Screwtape Letters 29-31

• Letter 29: How to kick a man while he is down
• What do you do advice for one surrounded by stress filled (dangerous, even) situations?
• Cowardice - it works, but it's a bit of a dead end, doesn't lead to other vices. It does leave the patient with shame, which is a nice touch.
• Courage leading to Pride - this is a nice idea, but is dangerous. Love the pride, but you have to flirt with [the virtuous] courage in order to produce it. 
• Cynical Hatred - use the violent emotions inherit in the times to develop hatred for his enemies. To reinforce, let the patient excuse his hatred as 'acceptable, because it is on others' behalf'. Keep the patient blind to the forgiveness, lest he be tempted to forgive his enemies as he is distinctly taught to do.
• "In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them."
• The bad can lead us towards the good.
• COURAGE is the testing point of every virtue. Do I have the courage to do what I ought? A coward may be sweet, nice, gentle, friendly... but he will not be good.
• DESPAIR is the loss of hope, the absence of faith. It is a sin less visible but more deadly than others.
• Letter 30: Do or feel?
• The 'act' is of the highest importance. You may feel weak and full of fear, but doing your duty (whatever that may entail) is the high calling, regardless of how you feel.
• Emotions are valuable, and have their place in God's creation. In the personal interaction between God and man (generally in the form of prayer), emotions play a very real part. However, life is lived through our actions, and the Kingdom of God is effected by those actions.
• How to damage the tired soul?
• S/T distinguishes 'moderate fatigue' verses 'absolute exhaustion', preferring the former. 
• Continual, moderate fatigue doesn't overwhelm us. We continue on, establishing a time frame (I can handle this situation for this period of time), relying upon deliverance rather than endurance, establishing a sense of rights (and how ours are being trampled). 
• Develop Expectations
• Be Disappointed
• Feel Injured
• "Up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less. Much secret resentment can be raised from this."
• There is confusion in the various realities of the 'real', be that physical, emotional, or spiritual. We struggle to know what is real and what is opinion, perception, physically apparent, etc. 
• Letter 31: The Cleansing
• Regardless of the lingering on this end of life, the delay we seek in the face of death, at the moment of death is instantaneous liberation. 
• This exchange (from this world to the next) is natural and intended. 
• "The gods are strange before mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange," as we were created to behold them.
• The delights, temptations, virtues and vices of this world go strangely dim, in the light of Jesus' glory and grace.

Screwtape Letters 25-28

• Letter 25: Rhythm vs Novelty

• the horror for us of enduring the same old thing
• We love change; we love permanence. These things are contrary, and are balanced through rhythm.
• Novelty, on the other hand, is the continued desire for the 'new', without the balance for the old. The continual desire for the new puts us at odds with the familiar, and distances us from the reality of our lives.
• The demand for novelty "diminishes pleasure while increasing desire", passing from innocent sources of pleasure to those forbidden
• Be careful of what we are chasing (the 'new' for the sake of the 'new'), as well as what we are cautioning ourselves against (the old, familiar, permanent, because it is old, familiar, permanent)
• When trying to determine whether or not to do something, keep it simple: is it kind? is it pure? is it loving? Steer clear from is it couth? is it relevant? is it fashionable?
• "We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favoured heros attain - not as something everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is"

• Letter 26: The selfishness of being unselfish
• Opening paragraph: a bit confused. Maybe Lewis is saying that by ignoring today's issues under the codeword of charity, you are just delaying the inevitable (that said issue must be addressed), and that you are giving opportunity across time for unhealthy seeds to grow between you and the other. Or maybe he isn't???
• Unselfishness -vs- Charity, which look similar. The latter is actually for another person's benefit; the former may be solely for your own. 
• The battle of who can be more unselfish, beyond reason... leading to frustrated discourtesy, as each party refused to be out-unselfished, an "elaborate and self-conscious unselfishness"
• From AeB: I'm inclined to think that this issue is much more 'British' in cultural context than 'American', although I may just be fooling myself.
• Letter 27: The Forbidden Question: Is it True?
• When we acknowledge (to God) our distraction away from God, we are in a good position to return before Him. Our movements towards and away from God are of ultimate importance to Him. If a sin in us awakens us to our state, and motivates us to repentance unto life, then in its own way, said sin has been turned on its head for the purpose of good.
• In the battle of daily prayer, keep it simple. Do not over-spiritualize.
• The challenge of the value of praying to an all-knowing God... why bother?
• God "does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously, to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it."
• In reading from those who have come before us, we ought to focus on the eternal question "Is it true?", rather than the intellectually stimulating questions "Is it contextually appropriate, culturally sensitive, applicable to our frame of reference...."
• Screwtape's advice: Cut generations off from each other. Prevent the passing of wisdom, and the learning from mistakes.
• Letter 28: Ultimate Importance
• Our misperception: death is the ultimate evil; survival the greatest good.
• If Wormwood cannot overcome the active faith and reliance upon the Enemy of his patient in his youth, then be patient, and allow "the long dull monotonous years of middle-age prosperity or middle-aged adversity [to be] excellent campaigning weather", to dreary the patient's soul away from the Enemy.
• "Prosperity knits a man to the world". Are you finding your place in this world, or is this world finding its place in you?
• Youth has the godly advantage of a lust for life and a acknowledgement that nothing is permanent in this life. Age can forgo both of those opportunities, trading living for security, and clinging to each day, masked as 'maturity'.

