Sunday, June 9, 2013

Screwtape would be proud.

At BCC, Screwtape must be handling their cases personally. You can read that book and see just how it works.

Case in point:  Compare this post to Screwtape Letter 10.

A few points of comparison:

Screwtape: "your patient has made some very desirable new acquaintances and that you seem to have used this event in a really promising manner. I gather that the middle-aged married couple who called at his office are just the sort of people we want him to know - rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world."

BCC: "I found myself being drawn away from art and into classes on religion, sexuality, and philosophy. I found that academia both gave me tools with which to think about religion with nuance but also allowed me to have a safe space for my questions and critiques to be engaged."

Screwtape: "Sooner or later, however, the real nature of his new friends must become clear to him, and then your tactics must depend on the patient's intelligence. If he is a big enough fool you can get him to realise the character of the friends only while they are absent; their presence can be made to sweep away all criticism. If this succeeds, he can be induced to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents. Failing this, there is a subtler and more entertaining method. He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper", "spiritual" world within him which they cannot understand."

BCC: "During this year, I put a strict divide between my religious and academic worlds. Eventually as I progressed in my degree, I relaxed my boundaries between my religious and academic worlds, cautiously allowing them to ever so slightly bleed into one another. Negotiating between those worlds is still a delicate balance that I will probably continue to work on throughout my entire life. Yet I can’t help notice that the way that my unique position of both academically digesting religion and being an active participant affected the way is embodied in which I framed both of these images."

No comments: