Ben Shapiro (0:00)

Hey, hey, and welcome. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So, folks, here at Daily Wire, we have something called Ben Shapiro's Book Club. It's exactly what it sounds like. I read books with you. Well, one of the books that I read with you over the course of the last year and a half or so was the screwtape letters by C.S. lewis. Here's a bit of our discussion. C.S. lewis. The screwtape Letters is all at once a deep rumination on religion. A high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity's flaws and Satan's foibles. A tragedy about the nature of death and a tale of redemption and everlasting life. There's so much to unpack here. We're gonna do all of that in just one second. First, let's turn to some thoughts from the community. Edward says, Ben, how in your life do you find that balance in loving others and yourself so you can objectively give yourself credit for accomplishments without being selfish or arrogant? This is an important lesson people can use in not just everyday life, but also the workplace. Well, you know, I think that people tend to mislabel humility or misdefine humility as telling lies about yourself, and that's not true. When the Bible suggests that Moses was the most humble person who ever lived, that didn't mean that Moses didn't know what he had or who he was, what it is that he attributed his qualities to God because it was God who was the source of those abilities. So when you do what you're supposed to do in life, that's not really you at all. You're just doing what you're supposed to do. You don't get extra credit for doing the things that you're supposed to do. You do blame yourself for failing where you're supposed to succeed. Also, you have to surround yourself in life with a group of people who are willing to tell you when you're wrong. And you have to be willing to hear that group of people. So don't surround yourself with an echo chamber. You have to allow enough criticism in to actually allow you to better yourself while preventing people who wish to tear you down from doing so. And there are a lot of people out there who are like that. Ramona says, has this book been insightful for you at all? I miss your Jewish teachings and wish that would be a new show of yours. I appreciate all that you do. God bless. Well, maybe we'll be doing some more of that sort of stuff next year. The book is fantastic. I mean, I love C.S. lewis. I love pretty much everything C.S. lewis writes. Most of what he writes is applicable across religions. Obviously his specific defenses of Christian theology, his apologetics for Christianity, I disagree with a lot of that stuff. But when it comes to his overall take on the Bible and religion, I very much agree with an enormous amount of that. Charles says it's scary how each book you pick relates to the current state of our country. Do you believe we can survive as a country? We are founded on religious principles which have been removed by our current government. I don't see a way forward without returning to God. We as conservatives must lead a revival in religion. I totally agree with this. Obviously, religion, it doesn't just provide the communal gathering place for people of like mind. It also provides an aim to shoot for. You have to be shooting for that highest goal as a community or you're not gonna have anything in common. Religion is one of the biggest intermediary institutions in life. And there are many sets of institutions in life ranging from the very lowest level of the family all the way up to the national government or even to sort of humanity writ large. But maybe the chief intermediary institution outside of the family is in fact your religious community. Without engagement with religious values, it's gonna be very difficult for to regain her footing. Which is why I think that there will be in fact a revivification of religious values. I think the spiritual emptiness that has been provided by modern secular theology is really garbage and people are paying the price. I think it's one of the reasons why you're seeing a mental health crisis in this country, why you're seeing high levels of suicidal ideation, chaos among the young. You refuse to allow people a system of rules when you immediately dismiss time tested wisdom. What you end up with is not freedom. What you end up with is libertinism, which eventually devolves into nihilism. Alrighty, so let's talk about the Screwtape Letter. It is a spectacularly good book. One of the beautiful things about Screwtape Letters is it is a fictional encapsulation of much of C.S. lewis's other work. If you've ever read Mere Christianity or Men Without Chess or any of his other essays, a lot of that ends up in the Screwtape Letters. And that's sort of how C.S. lewis writes. I mean, C.S. lewis famously writes the Narnia series. The Narnia series encapsulates a lot of his values in sort of a fantasy context. He does the same thing with regard to. He wrote a sci fi trilogy that starts with out of the Silent Planet Perelandre, he does a lot of that sort of stuff. He takes his values and he sort of telescopes it into a fictional story for ease of use. Screwtape Letters a little bit different because it's so obviously theology and obviously philosophy, where it's a little bit more guarded in Narnia or out of this island planet here. He basically just says it straight up, and it's very funny. One area where Lewis is often criticized is in not being funny enough that when you read Narnia, there's no humor in the Narnia books. But when you read C.S. lewis's screwtape letters, there's a lot of humor and very, very funny humor, actually. So Lewis himself described writing Screwtape Letters. He actually said it was tough. He said, though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. Though it was easy to twist one's mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. But it is wildly entertaining because he is, you know, obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan's minions. Now, I will say there's a bit of difference between sort of the Christian theology of Satan and the Jewish theology of Satan. So the Christian theology of Satan, which is that Satan is the opponent to God, almost a dualistic structure where Satan is responsible for evil in the world and is a rebel against God. Fallen angel and all of this Jewish theology is a bit different. In Jewish theology, all of the angels, including Satan, are emissaries. The