Screwtape Letters 22-24

• Letter 22:

• The Patient's current girl: "one who looks as if she'd faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile.... who would find ME funny"
• Q: is there some level of maturity involved with being able to grin and smirk at the wiles of Screwtape and his kind?
• The Enemy has a bourgeois mind, filling the world with pleasures, which must be twisted before S/T can use them
• In the godly household, the mysterious odor of the Enemy permeates residents and guests. What secret lies behind the pretense the disinterested love.
• Noise ("the audible expression of all that is exultant") -verses- Music & Silence (a place of joy and contemplation)
• NOTE how exciting and passionate things change us (in this case, into a caterpillar).

• Letter 23:

• First Strategy: separate the patient from spirituality. Keep the cultural and social identity of the Christian intact, while ensuring that the internalized/personal dealings with a spiritual God always secondary.
• If the Patient insists on interacting with God...
• Second Strategy: corrupt his faith and spiritual walk...
• Theology
• Politics
• The interaction of community, social issues, and government
• (re-) define  Jesus based upon one's contemporary concerns
• Make Christianity a means to some perceived-value end
• "Believe this [faith] not because it is true, but for some other [perceived-value] reason"
• Definition: Characterizations are the product of suppression and exaggeration, with a touch of guessing (I mean, deduction) and wishful thinking.
• "All great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our [Screwtape's] continually concealment of them."

• Letter 24:

• Screwtape encourages Wormwood to take advantage of people "who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief... that the outsiders who do not share this[their] belief are really too stupid and ridiculous [to understand]".... a combination of ignorance (reasonably forgiven) and pride (what you really want to capitalize upon).
• Spiritual Pride: the most beautiful of all vices, whereby
• we have "no notion of how much in him [any of us] is forgiven" as a basis of our daily relationships, and
• are confident in our own value within a relationship, 
• not cognizant of the necessary importance of forgiveness of our own indiscretions within a successful relationship, 
• rather than our intrinsic merit.
• Recommended method 1:
• Raise up your Christian circles and denigrate your non-Christian ones.
• Then separate the circles.
• Then separate from the non-Christian circles until you cease to have any spiritual effect outside the Church.
• Recommended method 2:
• I rightly belong within these Christian circles, rather than
• These folks have accepted me, warts and all
• Recommended method 3:
• Realize that you have been initiated into a select group,
• A group who has figured things out,
• Engaged by God to have a greater understanding of Him and this world
• Theocrats

Electoral College, part 2

I haven’t written part 1, which would include an explanation of

1. why there is an Electoral College,
2. why it is of value,
3. why it is particularly American in its essence, and
4. why you should get used to it (because it is not going anywhere).

Not sure if I’ll get around to that column, as there’s a lot to it. However, I was playing around with Excel (an Engineer’s good buddy), and curious of the effect of changing all 51 states (including D.C.) to mimic Maine’s Electoral College voting law.
There are 538 electoral votes, matching the 538 congressmen we all love to hate in D.C. The 50 states have 2 votes representing their Senators, with the remaining 438 apportioned out based upon census population, in the same manner as the 438 House of Representatives.

The typical voting method for the Electoral College is for each state to vote all of their votes to the one candidate who won the popular vote in that particular state, winner-take-all style (i.e. Bush won Florida by ~537 votes, and received all 25 of Florida’s electoral votes).

Maine and Nebraska employ a  proportional method of casting their electoral votes: whoever wins the state popular vote gets the 2 electoral votes, while the rest of the state's electoral votes are cast based upon whoever wins each congressional district.
In essence, our nationwide election is currently resolved at the state level. Under a proportional system, the election would be held at the congressional district level, with the candidate who wins the state getting a 2 ‘bonus’ votes. 

In today’s system, we hold 51 state elections simultaneously and combine them to get the result. A Congressional District apportionment of electoral votes would entail 489 separate elections (438 congressional districts + 51 states), combined for a single result. Simple enough;)

The following are the of the last 3 elections, data from here and here, using the Congressional District system:

Notice that the Net Change doesn’t work perfectly. This is the best I can do with the data I have. No politics here, just looking at the results, and how they would have changed the national ‘spin’ on the election. I’ve no dog in this fight (and didn’t vote for any of the candidates above), but you could see from these results how the feel of the results would have clearly changed.

1. No results would change. This is likely true for almost all of our nation’s election history, with rare exception.
2. 2000 – Bush would have won with a more clear mandate. Florida’s permanent place in election history would not have had the extreme histrionics, and would not have mattered near as much.
3. 2004 – A win turns into a route.
4. 2008 – A route turns into a win.

A ‘follow’ in the hand is worth two ‘learns’ in the bush

It is a great challenge: to teach people to follow God rather than merely teaching them about God.
Typically, we acquire God-knowledge and habit ourselves with God-actions (act nice, talk nice, be nice), content with the transformation from a child of Adam to a child of God.
But God intends more than rebirth and adoption. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God on earth, dwells in His children as a guide, a leader for our lives in the big and the little, that we should follow Him.
As a teacher, this is very difficult to convey with words. It is more aptly conveyed through deeds.

"But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children. Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you had become very dear to us." II Thessalonians 2:7-8