Sure she would. Mardi Gras ([caution, very depraved photos) is known as a Christian holiday that dates back thousands of years to pagan spring and fertility rites! There is nothing Christian about it, and it is disgraceful that such pagan parades would be permitted in any city before of after the Chinese coronavirus.

Cantrell said that she would have acted if Trump and his staff had been “more serious” about the Chinese coronavirus. Such blatant hypocrisy would gag a maggot. She’s not even sharp enough to disguise her duplicity. Moreover, the mayor would not have canceled the showcase for depravity angering all the perverts, pedophiles, and prostitutes—plus the “normal” citizens who support such decadence. Her Honor did not want to be responsible for canceling the depravity that always struts through the streets of the city each year.

Is the mayor totally uninformed? Does she watch television? Does she have any sane advisors? Can she read? This is an excellent example of incompetence looking for an excuse. She is the leader of the city, and to cast blame on Trump is nonsense.

But then it has always been that way with politicians: blame others who are totally innocent of failure or incompetence. Such action is typical of mankind. At the very beginning of time, Adam blamed Eve for the Fall, and Eve blamed the serpent, and of course, the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on. It is human and evil to blame others rather than accept personal responsibility.

During days of past disease, disability, and death, the persecution of the innocent, usually a minority, while never justified, is understandable. Death was stalking the streets. People were buried in mass graves. No one could be trusted—not politicians, priests, nor physicians. Terrified people looked for someone to blame and to hate, and they found them—Jews, Muslims, gravediggers, lepers, and others. Such action is a scapegoat response that is as old as man.

The persecutors, not being the sharpest people in town, could have seen that the ones they held responsible for the disease were dying in the same numbers as others. But they kept looking, and many cities found what they thought was a legitimate scapegoat. The definition for a scapegoat is a fall guy, victim, patsy (informal), or whipping boy.

However, the original scapegoat is Bible-based.

In the Bible, a scapegoat is an animal that is ritually burdened with the sins of others and then driven away. The concept first appears in Leviticus 16 in which a goat was designated to be cast into the desert to carry away the sins of the community until Christ actually accomplished it.

Only once a year on the Day of Atonement, Aaron, the high priest, entered the Holy of Holies and sacrificed a young bullock as a sin offering to atone for the sins of Israel. He also took two goats, chosen by lot, and presented them at the door of the tabernacle. One goat was “for YHWH,” which was offered as a blood sacrifice, and the other was sent into the wilderness. The blood of the slain goat was taken into the Holy of Holies behind the sacred veil and sprinkled on the mercy seat as the bullock had been. Later in the ceremonies of the day, the High Priest confessed the sins of the Israelites to God, placing them figuratively on the head of the other goat who would symbolically “take them away.”

Since the second goat was sent away to perish, the word “scapegoat” has developed to indicate a person who is blamed and punished for the sins of others. Christ fulfilled the symbolism by dying on the Cross for the sins of mankind—thus taking them away.

In ancient Greece, the scapegoat was done in different ways during different circumstances, during different times, but the scapegoat was usually a criminal, cripple, and at times a celebrity.

During the sixth century B.C., a man was appointed as a scapegoat during times of plague in Greece, and he was beaten seven times upon his genitals while flutes played! Then he was stoned or burned on a pyre of trees, and his ashes cast into the sea. At other times, an unpleasant, unlikable, and unlucky person would be chosen to take all the evils of the city upon himself. Sometimes the scapegoat was killed, and at other times, he was cast out of the city.

Please note that this was during the “golden age” of Greece that some homosexuals talk about so much. Also, during this “golden age,” women were second-class citizens; the most brilliant men did not know the function of the heart, liver, or brain, nor did they know about the circulation of the blood. They believed the entrails of a chicken could predict the fate of a nation, and that the Greek “deities” really lived on Mt. Olympus!

Golden age indeed!