word in Hebrew for for messenger is the same as the word for angel. The word is malach. And so whenever you see that in the Bible, a messenger that also is an angel. So when it talks about angels visiting Abraham, it uses the word malach, which is also messenger. The idea being that angels are essentially, in Jewish theology, sort of single forces in the world without will. Whereas in the Christian theology, obviously, Satan has a will of his own and he's rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character. Lewis opens the book with a couple of epitaphs. One by Martin Luther. The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to text of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. And one by Sir Thomas More. The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. Most focus on the both of them are focusing On a simple fact of the matter, something that we seem to have lost in modern society, which is laughing at evil. And we've decided that it's very important to earnestly engage with bad ideas. That it's very. You're not allowed to laugh at bad and damaging things anymore. If, for example, somebody says a man is a woman, inherently hilarious idea because it's definitionally idiotic. If somebody says that and you laugh, you are now considered intolerant. Whereas before you would have been able to just laugh at that and everybody would have moved on with their lives. Now, because we have decided that nothing is worth laughing at save religion. The only people who are not allowed to laugh are the religious, because you're not gonna laugh at your own religion, typically speaking, or if you do, it's gonna be kind of with a warm eye, because you like your own religion, presumably, but you're not allowed to laugh at anything else. The only people who are allowed to be mocked in modern society are essentially religious people. Those are open for mockery. But as you know, C.S. lewis points out, mocking evil is a great way of dismissing evil, because that's what mockery essentially is. Gertrude Himmelfar points out that religious Americans now find it difficult to transmit their own principles and practices to their children. Instead they rely on non judgmentalism. But laughter is inherently judgmental. And so religion ought to be filled with laughter. Laughter at evil. Screwtape letters. If you haven't read it, or even if you had, it's written from the perspective of Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on the ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity. And Screwtape is sort of middle management in hell. And it's his job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man's soul. And this gives Lewis extraordinary leeway to sort of stick and move with Satan, to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature. So there are a bunch of large scale arguments that Lewis makes in Screwtape letters. The first one is that Satan's best weapon is the quote unquote, real world. And this is right. I mean, if you talk to people who are secular, they'll always say that the spiritual world, the spiritual world, God is unreal. The real world is the material world. And then when you ask them about what's important to them, they'll talk about their feelings, which of course are inherently unreal. In the same way, the spiritual world is unreal. And this is a point that Lewis makes, is that the definition of real is capacious and changing on a regular basis from secularists. So Lewis believes that man's draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you towards something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent. That's an idea that I obviously agree with. I believe that the notion of free will, free choice in the universe, guides you toward the idea of there must be something beyond us. That if there's a logic to the universe, that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician who made the rules, for example, Lewis makes the same point, and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing. It's to get you to focus on the thing in itself. That's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell, famous atheist. And so Lewis says this. Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, this is as Screwtape. 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. Don't let him ask what he means by real. So just keep him focused on the immediate. Have him focused on the now. There's nothing that's done that's more than the Internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas. If you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society. So what exactly does reality mean? Well, according to Screwtape, people ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective. And in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality. And to ignore them is to be an escapist, right? So the idea is that when you're thinking about death, that the only thing that is real is the death, right? You're not supposed to look to the. You're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death. Or if you look at something that makes you very happy, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world. And this is something that Catholic theologians talk About a lot. The idea that the spiritual world, if you can enmesh it in reality too much, then you can bring people away from the reality of something higher. This means, for example, that you have to get people to stop thinking about death. Screwtape says, how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness is rendered useless in wartime. Not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations, God has duties. Screwtape says human beings hate every idea that suggests him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook. Passbook meaning like a checkbook. So the idea is that if you're not thinking about duty, and then you're forced to think about duty, you don't like it very much. The other thing that Screwtape tries to get you to focus in on is the future at all times. If you can focus in on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the president. So, says Screwtape, it's far better to make them live in the future. The future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time. For the past is frozen, it no longer flows. The present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought, like creative evolution, scientific humanism, or communism, which fix men's affections on the future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future. The idea is, if you're thinking about the future, then you're not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You're thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now. And that allows you to do bad things in the name of a quote unquote, better future. Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God. On the other hand, Screwtape advises wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly. Like, if you can be narcissistically checking yourself all the time, you're going to end up without God. So if you feel wildly enthusiastic about becoming religious, then wormwood ought to encourage people to wait for the Anti climax, right, because you get enthusiastic about a thing, then you become less enthusiastic about the thing and then you pounce. Work hard then on the disappointment or anti climax which is certainly coming to the patient. During his first few weeks as a churchman, in every department of life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The enemy takes this risk because he has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what he calls his free lovers and servants. Sons is the word he uses. So in other words, very often in life we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks. And once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the, in the spiritual aspect of what they're doing and instead focus in on the fact that it's just sheer drudgery. So for example, when it comes to prayer, human beings should be encouraged to seek a feeling of inspiration specifically because it's very hard to find. I mean, I pray three times a day, I've talked about this before. Finding a feeling of inspiration while you're praying can be really, really difficult. And so if you're constantly searching your feelings all I'm not inspired enough, I'm not inspired enough. Eventually like I'm never getting inspired and you stop doing it. And that's the goal. Whereas the reality is that when you're praying you should stop searching inside your own feelings all the time. You should focus on the doing of the prayer. And then when eventually you stumble onto the feeling, it's an incredible thing. But at least you won't stop doing the thing when you lose the feeling. So if you focus in on the feeling, when the feeling goes short, you stop doing the duty. If you focus in on the duty, then eventually you come to feeling. Is the case that Lewis is actually making. Screwtape says that the rule of thumb for seducing mankind away from God is to encourage people to be unselfconscious when considering sin. To be unabashed, unashamed, you should be very just out there and blase about your sin. But to be self conscious and awkward when you consider acts of faith, and this is modern society in a nutshell, the more you sin, the more proud you should be. You should engage in full on festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy. I don't want to be judgmental I don't make you feel ashamed. I don't want to make you feel bad about the fact that I go to synagogue on a routine basis. I don't want my. I know my yarmulke makes you feel uncomfortable as a Jew because it might make you think that you're not being religious enough. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable, we can be the boys when we're talking about our sins. Other roads to hell include depression and anxiety. Screwtape says when people are depressed, they are more likely to despair that their actions and thoughts even matter. And so they sort of sink into a malaise. This leads you to what C.S. lewis calls grayness, Right? If you're passionate about things, then very often you can find spirituality. But if you're gray about things, it's very hard to find spirituality. He says the Christians describe the enemy as one without whom nothing is strong. And nothing is very strong. Strong enough to steal away a man's best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that man is only half aware of them. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing. I mean, is this a great description of the Internet age or is this a great description of the Internet age? You spend all day on social media consuming your time with absolute stupidities. You don't feel anything good about it. It just feels like bleh. And then when you go outside in the sun, you still feel unenthusiastic. The goal of modern society is almost solely, apparently to do the work of wormwood. Here the point that Lewis makes is that you're able to get at people through art, through popular culture. He says, we've engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude in art and its exhibition on the stage of the bathing beach. It's all a fake, of course. The figures in the popular art are falsely drawn. The real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being frank and healthy and getting back to nature. As a result, we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist, making the role of the I in sexuality more and more important and at the same time, making its demands more and more impossible. What follows, you can easily forecast. That is the greatest description of Internet porn that has ever been written. And C.S. lewis is writing this in 1942, that you are setting up increasing expectations for what women are supposed to look like, what sex is supposed to be, what it's supposed to look like, and then people are engaging in it less and less. You're making the demands nearly impossible, and yet you are satisfying those demands with the virtual. Again, CS Lewis is a man ahead of his time. Because here's the thing. Sin is always the same. This is the thing that people always say about the Bible, and it's so stupid. They'll say, oh, the Bible, it's archaic. The Bible's talking about things, that things have changed. You know what has never changed? Human nature. C.S. lewis could have written this 4,000 years ago. It would not have mattered. Human nature does not change. Human nature is the same as it was thousands of years ago. The only thing that has changed is that we believe that we have been able to overcome human nature, which, of course is extraordinary arrogance and silliness. It turns out that all of the systems that we built to hem in human nature, all the systems that we built in order to channel human nature to its best available pursuits, we've exploded all of those in the belief that we have created a new human already. And there are a lot