Can a plague have any meaning or is it just a thing that happens?

Is it just a part of blind nature entirely exhausted by nature's horizon?

The question would in this case be something like asking why bat, pig, or other animal populations

suffer their own lethal epidemics, certainly not for their sins.

The first cats have now tested positive for COVID-19.

Shall we blame this on their decadent Western materialism and abandonment of the Christian religion?

Over the weekend, several major world newspapers intensified their reporting on the problem

that Christian belief in

its maligned fantasies poses for society at this difficult moment.

On Friday, an op-ed in the New York Times pulled out the inevitable faith versus science

canard.

Quote, the religious rights hostility to science is crippling a response to the coronavirus, we are told. In France, a worried

article about religious extremists profiteering on the crisis bore the title Apocalypse, divine

punition, when the coronavirus confirms the prophecies of fundamentalists and sectarians.

Now, over the weekend, I confess that I had the awkward task of answering an email

asking me whether I thought this plague was a commencement of the beginning of Revelations 1260 days.

This lecture will not be my answer to that question. It will, however, attempt to address the question of the pandemic's meaning,

if it has one, by placing this quite extraordinary event in a certain biblical perspective,

hopefully helping a bit to locate where we suddenly stand.

I will take a broad humanistic approach. Still, cultural elites will find our exercise a worrisome regression to the ignorant mythopoeic piety of the Middle Ages.

To them, I will only say this. It is actually Bronze Age piety.

Additionally, materialism is a cultural scourge in a twofold sense, both philosophical and moral.

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