When a plague lashed Marseilles during the 100s A.D., a destitute man would offer to be the scapegoat (he was not only destitute but dumb, super dumb) and lived for a year at public expense, fed the best food, and then clothed in sacred clothes. On the very special day, he was led through the city as prayers were said to cast all the peoples’ sin upon the well-fed dummy. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to death.

None of the unfortunate victims succeeded in removing any of the town’s sins to himself or any forgiveness of sins.

The Athenians always kept hapless souls at public expense, and during times of pestilence, famine, or natural disaster, two of them were sacrificed. Rome also resorted to scapegoats at times. It is interesting that all people have felt the need to have someone pay for their sins.

For thousands of years, mankind resorted to human sacrifices, and with more enlightenment (and the teaching of the Bible), animals replaced humans. Whether humans or animals, the sacrifice was to appease “the gods.” Honest men know they are sinners and require forgiveness, and being sinners, they react to death staring them in the face during a time of contagion. Some will confess and repent, while others will become callous and rebellious.

We must realize that we are not too smart, sophisticated, and special that such a thing—a massive time of death—could  never happen here. If not this pandemic, the next one to follow. We must react as concerned, committed, and compassionate Christians, not as people have responded in past times of distress, disease, and death.

America and the world are in a mess, and leading politicians are making it worse, so let’s not compound it even more by making President Trump the scapegoat.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent being Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! The eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

Recently developed methods of travel permitted the swift distribution of the disease and with the First World War in progress, soldiers were transferred all over the world.

In some American cities all public meetings were illegal: schools, churches, lodges, theaters, etc. Some cities were closed down while others made it illegal to be in public without wearing a mask. There were so many deaths the undertakers could not keep up with the burials and asked volunteers to dig graves. Other cities dug massive holes and buried everyone together without coffins. Morgues were overwhelmed and they stacked bodies like firewood in the corridors.

Since health officials were not much help and knew little about the flu, concerned people tried their grandmas’ prevention remedies such as eating raw onions, keeping a potato in their pocket, or wearing a bag of camphor around their neck.

There are no reports of any success from such practices but the raw onions might have kept the infected at a safe distance.

Some experts think the disease started in the U.S. at Fort Riley, a Kansas army camp, when a cook was infected. Within a week the pestilence was in every state because of the transfer of soldiers. The disease then jumped the Atlantic Ocean to cut down millions and infected about a third of the world!

It marched into India killing 17 million people! Total world deaths are estimated to have been up to 100 million people (3% to 6% of the world population) and it killed 20% of those infected. This pandemic has been called “the greatest medical holocaust in history.” It hit every part of the world.

Laura Spinney wrote in Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, it was the “greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”

More people died as a result of the Spanish flu than died in World War I and II–on both sides! During the Crimean War (1854-56), ten times more British soldiers died of dysentery than from all the Russian weapons combined! Moreover, 50 years later, during the Boer War, there were five times more deaths from disease than from enemy fire.

From the dawn of history, mankind has experienced times of sickness, sorrow, and suffering. Often, times of pestilence were mysterious, sudden, and without remedy. Lack of knowledge, superstition, and poor sanitary conditions often contributed to the progress of the pestilence. Men often felt that God was visiting them with plague as punishment for their evil deeds. The disease was usually dreadful, devastating, and deadly and often left as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared.

Now, we face another deadly possibility: the coronavirus that experts think was caused by eating bats and other dirty creatures.

Additionally, there are Islamic terrorists with the ability, equipment, funds, and commitment to wreak destruction, disease, and death on a massive scale. Whatever the threat, it is folly not to be prepared.

Throughout history, people often reacted out of fear and ignorance, and that only compounded the problem, extending the pestilence. They ran from the towns, but found that when they arrived in their safe haven they were met by the same pestilence! Of course, the pestilence had been a traveling companion.