of ideologies that say that you can create a new human. Marxism says you can create a new human. Change the economic conditions, change the man. Secular humanism says the same thing, that if you just get rid of God, then magically a new human being will flourish. Religion says no. Human beings are exactly the same as they were when Adam ate the apple with Eve in the garden. We're exactly the same, and nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that we've built institutions and systems in order to channel us toward our better selves. And when you blow up all those institutions, what you end up with is something very, very bad, which is precisely what has happened. Screwtape also talks about how human relationships can undermine faith as well, because human beings have a really tough time living with each other. And so most sin is not between man and God. Most sin is between man and man. When he talks about the relations in marriage, for example, Lewis is right on the money. He says, in civilized life, domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper. The words are not offensive. But in such a voice, or at such a moment that they're not far short of a blow in the face, your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. This is true in virtually all human relationships, right? You say something and you say it in kind of a nasty way. And then when somebody gets offended, you're like, hey, what did I say? What did I do? Did I say no? Just look and I'll read back the words that I said. It's like, well, no, the tone mattered an awful lot right there. By the way, this is one of the reasons why. Just a piece of Shapiro advice here. Try to have as many conversations via voice as you can and not via text. Text is open to misinterpretation. Voice really, really is not. But we do have a double standard. We insist that everybody interpret us in the best light, and then we interpret everybody else in the worst possible light. And then his descriptions of men and women are also extraordinarily accurate. This is one of my favorite sections of the book. He says, a woman means by unselfishness, chiefly taking trouble for others. A man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the enemy's service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom our father has dominated completely. And conversely, a man will live long in the enemy's camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. In other words, women tend to be very helpful, and if Satan can get a hold of them, then intrusive and invasive. And men tend to be very blase, which means that they allow people their space. But also if Satan can get ahold of them, then they are completely disconnected from other human beings and selfish. A sensible human once said, quote, if people knew how much ill feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit. And again, she's the sort of woman who lives for others. You can always tell the others by their hunted expression. Screwtape also talks to Wormwood about the misinterpretation of the word love, how love has come to mean sexual desire, and how we have moved away from marriage as a duty based relationship to the voluntarization of marriage. Screwtape says, quote, in humans, the enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it, thus producing the family, which is like the organism, only worse, for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in love. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them, which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce, and if obediently entered into, too often will produce affection in the family, humans can be made twin for the false belief that the blend of affection, fear and desire, which they call being in love, is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. So, in other words, family is a relation that is created by nature. But if we can reduce it, if the devil can reduce that down to the subjective feeling of love, then the minute that you lose the love, you lose the duty. So obviously this is what's happened with regard to marriage. With regard to this is how the slogan love is love has ended up being a definition of marriage. And yet it has no boundaries, right? Love is love could include bigamy. Love is love could include polygamy. Love is love can include two brothers getting married. Love is love has no definition because obviously love is not in fact love. Love in the traditional sense meant duty. Love in the traditional sense meant familial relations between man, woman and children. If you redefine love as that subjective feeling within you, then love is love, I suppose, is true. The problem is that is a complete redefinition. It is a robbing marriage of its identity and then wearing it around as a skin suit. Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of mankind writ large. This obviously is the project of the left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a better world for everybody else. Screwtape says the great thing is to direct the malice of his immediate neighbors, whom he meets every day, and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he doesn't know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. Is something I say about people, you Know, I always say that I'm sort of a not people person, but that's actually not particularly true. My thoughts about mankind at large are not particularly generous. I don't think that human beings are saints. I don't think that human beings are devils. I think that we are somewhere in between when it comes to interpersonal, like day on day relations. I get along with. I love individual human beings. Individual human beings are great. It's the species that's a problem. And when you start to think that the human species is filled with joy and wonder, but the individuals who live next door to you are the worst people in the entire world, you can do some pretty terrible things to your neighbors. One of Screwtape's other tools, one of the tools that he likes to use as well, is the human incapacity to understand the divine. So God obviously has to limit his power in our lives in terms of being right in our face all the time in order for us to have free will. This means a sort of unbridgeable gap between human beings and the divine. And so we have a picture in our head of what God is and that picture is not real. And then when God doesn't manifest in the way that we think the picture ought to manifest, we get