THE TWIST

 C. S. Lewis wrote a brilliant book which he said was his most difficult to author. He called it "The Screwtape Letters" about which he said that he had to think backwards. The book is about one senior demon (Screwtape) advising a junior inexperienced demon (Wormwood) on how to deal with Christians, those people Screwtape describes as having "gone over to the Enemy." Writing such a book was wearing on the author as we can easily imagine. 

One piece of counsel Screwtape offers Wormwood, who's also his nephew, concerns something rampant in the church today.

 Screwtape writes. “On the other hand, we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means.” This would amount to using Christianity

A means toward what? Preferably toward personal advancement, Screwtape writes, “but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice.” He continues:

“The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop. Fortunately, it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner.”

"The Screwtape Letters" was published in that great year in American history, 1942, and as you can tell in the above paragraph, it's much more apropos now than back when. Televangelists promote Christianity as a means to more corpulent bank accounts, ever-flourishing health, and upward mobility. Their church services become pep rallies to get up and go out to live your best life now. 

In the book, Screwtape advises his young ward to influence men to work toward a Utopia on earth, something impossible since God placed an angel with a flaming sword at Eden's gate, thus preventing mankind from getting back to Paradise in a fallen state. The message is a clear warning to those who’d be tempted to use the Gospel to build utopias here on Earth. Isn't that what the social justice warriors are trying to do and, sad to say, many churches and Christian authors are caving in to them.

SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN DENMARK

 

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” That's from the great Shakespeare himself in one of the most famous pieces of literature: "Hamlet."

That was said as Horatio and Hamlet see the ghost of Hamlet’s father beckoning to his son. Hamlet’s father had been king and was murdered by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius.

When the ghost beckons Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus try to prevent Hamlet from following the apparition, afraid of what harm might come to him.

The comment about something's being “rotten in Denmark” was a summary of the corruption under Claudius’s rule in the home of the Danes.

The next line, which is never included when someone uses the phrase today, paints a picture of faith: he says, “Heaven will direct it," that is, "We should let God take care of it.”

Something is rotten in Denmark when it comes to an American experiment which began in July 1963, also tried in other countries--that experiment has failed. Now the results are in: American education, public and private, has failed. The experiment, still on-going, is that we can educate without morality and expect good results. 

What's the evidence of failure? William Jeynes, a Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach with graduate degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, has listed the evidence of the rottenness:

Academic achievement has plummeted, including SAT scores

Increased rate of out-of-wedlock births

 Increase in illegal drug use

 Increase in juvenile crime

 Deterioration of school behavior

We might add that an American university should provide the parents of all prospective students the following guarantee: "In less than four years at our school we will teach your child to hate his country." It's only fair to state the sticker price of the education they offer upfront since the old folks at home are going to be slicing a financial vein in their savings so their child(ren) can gain such an education.

The fetid smell wafting from the groves of academe` has a historical antecedent as stated by Tova Friedman,  a survivor of the Holocaust. She said, "Education without morality is completely worthless. Hitler and the whole war was orchestrated by very intelligent people, they were psychologists, lawyers, doctors, scientists & engineers. The people on top where excellent thinkers."

C. S. Lewis wrote: "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil."

Here's a testimony from a former teacher (there are a lot of former teachers these days because they couldn't stop or stand the stench): "Having taught in the state’s public school system for the past six years, I can attest to the fact that moral values have deteriorated since I left the teaching profession in 1980 to enter the insurance business. Cheating is not only rampant, but all too often is not viewed as morally wrong."

Just how bad is it? "The Oregon Education Department has announced that teaching that there is one right answer in math [is wrong}. (Aside from the fact that my grades in any given math course would have vastly improved under this dictum, something is truly wrong in Denmark.)

Another example from history, this one from East Germany before the fall of the wall: Esther is a 13 year-old girl who came home from school crying. Esther is a straight A student, top of her class in everything. When asked, "Why are you crying?" she said, "Because I can't go to school anymore." 

She explained, saying that there's going to be a parade tomorrow and we're all to stand beneath the huge head of Karl Marx and swear an oath to the state. (Sounds like something eerily akin to Daniel 3). She said that she told the teacher she was not going to swear such an oath. The teacher told her that she would be forced to quit school and go to work in a slipper factory.  

What's going on? In schools and all over the place in the West, there's enormous pressure to keep the practice of Christianity private. This also applies to any talk about God in public. In schools, public and private, God talk is forbidden so let's call it what it is and let's call what happened to the 13 year old what is it: intellectual murder. It's nothing short of the tyranny of the mind. 

Something is rotten in Denmark. We're in Denmark.  

 

Dr. SEUSS

CBS News reports that "Six Dr. Seuss books — including 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street' and 'If I Ran the Zoo' — will stop being published because of insensitive imagery," the business that preserves and protects the author's legacy said. "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong," Dr. Seuss Enterprises Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author's and illustrator's birthday.

The other books affected are "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!," and "The Cat's Quizzer." This move has been in the works since last year as "Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists in the field as part of our review process. We then worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles," it said.

eBay has jumped into the mix by preventing the resale of the six Dr. Seuss books discontinued this week by the late author’s publisher.

“At eBay, we have a strict policy against hate and discrimination to ensure our platform remains a safe, trusted and inclusive environment for our global community of buyers and sellers," spokeswoman Parmita Choudhury told the Washington Examiner’s Haley Victory Smith.

 But then there's a best-selling book in which evil lives. When that book went on sale after 70 years of lurking in its deserved pit of darkness, it sold 85,000 copies in one country alone, staying on the best-seller list for 35 consecutive weeks. The book was so evil that at one time 12,000,000 copies had been burned. 

Its evil has been translated into at least 16 languages — including Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. In April 2017, the Japanese government approved its use in their schools, classifying it as "teaching material."

 When it was first published, some literary critics called it "rambling nonsense." Almost every page of that book singles out for hatred and demonization one miniscule group of people that comprise less than 1% of the world's population.

The book with evil between its covers is Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Its  distribution was ubiquitous in Germany; every couple received a free copy at their marriage ceremony; from 1925 to summer 1945, it sold over 12 million copies and was translated into more than a dozen languages, including a braille edition for blind Germans.

In the book, Hitler wrote that the Jews were bent on destroying the Gentile world and were controlling everything behind the scenes. World Jewry, Hitler claimed, was responsible for every thing he didn't like. He believed and wrote that the Jews were a disease on the body of the human race, sub-human, vermin fit only to be extinguished.

But here's the thing: until eBay comes to its senses, you can't purchase Dr. Seuss. You can buy Mein Kampf.