Recent news reports reveal that 5 million citizens fled Wuhan, China just before it was locked down by the government leaving 9 million people to fend for themselves. About 19 Chinese cities have been quarantined and no one is asking how they will get food to stay alive. The Communist government doesn’t really care; after all, they have a population of 1.5 billion. Citizens, thought to be infected, have been arrested and placed in what The New York Times called, “quarantine camps” against their will.

Our present threat could come from the coronavirus, an EMP blast, poisoned water or food supply, or biological agents sprayed over a metropolitan area.

The further one goes back into history, the less reliable are the numbers of dead, and the less knowledge we have of the pestilence that took them; however, it is a fact that mankind has suffered far more from bugs than from battles, more from viruses than villains.

We can pray (atheists can hope) that the coronavirus, like Ebola and other killers, will fizzle and fade and become only a momentary concern until “the really big one” shows up.

However, like the Chinese, most Americans will not be prepared to face it.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

We are only a short plane ride from Europe and Asia so expect many more. Health experts issued a menacing warning about “a coronavirus pandemic 3 months ago. Their simulation showed it could kill 65 million people.”

That was three months ago yet only now are health and political officials taking action—maybe too little, too late.

The London Daily Mail reported on January 24 that the Chinese were “building a 1,000-bed hospital in FIVE DAYS to deal with the crisis.” The mysterious virus has infected 4500 people in China and killed 81 around the world as  of the last of January. The major cities are closing roads and stopping public transportation. The disturbed Chinese officials have locked down fourteen cities in a desperate effort to restrain the spread of the lethal virus.

As usual, health officials and politicians are underestimating the threat according to the BBC: The number of infectious carriers of the mystery virus “is far greater than official figures suggest, scientists have told the BBC.”

Dr Guan Yi, a leading virologist who helped tackle the SARS epidemic in Asia in 2003 is director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Yi confessed to Chinese media that the virus “was already uncontrollable in Wuhan (11 million residents) where it started.

Dangerous, debilitating, even deadly diseases have produced massive problems of civil disorder, disruption of labor, economic disaster, insurrection, and demise of whole populations in many nations. America is no exception.

It would be helpful to learn from the plague of Saint Cyprian and not make the same mistakes people of that day made.

In 250 A.D., the Roman Empire was in turbulence. The Goths had just won a major victory and the barbarians were at the gates of Rome. Barbarians originally meant any non-Greek people but eventually came to mean “a brutal, cruel, warlike people.” Then the plague of Saint Cyprian lashed the empire for fifteen years with wave after wave smashing the same areas. Its spread was facilitated by numerous military activities that were going on throughout the provinces. It was a time of terrible tragedy that pushed people to the brink of despair.

The following shocking account by Heinrich Häser, a German medical author, might be a warning of the possible future for present day China and America. He declared that people “crowded into the large cities; only the nearest fields were cultivated; the more distant ones became overgrown, and were used as hunting preserves; farm land had no value, because the population had so diminished that enough grain to feed them could be grown on the limited cultivated areas. Hieronymus wrote that the human race “had been all but destroyed.”

Much of Italy was altered because of this epidemic. Large parts of the landscape were depopulated and left vacant. Swamps appeared and the earth was returning to a primitive state of deserts and forests. Disease was changing the face of the earth in every way. Numerous problems in the palace and nasty bickering on the battlefields defeated the army before battles were fought.

Often, the soldiers served uncompensated because the disease exhausted the wealth of the Empire. Angry, unpaid soldiers bolted into the forests, and took what they wanted from the populous, trying to live off the land. Military insurgences, civil disorders, and domestic wars became common while the Roman Empire continued to crack along its foundations.

Desperate laws are approved during times of disease, disruption, and death as during Diocletian‘s reign (ruled 285-305). It became illegal for farmers to leave the farms to take up other jobs and some occupations were made hereditary. Such laws required a son to follow his father’s trade or profession. Of course, it was tyrannical but when you are poor with no future, the chain doesn’t seem too heavy! It was just one more burden to bear.

