Thursday, November 23, 2006

on Screwtape

Since I am back at the parental abode for the Thanksgiving holidays, I thought I'd take the time to rummage through the old records to find some... records, I suppose is the word I'm looking for. I didn't quite find what I was looking for or even things that would be particularly helpful: I found my PSAT scores [80, 80, 69], hundreds of pages of notes on translating the Mahaabhaarata, well-scribbled-on photocopies of pages of Aristotle's De Caelo, my 2001 pay stubs, and the copy of The Screwtape Letters I used when they decided to have a student-led reading group at my high school evangelical "youth group" with me and this other guy as the student leaders, but none of the various other important documents I really wanted to look at or would at least have been interested in finding. So I sat down and reread Screwtape.

One thing which always struck me was how the demons didn't particularly care for what exactly was going on in the war or in politics except insofar as it related to the state of the man's soul. In most cases, it didn't particularly matter which side of a matter the man took, so long as he used it to divide himself from others and perhaps define his faith in terms of it, with luck beginning to only use his faith as a convenient prop for [viz] Pacifism. Which is, by the way, why such pieces as this one are utter tripe, as it seems to have gone dangerously far down that very path. Even a 16-yr-old could be made to see that.

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