Saved by the sons

I’ve been writing this post at the time of another full moon. Last night the skies were illuminated by the worm moon that marks the arrival of Spring. The alignment of the earth, moon and sun also generated a lunar eclipse this morning, something that can only mean bad things for us. As predicted, we’ve had a night with no sleep. Our son has been at his worst. He has been jumping on the floor making the whole house shake. He has been hitting his head with great force and has a possessed glaze in his eyes. It is truly terrifying to behold. The autism demons stir at the time of the moon.

This has turned my thoughts to the celestial world and I’ve been pondering the ways in which our religious tradition can help to make sense of it all. There are consolations in Christianity that I never would have appreciated without experience of having a son with severe autism, so here goes – and comments are very welcome at the end of the post.

It is now more than two thousand years since Jesus Christ was crucified at Calvary, outside the city of Jerusalem. The bible tells us that his last words on the cross were “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” These words reflect the hubris of humanity. The ability of human beings to do terrible things to each other and the natural world, often in ignorance of the impact of what they are doing.

The epidemic of severe autism exemplifies this only too well. Well-educated and well-meaning people are practising forms of ‘medicine’ that are making our children sick and disabled. Old-fashioned appeals for humility have been pushed aside in the name of a secular and progressive God manifest in a standardised and increasingly globalised health system that ploughs on despite mounting evidence of the harm being done to our kids. Christianity teaches us that Jesus died so we could learn how to live with our sin, cognisant of what we are able to do to each other and the world on which we depend. However, religious adherence has been in steep decline in countries like the UK since the Second World War. Religion no longer provides a challenge to the progressive leadership of our institutions and systems of government. Just when we need greater humility to recognise the damage being done to the next generation, we have thrown out the God who might remind us of the need to repent.

Living with autism has reminded me of the sophistication of our natural inheritance. We are each born with an immune system that allows us to navigate self and other safely from the first moment of life. It is all too easy to destroy this evolutionary inheritance without fully understanding the consequences for humanity. Vaccination and antibiotics are disrupting our natural system and replacing it with a hybridised, synthesised and unnatural immunity. This alters the way our system matures over time, impacting the development of other parts of the body, including the microbiome in the gut and the neurological connections forged in the brain. We have no idea how multiple vaccines accumulate and distort the natural immune process. We also know nothing about the role of the complex ecology of gut organisms that are killed and disrupted when we take antibiotics. We have no idea what it means to become reliant on a synthetic immune response in a context where our natural but compromised immune system continues to work. Rather like the battery chickens that can’t survive without the antibiotics that are needed to keep them alive just long enough to produce the eggs and meat that we crave, there is a risk that human beings will become ever more dependent on vaccines and drugs to replace their depleted natural immunity. There is a further risk that the changes in immunity are compounded across generations so that children never again regain the natural immune function they would otherwise have.

Our experience of living with severe autism and seeing the impact of vaccines on our son’s immune system, bowel and neurological development, has pushed us back into the camp of the old God rather than continuing to follow the secular Gods of our time. Growing up in a religious household, my favourite text was always to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Matthew 6, 28-29). The words remind us of the wonder and beauty of creation inside and outside the body. We are blessed to be born with natural immunity that needs to be cherished and supported with good food, rest, sunlight and exercise, and most of all, love. This is the alternative medicine that we have focused on in helping our son to recover. His health is much better eating home grown and cooked food. He spends his days outside, walking in the fresh air, feeling the sun on his skin. He is loved by everyone who comes to know him, and he loves them back.

Our experience points to us being at an evolutionary crossroads. We can choose to stay on the path we inherited, that served us so well for the last 300,000 years, or we continue down the new synthetic route and risk losing everything in the next 30 years. The changes are already happening thick and fast, and there will soon be no way of reversing it all.

While Jesus came to save humanity from our inevitable failings – a task that clearly has a long way to go – our children with severe autism can play a role in saving us from false Gods. They are a living sacrifice, bearing testimony to the dangers of faith in progressive medicine and corporate power, backed by the state. Our son has saved us, our daughter, and if she has them, our grandchildren, from the dangers of vaccination and the child ‘health’ regime. He has motivated me to write The Autism Tribune to try and tell as many people as are able and willing to hear.

Since our son’s regression into severe autism, we have remained completely immune to the repeated calls to visit the ‘health’ service for more vaccinations, not least during the hysteria of Covid-19. We found it relatively easy to stand firm against the pressure to submit to the emergency vaccinations developed in response to Covid-19 and resisted the repeated demands to have synthetic ribonucleic acid (mRNA) injected into our arms. This was the autism story writ-large, inflicted on the whole population across the whole world. It was a remarkable thing to behold and the damage it caused is incalculable.

However, the horrors of the Covid response mean that many more people are coming to understand the danger of the secular Gods. It is no coincidence that we are now seeing a reckoning with the legacy of vaccination – at last in part - particularly in the United States but around the world too. Living in the aftermath of the pandemic has the potential to plant the seeds for a better future for the next generation. It might also prompt people to revisit their Christian inheritance. I never really understood Christian talk of ‘the fall’ until severe autism happened to us. Now the message stays with me, day after day. Full moon to full moon.