the next:
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.
The root of the obstacle is to be found in the university, and it is there that it must be attacked. Unfortunately, Machen’s warning went unheeded, and biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closets of Fundamentalism, from which it has only recently begun to re-emerge. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.
This lecture is an excellent opportunity for us all to ask ourselves: what are we doing to influence the university? Do you have a plan?
Many of the strongest people who are now opposed to Christianity raised in two-parent Christian homes, and went to church for a decade before going off to the university. I’m thinking especially of people like Tim Gill, in Colorado. At university (and even increasingly in high school) they turned away from Christianity. All their peers and the adults could not answer their questions. As adults, they were able to get money, power and influence. Many of them are using it against Christ and his kingdom – kicking away the ladder that they climbed to success on. Why is this? Unfortunately, many of us are not willing to do what works – pick up the Lee Strobel books and read them. Especially “The Case for a Creator”.
Americans can expect to be forced to send hundreds of millions of tax dollars to pro-abortion groups if Joe Biden is confirmed to be the winner of the White House.
Biden, a pro-abortion Democrat, promised to reverse President Donald Trump’s progress for life when he takes office, including ending the Mexico City Policy and restoring Title X funds to Planned Parenthood.
These two executive orders alone defunded Planned Parenthood and the British-based abortion chain Marie Stopes International of more than $200 million U.S. tax dollars.
But they are just a few of the targets of a pro-abortion Biden administration, and abortion advocacy groups already are pressuring him to do more.
Jacqueline Ayers, vice president of government relations and public policy for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told The Hill that they hope Biden will restore funding to her abortion chain on his first day in office.
“We think many of these issues actually could be addressed day one, in an executive order that explicitly talks about the new administration’s commitment to sexual reproductive health care,” Ayers said.
Among other priorities, Christianity Daily reports Biden also is expected to repeal a Trump executive order that granted relief to charities like the Little Sisters of the Poor. Biden would once again force them to follow the Affordable Care Act contraception mandate, which includes drugs that may cause abortions.
Jessica Marcella, of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health, also urged Biden to act quickly to restore Title X funds to pro-abortion medical groups. If he does not, she said some facilities may close.
“It is essential a Biden administration act as expeditiously as possible, on day 1 or within 100 days, to get money flowing back to providers, particularly to jurisdictions that don’t have Title X services right now,” she told The Hill. “Even right now, there are health centers on the brink of closing, just trying to hold on for a reversal of fortune and restoration of Title X’s integrity as a program they can participate in.”
In 2019, Trump enacted the Title X “Protect Life” rule to ensure that the program does not indirectly fund abortions. Title X provides family planning and other health services for low-income individuals. Planned Parenthood could have complied with the rule by stopping abortions or completely separating its abortion business from its actual health services, but it refused. Instead, it prioritized abortions over women’s health and it was defunded of about $60 million.