It seems Caesar had trouble “keeping them down on the farms” once they had been to the city. Furthermore, after seditious soldiers robbed the merchants and farmers and the tax collectors seized their money and crops (calling it–like today–taxes), the country people looked for other means to make a living. The oppressive laws forcing people to work at certain occupations, were passed because famine and disease had killed so many of the workers leaving crucial trades vacant.

The moving armies, fleeing citizens, and famine all contributed to conditions that were inviting disease. By the fifth century, the once-mighty empire was collapsing as the Vandals, Goths, and other barbarians were beating on the gates of Rome. (Many barbarians were already in the Empire having crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.) The Visigoths, led by Alaric in 410 were the first of the barbarians to sack Rome; however, Alaric‘s hopes of glory faded when he developed symptoms of malaria and soon died. His successful storming of the city signaled the final decline of the Roman Empire in the West, but it had been crumbling for many years from numerous internal problems. The mighty Alaric failed in his conquest and died because of a mosquito bite!

The Vandals appeared at the gates of Rome in 455, entered for a few weeks, and then left for Carthage! Angelo Celli suggested they were driven out by malaria and thousands of infected people threw themselves into the Tiber River to hasten death to escape lingering pain. It was a time of famine, fear, and fighting–and pestilence. At this time, as if Rome was not having enough trouble, faraway Britain experienced a relentless epidemic.

The mighty Roman Empire was convulsing and gasping for breath during the very troubled early fifth century as determined barbarians moved in human waves from east to west and were now ensconced along the Danube River, in Roman territory. Earlier, they had knocked down the gates of Rome and had settled in Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Now they were interested in Britain. Vortigern, Britain‘s leader, had his back to the wall as he faced other barbarians from the north (the Picts and Scots), and the Venerable Bede reported that Vortigern called upon the Saxon chiefs, Hengist and Horsa, for help. Desperate leaders thought it wise to settle barbarians within their empire to furnish troops to aid in the defense of the empire. It worked–for a while.

Bede wrote: “…a severe plague fell upon that corrupt generation [Britain], which soon destroyed such numbers of them, that the living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead….They consulted what was to be done, and where they should seek assistance to prevent or repel the cruel and frequent incursions of the northern nations; and they all agreed with their King Vortigern to call over to their aid, from the parts beyond the sea, the Saxon nation; which, as the event still more evidently showed, appears to have been done by the appointment of our Lord Himself, that evil might fall upon them for their wicked deeds.”

Apparently Britain‘s fighting forces were greatly depleted by the plague. The Saxons arrived in 449 and acted as mercenary guards for the Britons. The Brits discovered that their “help” was to be another “plague” upon their island. Everything would be different because of the Saxons, who came to help but ended up being a plague. Bede recognized that the pugnacious Saxons were a curse from God because of Britain’s wickedness.

Hans Zinsser, physician and author, concluded: “It requires little exercise of the imagination, therefore, to conclude that the history of the British Isles in all its subsequent developments of race, customs, architecture, and so forth, was in large part determined by an epidemic disease.” Britain would never be the same because of an invisible bug!

America is no exception and could be rendered a drained, defeated, even destroyed nation because of a deadly disease.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA TODAY for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D.; and visit his blog. Send request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

The bubonic plague cut its way through the Far East to Italy, then to the rest of Europe. It is believed that Genoa merchants transported plague in their cargoes of spices, nutmeg, jewels, and silks. In Siena, 75% of the people were cut down like grain before the scythe, and about 75% also died at Pisa. As described in the Cronica Senese of Agnolo di Tura, “Father abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother, another….No one could be found to bury the dead for money or for friendship.”

We are observing some of the same reactions regarding Ebola as health officials keep changing the narrative. The indecision of the “experts” is fueling the plague. First it is not airborne then it is airborne according to German doctors as reported in the Oxford University Press. The CDC agreed yesterday that Ebola can be contracted by a sneeze! The incubation period is 21 days, then 31 days, and some say 40 days. It seems health officials don’t know whether they are pitching or catching.

