Since it's Sunday morning and my religious tradition is on my mind, I hope you won't mind me posting a theory based in that tradition. The response to the pande

Since it's Sunday morning and my religious tradition is on my mind, I hope you won't mind me posting a theory based in that tradition. The response to the pandemic has reminded me of nothing so much as the demons in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Their goal is not simply for people to die - if they die innocent, they haven't gained anything. Their goal is for people to die while being culpable of great evil. At one point, the trainee demon Wormwood is excited to hear that his target might be called up to fight in the front lines of World War II, but his mentor Screwtape warns him that this might not work out the way they want. A pandemic, by itself, would be a tragic loss of innocent lives. A pandemic where half the people involved are telling each other to make themselves more likely to die, and then they all die as a result - now that's a plot Screwtape would love. Remember Satan's original plan. Are you such a sheep that you're going to be afraid of one fruit because you were told to be afraid of it? Why live in fear? Look how good the fruit is, and make use of the freedom you have to eat it. "You will not surely die." For me, the response to the pandemic - and especially the extent to which the pandemic is much worse because of the human response to it, from so many different politicians and business leaders in so many places - just confirms that human evil is real.