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SCREWTAPE PROPOSES AN EPISCOPAL TOAST (18)
With Apologies to C.S. Lewis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
December 26, 2011
My dear Wormwood,
It is hard not to imagine the enormous damage this Jefferts Schori woman is doing to her church and faith. I doubt we could have come up with someone like her - a woman who spent most of her early life examining squid and then does a 180-degree turn and examines Scripture with the clinical detachment of a plate of fried calamari. Our Father says she will be given first class accommodations when she arrives here, at least for a while, but never enough ease for the torment that will follow.
She has undermined their wretched faith and the weak-willed House of Bishops who follows her like lemmings over a cliff. They are simply unaware (or refuse to see) that she has given the whole shop away....to us. There is always the concern, though we admit rather limited, that the penny might suddenly drop as the church slowly empties and she as Presiding Bishop declare a "national state of calamity". With your help this will not happen.
It never ceases to amaze us, Wormwood. In the old days, we had to work hard for converts. Newer atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris (to name perhaps the three most famous examples) proudly proclaim from whatever atheistic minaret they can find that the idea of God is a delusion, that the God of the Bible is not great, and that "faith" should be are our best advertisers. They were difficult converts, but once seduced, they became some of our best agent provocateurs. They are, of course, the heirs of such minds as A. J. Ayer, H.G. Wells and the Bloomsbury set. Wells' book Mind at the End of its Tether almost gave the whole game away. Mercifully the book never went viral.
But Jefferts Schori is a dream come true and beyond anything we could have hoped for. Pansexual knock off sinners like Otis Charles, Mary Glasspool, Gene Robinson, Louie Crew, Susan Russell, Tracey Lind et al were easy prey and third-rate sinners at that. Just twist an already twisted culture on sex a little further and, presto, the church was sure to follow. From pop goes the weasel to pop goes the condom was a short sexual highway.
The morals of The Episcopal Church now lie somewhere between Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. Why they haven't offered the lesbian talk show host Ellen DeGeneres a deanship or something is quite beyond us. I suppose Tracey Lind will have to do. It was unfortunate Lind did not become the next bishop of New York; we could have made her an instant celebrity. We could have had her and Frank Griswold do the Circle Dance of Dispossession together on U-Tube for all the world to see.
I must tell you, Wormwood, that the Presiding Bishop's latest pronouncements have been making the rounds in Hades with considerable mirth and entertainment.
This Sarah Frances Ives woman catches the flavor of her thinking. "In Jefferts Schori's recent book, The Heartbeat of God, she cleverly weaves together her vision of the future Episcopal Church-interfaith communities partnered with a huge United States government. She writes, it is all about, 'Mission, mission, mission', (91) and describes many different projects that parishes can start in tandem with the government and other secular groups. Jefferts Schori's underlying terror in this book is clear: create more projects at the parishes or the Episcopal Church is going to disappear. Get to work, peons. Our ship is sinking.
"She tells us what to do about any problem in glib and superficial terms that include disparate advice such as to eat our protein, wash our dishes by hand, celebrate layoffs in the Episcopal Church, support the Obama health care bill, call ourselves beloved, criticize the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, make the United States government limit capitalistic profits, declare unity in the Episcopal Church, and plant gardens on the church lawns.
"Jefferts Schori bounces from one subject to another with the rapidity of a writer not disciplined by transitional ideas or even rational thought. On page 23 within four sentences, Jefferts Schori drags in, with her typical pell-mell fashion, Katrina and its aftermath, genocide in Rwanda, global AIDS, torture for terrorists, and health care reform in our country. With all her vast pronouncements, she doesn't even bother with a bibliography to support her ideas and includes only seven notes for quotes (two of which are from the Book of Common Prayer)."
This is precisely the kind of glib educated intelligentsia of the 21st Century that we seek, Wormwood, -- smart one-liners with little or no substance. The sheer hypocrisy of the TEC House of Bishops meeting recently in Quito, Ecuador, bemoaning global warning while increasing their own carbon footprints had us all in hysterical fits.
Keep the Episcopal deep thinkers and their followers focusing on this world with all its joys and pain, but never, I repeat never, must they be allowed to think of the life to come with its unspeakable joy for those who follow Him and the torment that awaits those who reject their vile faith here.
Allow them to luxuriate in blasting ordinary Christians as uneducated "fundamentalists", unscientific fools unable to tell the difference between a limpet and a limpet mine, but never must the enormity of their lost salvation be on their mental radar screen. John Shelby Spong is a genius working for us at this level.
Make them feel secure in their lostness. Make them believe that there is nothing out there; that it all ends in death and nothingness. Any notions of eternal life and light or eternal death and darkness must be expunged from their minds. Let them believe that this world IS all there is, that they must live it to its fullest while grabbing the gold ring. Make sure that Ayn Rand's books do the rounds. Her gospel of greed has made the US a selfish, greedy nation. It MUST be everybody's gospel, not just Wall Street brokers and Federal Reserve chairmen. Love of self without love of neighbor must be paramount. American minds are dull with endless hours of television, porno and the good life. Make sure that the part about the "pursuit of happiness" is never far from their minds. To parody, "For me to live is gain and to die is no loss at all."
That Jefferts Schori has actually twisted their gospel into this worldly salvation is but the end game of 50 years of Protestant liberalism and their "social gospel", just as AIDS is the climax, if you'll pardon the pun, of the 60's sexual revolution. Sigmund Freud has served our Father well as the high priest of sexual liberation. Intellectual Jewish elites who have abandoned the Torah are our best allies and twisters of truth.
As we are in the season of HIS incarnation make sure people can be heard to say Happy Holidays and not Merry Christmas, make sure the ACLU sues anyone who tries to fill the public square with Christian symbols like crèches...anything to remind them of what the birth of HIM really means. If the masses ever catch on, it would be over for us. You must never let that happen Wormwood.
We relish the growing secularization of America. It is sweet music to our ears when, day by day, people are caught up in the Culture of Celebrity sacrificing their souls for momentary pleasures and passing toys, substituting the real thing for fantasy.
The pressure you must exert in 2012 is increasing secularization, the dumbing down of Christian absolutes, more talk of interfaith alliances, the neutering of doctrine, the increasing legitimization of gay marriage, gay rites and all manner of things pansexual. Any opposition must be met with cries of homophobia and lawsuits designed to put the fear of Hades into them. Make the Bible look stupid or like just one more holy book among many. Keep all talk of exclusive claims of HIM at bay. Dumb HIM down as a mere prophet, one among many, a good man, one to follow in doing good things, a super Mother Teresa, but never as Lord and Savior or true Master of the Universe. THAT must be repelled at all costs.
The Council of Hades met recently and much admired your work in 2011. Our Father drank a pint of one resident Episcopal bishops' blood in your honor. A special medal is also being cast in your honor for the great achievements you accomplished this past year. They were astounding. Some jealous observations were expressed, which our Father reveled in. We ARE hoping for more and better results in 2012. These are dark days and the darker the better. Mind how you go with the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and the Middle East, Wormwood. These things can backfire on us, the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church and all that.
Nonetheless I remain your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