The virus can survive “a few hours” on an object and a “few days” in body fluids although now we are told at least one Ebola strain can live 50 days especially on a glass surface. It is not easy to catch, yet health workers dress in personal protective equipment (PPE) and still get the disease. Health workers are refusing to care for the dying and some are refusing to bury the dead in Africa. Even some U.S. health workers refuse to honor quarantine and spineless officials refuse to require it.

It seems Larry, Curly, and Moe are handling the Ebola threat with understandable results: Death is the result of ineptitude, incoherence, and incertitude.

The poet Petrarch, called the “Father of Humanism,” reported about the effects of the plague on Florence: “We go out of doors, walk through street after street and find them full of dead and dying, and when we get home again we find no live thing within the house! All having perished in the brief interval of our absence.”

George Astor wrote, “Almost half of Europe died from the Black Death between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.” The Black Death (bubonic plague) raged into Paris in June of 1348, and about the same time, it ravaged up and down the valleys of the Rhine and arrived in England, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In 1360-61, 50% of the people in many Polish towns died! Lubeck, Germany saw 80,000 of its people swept away by the plague. In 1477-78, 30,000 died in Venice; 18,000 died in Vienna in 1542. London saw thousands die each week in 1563, 1592, and 1599. Spain was lashed by the plague in 1596-1602, when half a million people died! In 1603, when James I came to the throne, 38,000 people died in London; almost that number died in 1653.

Then the great plague lashed London again, and more than 68,600 died out of a population of 460,000. It all started slowly in London. Just before Christmas of 1664, two men died in Drury Lane, with a few additional deaths during the remainder of the winter. The next few months were months of beautiful weather in London, but not for people! As the temperature climbed, so did the death toll; however the town officials refused to admit the numerous deaths which is the charge made about Ebola. The rich and well connected began to flee the city. The College of Physicians left the city by the last of June, and the politicians and King Charles II fled in early July.

In the last week of August, over 7,500 people died, and the dead carts rolled through the streets each morning picking up those who had died during the night. The dead were taken to church cemeteries where huge holes had been dug and where the dead were thrown. Infected people threw themselves into the pit, and sought to bury themselves since death was so sure and dying was so painful. The plague spread from London to the rest of the country, and then disappeared after 1667.

By 1679, 76,000 people perished in Vienna and 83,000 in Prague during 1684. Moscow lost 57,000 people to the plague as late as 1771. In the mid-1800s, the bubonic plague raised its ugly head in China and skipped across the country. Almost 100,000 people died in Canton. It showed up in Bombay (30,000 deaths) and Calcutta in 1896 and in Japan and the Philippines the following year.

In 1899, the Black Death visited Hawaii, Central America, and South America. The next year saw it in Cape Town and San Francisco. Plague paid a visit to Egypt and Singapore in 1901. Bangkok played an unwilling host to the plague in 1904, Java in 1910, New Orleans in 1914, and Florida in 1922. About ten million people perished of bubonic plague between 1903 and 1921! Since then, it has only shown up periodically and has been contained, but the Black Death is on every continent of the earth at this very moment!

The preceding litany of deaths could be a portent of what the world faces if Ebola gets out of control or Muslim terrorists carry out their threats. No sane person thinks they are playing games. It is not demagoguery to suggest that the earth could become a mass graveyard!

If major disease, disaster, and death visit America I’m afraid we will see the same results witnessed in the past. Few seemed/seem to fear God or man. Honor was/is a forgotten concept.

And Larry, Curly, and Moe continue their silly, senseless, and stupid antics playing “doctors”!

http://bit.ly/1iMLVfY Watch these 8 minute videos of my lecture at the University of North Dakota: “A Christian Challenges New Atheists to Put Up or Shut Up!”

