Zev Zelenko, Physician and Moralist 

Although the big corporate media chose to ignore this death, many Americans are aware of the recent passing of Zev Zelenko, the pioneering doctor who proposed the first widely publicized protocol for Covid in the early months of 2020. 

Of the many sentiments expressed by his medical comrades in arms, perhaps the most meaningful and incisive was by his friend Dr. Paul Alexander who wrote: “He was a great human being with the will and drive to be virtuous.”

Zelenko had the view that people have the power within themselves to overcome. This “power of choice” is what gives humans their special status in this world, which is nothing less than a reflection of the Creator who made them.

The second key idea of the Judeo-Christian tradition is its conception of God. God is described as a “Good God,” a God whose very definition is Perfect Goodness. And not only is this God good, this God has created human beings “in His own image” and expects them to be good as well; that is to say, to treat each other with respect and decency due to their very nature as “children of God.”  

Furthermore, the Good God has given the human children of God an instruction manual on how to behave in the form of the Ten Commandments. The first four inform humans that they are to respect and even love this Good God and the last six show the humans how to demonstrate that respect and love by following the commands which focus on treating each other well. This God has given His humans incentives and disincentives. Treat your fellow humans well and there is eternal reward. Treat them badly and there is eternal punishment, 

The central principle of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that the nature of the One God is goodness and that this Good God insists that His human creations treat each other with respect and dignity. All other theological considerations are secondary to the one enduring central principle of ethical monotheism.

Contemporary secularists, of course, are prone to dismiss this long Judeo-Christian tradition with the derisive phrase “Prove it.” These secularists seem to have no awareness that they have taken a perfectly wonderful discipline called science with its methodology of hypothesis, hypothesis testing and conclusion, and replaced the Judeo-Christian religion with a counter-religion of their own called scientism.  

The central tenet of their religion is that something cannot be deemed as objectively true unless proven via the scientific experimental method. But the scientific method is only a tool with limited reach, much like a telescope is a tool with a limited reach, which does not mean that nothing can exist beyond what the tool allows the human to see. 

Furthermore, only the unwise think that religion has to be “proven.” Self-aware religious people know that religion is chosen, not proven, and that human beings use their power of choice if they see in a religion something meaningful. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard passionately embraced Christianity with “fear and trembling” because he knew it could not be “proven.” But, in addition to recognizing the limitations of the scientific method, there was something in it he found emotionally satisfying, so he chose to make the decision to believe. 

Zelenko embraced Judaism because he found in it a story of his own elevated humanity when he chose to treat others humanely. Contrast this to doctors with no faith or merely lukewarm religious belief who were content to blindly “follow orders” from the CDC rather than do their own rigorous research and treat patients with proven technologies.

Just like people, religions can be good or bad depending upon the basic tenets and the interpretation of those tenets at any particular time. An example of a good religion is the central animating principle of Judeo-Christianity. An example of a bad interpretation is when eccentric old spinsters are burned at the stake on the suspicion they are witches. Good religion produces people like Zev Zelenko and men like him enable societies to flourish.

Unfortunately, many in the West seem to be moving away from the Judeo-Christian tradition toward the newer religion of scientism and ironically, they do not even recognize that scientism requires the same “leap of faith” that Kierkegaard so clearly recognized. The religion of scientism is a “bad religion” because it leads people into bizarre pseudo scientific conclusions that, in their delusion, think are scientific, but which ultimately do great harm to the society at large and the individuals who live within them. 

The proud atheist Karl Marx gave us a “science of history” which ultimately turned large numbers of Europeans into followers of totalitarian beasts. In the 1920s and 1930s science religionists gave us the “science” of eugenics, which ultimately led to Hitler’s slave labor camps and death factories. We’ve seen what “following the science” has done in the Covid era: the mass disregard for the well-being of actual human beings in favor of adherence to model-based abstractions that treat people not as volitional beings with rights but rather as machine parts to be molded and manipulated. 

These and many other examples of “social science” cooked up in Western universities are, simply put, rendering Western societies less cohesive, less peaceful and less humane. One can only hope a counterrevolution will take place, a Great Reawakening, that will lead Westerners back to the core principles of both genuine science and the faith tradition that inspired Zev Zelenko to become a great doctor and an even greater human being.