A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.

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“While he acknowledged that ‘everybody got coronavirus,’ Lapp defended the community’s approach: ‘It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying…’
About a year after the coronavirus pandemic first broke out in the U.S., national news outlets and The Associated Press wire service reported that the Lancaster County Amish community had reached herd immunity, meaning that ‘a large part of the population had been infected with COVID-19 and became immune.’ However, precise data is difficult to come across because the Amish were hesitant to publicize coronavirus cases in their community.”
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“I count myself a rationalist and a skeptic, and I find myself constantly defending Christians and Christianity…All the things that we value, the right of free speech, the right of the individual conscience, these evolved in first and second century Roman Christendom, where the individual Christian said, ‘I have a right to believe, what I believe and not what the Emperor tells me.’ From that our whole idea of democracy and the equality that we have has developed…We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have and to slight it and to dismiss it as being irrelevant is the detritus of rather ill read minds, I think.”

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We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.

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“It would be so much easier if God just handed you the blueprint, wouldn’t it? It would be easier to follow ‘the plan.’ But God is too good for that; too kind. He wants relationship with you too much to hand you a blueprint and let you walk away…So embrace the wildness of your season, the gray areas that litter every step, and learn to listen to the Spirit of God in you. Black and white isn’t always His way. More often than not, His way is through the confusing and the impossible, because that’s where you’re most likely to hold His hand.”

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