Deliver Us From Evil

In previous posts I alerted my readers to the nefarious aspects and fallout from those who embrace evil:

From reading each of these posts you will have noticed that the Evil One will use small amounts of good mixed with a large doses of evil to accomplish his purposes. His ultimate purpose is to steal you away from the “enemy” ~ the one true God.

 This enticement to do evil is sardonically portrayed in a portion of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Here Screwtape lectures Wormwood (Screwtape’s disciple of evil) on how to be a competent tempter:

 “[The enemy] has filled His world full of pleasures . . . Everything has to be twisted before it is any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you…)” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The previous posts (listed below) are interspersed with quotes from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters: 

 

 

A Brave New World or Evil Will Make One Lose Their Head

 In this post we learn of evil’s “fundamentally transforming” power. Wicked counsel using the contrivances of moral relativism, pride and grandiosity feeds the darkened imaginations of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. A short review of Shakespeare’s tragedy reveals that breathing the “Fog and filthy air” is toxic.”

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Worker Bees, Outcome Based Education and Our Little Ones

Here, evil is disguised as a consensus building which “fundamentally transforms” our children via the public school system. We read that consensus building can be used to synthesize good with evil.

“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.” “―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Label Me “In Christ”

  The use of labels and political correctness become roadblocks to any conversation that would reveal truth or opinions that would differ from the demanded conformity. The Progressive Left’s political intolerance is shown for what it is: “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out…” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!” Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 The People of the “White Privilege” Lie

 A White Privilege Conference is held annually in Madison Wisconsin. The conference of hive minded collectivists tell the lie of being born on the wrong ‘side’ of the melanin tracks. We learn of how evil is used to re-label, redefine, classify and ‘inform’ public school teaching.

 “Suspicion often creates what it suspects.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “Doubly Dead and Uprooted”

 In this post Jude (and I) write about false teachers, teachers that synthesize good with evil to create a cheap grace. This cheap ‘grace’ is embraced by many churches, churches which acquiesce to the pressure of the LGBT ‘community for the sake of vacuous “diversity”.

 “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”  ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Tear Down That Anthropocentricity

 We learn about evil in its many socio-political forms: humanism, Marxism, collectivism, Progressivism and murderous tyranny ~ each one centered around man’s material needs.

 “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “Schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, fix men’s affections on the future ─ on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past, and love to the present; fear, avarice, and ambition look ahead.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “Pilate was merciful till it became risky.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 “Whenever all men are…hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Fear and Loathing in America

 Allan Bloom, relates, “We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil.”

 “If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy’s hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor. This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Exclusion & Embrace in the Garden of Good & Evil

“To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.”

• Miroslav Volf
  The End of Memory, Remembering Rightly In A Violent World

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 Check Your Motives At The Door

 In this post are quotes from M. Scott Peck, Psychiatrist & author. He defines evil and antilove.

 “All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 

Then, evil as religiously practiced by Islam’s Jihadists, by Hamas and under the demented Sharia Law is discussed in

 Truth Be Told – Chloé Simone Valdary

…or as revealed by this tweet reply:

 “…a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 

Lord, deliver us from evil.

 

Be encouraged; from the Gospel according to Luke 10: 17-20, the report of the seventy disciples sent out by Jesus:

 

“The seventy came back exhilarated.

“Master,” they said, “even the demons obey us in your name!”

“I saw the satan fall like lightening from heaven,” he replied. “Look: I’ve given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and every power of the enemy. Nothing will ever be able to harm you. But-don’t celebrate having spirits under your authority. Celebrate this, that your names are written in heaven.”

 

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 

My next post will uncover more evil, as practiced by Anonymous.

 

 

 

 

 

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Picture attributions:

Above Illustration: The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden – by Gustave Dore

Wormwood picture: The Screwtape Letters Cover: Read by John Cleese

 Satan at the computer:  http://screwtapefiles.blogspot.com/2011/02/detail-is-in-devil.html