"Surprising message from Bill Gates about the coronavirus"
The liar who wrote this letter opens with these lines:
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has released a powerful message about what we can learn from the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe. Bill Gates said the virus is sent to remind us of the important lessons that we seem to have forgotten. ...multi-billionaire Gates, 64 - who donated £85 million to combat the virus last month - believes that despite the chaos, there is 'a spiritual purpose behind everything that happens'. In an open letter, entitled 'What is the Corona/ Covid-19 Virus Really Teaching us?', he wrote....
Bill Gates did not write this. I guarantee he did not. It's wrong to misuse his name by passing it along, even with a question mark.
Evidence--he would not make these mistakes that appear in the letter:
1) "
perhaps we should to."
2) "
the power of freewill "
3) " We can choose... to look after only our self. "
4) "
see it as a *great corrector* "
This fake letter uses quotation marks on the lines "I'm a strong believer" and "As I meditate," but the quotes are never closed at the end of item 14 or anywhere else.
If there were an "open letter" from Bill Gates, it would be published in the NY Times, or at least signed and dated, not passed around on the internet without the slightest bit of authentication.
The whole idea that the Covid-19 pandemic is "sent to us" by some Higher Power for any purpose is offensive to me. The God I serve does not send us bad things " to remind us of the important lessons that we seem to have forgotten."
God can take good and bad events that happen and make some limited good come out of them, but please do not attribute earthquakes and viruses to God trying to tell us something. That is a very outdated idea though some instances of this belief appear in the Bible, especially books of the Bible that were written 2-3,000 years ago.
In the Gospel of John, the disciples of Jesus ask him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:1-12).
Jesus answers that neither the man born blind nor his parents sinned and caused his blindness. Then he heals the man.
As I see the scene, Jesus looks at the man with compassion and hugs him. Then Jesus mixes his saliva with mud and gently spreads it on the man's closed eyes, at the same time giving him a positive meaning for his long years of blindness: it was all "so that God's works might be revealed in you."
In other words, "You are special. God has loved you all along and planned that you would meet me and be healed."
I'm not sure that the chance to meet Jesus and go down in history was that consoling to the blind man. Maybe he wanted to argue, "I would rather have had my sight all this time. Couldn't you pick someone else to demonstrate your miracles on?"
You don't complain, however, to a famous rabbi who is about to heal you.
Jesus's words to the man and to his audience still contain the idea that the blindness was deliberately planned by God. This view of God as intending every event on the face of the earth leaves us with a God who plans accidental drownings, fatal car accidents, deaths in tornadoes, even sets in motion murders and an occasional holocaust. No.
God allows gravity to exist, avalanches to crash down mountainsides, DNA to make random errors in reproduction of cells. God allows people to make foolish and even evil choices.
But the idea that there is "a spiritual purpose behind everything that happens" (as asserted in this letter)--purpose behind every earthquake, car accident, heart attack, and epidemic--is superstition masquerading as religious faith.
It sounds pious because it acknowledges God to exist and to be all-powerful.
It provides the comfort that God is watching us closely and wants good for us.
Nevertheless, it sets up a God who is monstrous, who actively intends evil for purportedly good ends.
It's like the father who beats a child in order to "correct" him or her.
Many of us have grown up with fathers or mothers like this or worse, but it's time to give up the heresy that the Creator of the universe or universes wants to create human or animal suffering for some sort of corrective purpose.
Please! God is powerful, but not powerful enough to manage a kind of gravity that never causes a fatal fall. Cell reproduction apparently cannot occur without an error in the DNA every now and then.
Viruses evolved. They exist in one species or another, and humans who slaughter and consume smaller animals will occasionally, unwittingly, cause a virus flourishing among bats or birds to take hold in homo sapiens.
Do not jump to the conclusion that the Maker of all planned for the novel corona virus disease of 2019 to become a pandemic.
Do not create for yourself a vain idol, a blasphemy, for the purpose of cloaking a random event with meaning.
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