EDITOR, The Tribune.

The Bahamas Christian Council’s (BCC) COVID Vaccine Investigative Committee’s pending report on the various COVID-19 vaccines should be thoroughly examined by the entire Christian community, as a way of separating fact from fiction and wheat from chaff. The BCC is well within its rights to chime in on this national health issue, despite the pushback from the secular community and The Tribune atheist ghost writer who calls him/herself The Realist, who appears to loathes Christianity. By chiming in on the COVID-19 vaccine, Pastor Mario Moxey and the BCC are continuing the church’s tradition of taking an active role in medical science, as modern science was birthed in the Catholic monasteries of Europe during the medieval period that The Realist spoke condescendingly of in his latest broadside on the church. For his information, the first hospital in the Western world was built by a wealthy Christian woman named Fabiola in A D 400 in Rome.

The oldest hospital in the world today is the Hotel Dieu in Paris, France. Dieu is the French word for God. Interestingly, during the French Revolution the hospital system had collapsed, due to the atheists’ attacks on the church. Another irony is that half the hospitals in China during the 1930s were operated by Christian missionaries. The church was repaid by the Chinese government with a brutal suppression with the advent of the Communist Revolution in 1949. Like The Realist, the Chinese government holds to atheism. Moreover, the Jesus of Nazareth Hospital in Mexico is the oldest hospital in the Western Hemisphere. Unbeknownst to The Realist, at the Council of Nicea in AD 325, it was decreed that hospitals were to be established wherever the church was established. According to the late Dr D James Kennedy in his What if Jesus had Never been Born? it was St Basil of Caesaria who founded the very first non-ambulatory hospital.

The first nursing society, called the Daughters of Charity, was founded by Catholics St Vincent de Paul and St Louise de Marrilac. The first nursing school was established by a Lutheran named Theodor Fliedner. The first almshouse, which served as a forerunner to hospitals, was established by a Quaker named William Penn, in 1783 in Philadelphia. Florence Nightingale opened her Nightingale School for Training Nurses at the St Thomas Hospital in London in 1860, which is the beginning of modern nursing, as per Kennedy. And who can forget Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, the greatest humanitarian agency in the world? The Red Cross has saved millions of lives. Dunant was motivated by his Christian faith.

And it would be remiss of me not to mention the greatest biologist of all times, Dr Louis Pasteur, whose research into bacteriology led to pasteurisation, sterilisation and the development of vaccines against rabies, anthrax and diphtheria, as per Kennedy. Like the BCC today, Pasteur’s staunchest opponents were atheists who heaped scorn and ridicule on his Christian faith and belief in creationism, unlike the atheist Darwinists. Had it not been for Pasteur, scientists today might have never developed the Oxford AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson vaccines. Modern science has simply built on the foundation laid by Pasteur, who as a devout Christian viewed his scientific profession as an extension of his ministry.

Consequently, the Christian community and the BCC have every right to have a say on the matter of the COVID-19 vaccine, as it is Christianity that gave rise to modern medicine. Atheists like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins have hijacked science and are using it as a proxy for religion. The BCC must ignore the hateful rhetoric of The Realist and other self-professing atheists.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport, Grand Bahama

March 25, 2021.