More people died as a result of the Spanish flu than died in World War I–on both sides! During the Crimean War (1854-56), ten times more British soldiers died of dysentery than from all the Russian weapons combined! Moreover, 50 years later, during the Boer War, there were five times more deaths from disease than from enemy fire.

From the dawn of history, mankind has experienced times of sickness, sorrow, and suffering. Often, times of pestilence were mysterious, sudden, and without remedy. Lack of knowledge, superstition, and poor sanitary conditions often contributed to the progress of the pestilence. Men often felt that God was visiting them with plague to punish their evil deeds. The disease was usually dreadful, devastating, and deadly and often left as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. Now, we face another deadly possibility: the Ebola virus (EVD). Plus, there are Islamic terrorists with the ability, equipment, funds, and commitment to wreak destruction, disease, and death on a massive scale.

Throughout history, people often reacted out of fear and ignorance, and that only compounded the problem, extending the pestilence. They ran from the towns, but found that when they arrived in a “safe haven” they were met by the same pestilence! Of course, the pestilence had been a traveling companion. Hopefully, the mistakes make in the past will not be repeated in the future. Our present threat could come from Ebola, a nuclear blast, poisoned water or food supply, or biological agents sprayed over a metropolitan area. It might simply be numerous suicide attacks in scattered malls and churches.

The further one goes back into history, the less reliable are the numbers of dead, and the less assurance we have of the pestilence that took them; however, it is a fact that mankind has suffered far more from bugs than from battles.

My use the word plague is a general term for any deadly epidemic disease since even the experts can‘t identify some of the major plagues of the past.

We know that malaria hit Italy in the first-century B.C., and that the dead were in all the houses, and the streets were crowded with funeral processions. Many who had mourned a stricken relative died themselves with such rapidity that they were burned on the same pyre as those they had mourned.

An epidemic that lashed the whole world started in Verus’ Roman army while his troops were fighting in the East in A.D. 165. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the original infection came from a chest in a temple which Roman soldiers had looted. God warned about those who are greedy for gain in Proverbs 1:19, reminding us that it would cost the lives of the greedy souls. The results of this thievery cost the lives of millions of innocent souls. Verus’ army carried the disease homeward, scattering it everywhere, and by the time they reached Rome, the disease had spread from Persia to the shores of the Rhine, a world plague. Hans Zinsser, American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author, quoted Orosius’ report that deaths were so many that some cities in Italy were abandoned and fell into decay.

There was so much terror of the disease that no one dared nurse the sick and dying. It even killed Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, who was among the 2,000 per day that died in that city.

In the epidemic of Cyprian about A.D. 251, the plague skulked through Egypt, leaving the dead and dying, and then boldly attacked Rome and Greece where the daily dead rose to 5,000! It spread over the entire world, from Egypt to Scotland. It was during this plague that the custom of wearing black as an indication of mourning became common, according to Roman Catholic historian Baronius (1538-1607).

The pestilence of A.D. 302, had a companion—famine. The people resorted to eating grass, and the deaths from famine almost matched those dying from disease. Hungry dogs fought over the bodies of the human dead. Hieronymus tells us that the human race had been “all but destroyed,” and that the earth was returning to a state of desert and forests.

Headlines last week reported: “UN predicts global famine” if Ebola continues to explode. Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response revealed that “Ebola got a head start on us.” He also said, “It [Ebola] is far ahead of us, it is running faster than us, and it is winning the race,” adding “We either stop Ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan.” Note, “We do not have a plan.”

So, maybe Ebola [EVD] or terrorism will do to us what Hieronymus reported about the human race in 302 A.D.–it had been “all but destroyed,” and the earth was returning to a state of desert and forests.

God help us! World health officials have not been very helpful!

http://bit.ly/1iMLVfY Watch these 8 minute videos of my lecture at the University of North Dakota: “A Christian Challenges New Atheists to Put Up or Shut Up!”