angry at God, or we say that he doesn't exist. We think he's an old man in the sky who's a gumball machine. And you pray to him and he gives you what you want. That's not how God works. So one of the big questions that you are supposed to not ask is really the nature of God, because you're not really able to comprehend God. There are certain things you can comprehend about God. The idea that God is generous in creating humanity. The idea that God has bound himself to a particular logic of the world. These are things that Aquinas talks about or Maimonides. But the idea that you can know God at the most intimate level, obviously the Bible itself says that this is not the case. Moses in the book of Exodus specifically asks God whether he can see his glory. And God says, if you can't see my glory and live as you can see my back. The idea being you can identify what I am by sort of my actions in the world, but you can't actually see my face. You're not capable of understanding who God totally is. Attempts to delve too deeply into what God is end up in what Screwtape calls materialist magic. Quote, if we can produce our perfect work, the materialist magician, the man not using but veritably worshiping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits, then the end of the war will be in sight. So the materialist magician in this world is the person who believes in larger forces like physics or global warming or evolution or disease as controlling our fates while denying that God has any say in the matter whatsoever. Sort of the notion that the environment is taking revenge on us, the world is taking revenge on us. It's sort of an animistic philosophy that separates us off from God. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First you voted big government out and efficient government in. Well, now it's time to trim the fat on big Wireless. If you're still on Verizon, AT&T E T mobile, why I personally use PureTalk, I can tell you it gives me the exact same service on the exact same towers with better customer service because they're based right here in the United states, all for 50% of the cost. I've been using Pure Talk myself for two, three years at this point. The coverage is excellent. It's exactly the same as some of the big wireless carriers, and it cost me less money. I know what you're thinking. There's simply no need to spend 85 or 100 bucks per person on your wireless bill now. And I can tell you firsthand, you will get unlimited Talk, text and 15 gigs of data with mobile hotspot for just 35 bucks a month. I've seen it myself. The average family of four saves about $1,000 a year with Pure Talk while enjoying America's most dependable 5G network. So cut the fat out of your wireless bill. Switch on over to PureTalk. Head on over to PureTalk.com Shapiro again, that's PureTalk.com Shapiro. You'll save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage with PureTalk, America's wireless company. Go check them out right now. PureTalk.com Shapiro to save an additional 50% off your Very first month of coverage, Screwtape also says that the notion of complete human autonomy apart from God is ridiculous. Screwtape laughs. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they own their bodies, those vast and perilous estates pulsating with the energy that made the world in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of another. Again, this is a pretty good point. We tend to think of our bodies as our own. Did you ask to be born? Were you asked about when you wish to Die. Do you have permission? Does your body take your permission every time you get sick or when you get cancer? The notion of complete bodily autonomy, that may be true from other human beings, it is not true in terms of godly duty. Screwtape also makes clear what Satan wants out of all of this. We want cattle who can finally become food. He wants servants who can finally become sons. Our cause, says Screwtape, is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do the enemy's will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys. That's what God wants. God wants our devotion. God wants us to understand that we can't understand the logic of the world. God wants what he wanted from Job, which is an understanding that we don't understand. That's what God actually wants from us. And so the chief curative for devotion, for a devotion to a God that you can't fully understand for Screwtape, is moderation. And you see this a lot in the religious world. Well, I don't want to be too religious. I don't want to be too spiritual. I don't want to do. I don't want to do too much. That's immoderate. Quote. If you can once get him to the point of thinking that religion is all very well, up to a point, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all, and more amusing. This is sort of the idea that you see on the secular left these days, that religion should be relegated to your house at best, should be relegated to your church. You should never act out your religion in your everyday life. A truly religious person infuses their life with their religious ideal all the way through their life, from when they wake up in the morning to when they go to bed at night. The more they do that, the more religious they are, the better they've done. But if you can limit religious life to certain aspects of your life, then religion loses its sway. So what exactly does it mean to reach sort of the ultimate goal? So Screwtape says the idea of acting in accordance with a higher will is the goal. He says this indeed is probably one of the enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world, a world in which moral issues really come to a point he sees as well as you do. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the highest point of highest reality. So if Screwtape can make you listen to your animal instincts, if Screwtape can enmesh you in the material, if Screwtape can make you feel gray, if Screwtape can make you focus too much on your subjective emotions, then he wins. And the best way to fight all of that is active repetition of good habits. This is true going all the way back to Aristotle. It is obviously true in Judaism. It's true in Christianity as well, that acting dutifully in the world is the best way to overcome all of these flaws in yourself. Now, the end of Screwtape Letters is tragic. Obviously, you're talking about a man who has found a woman. He's going to get married to her. You think they're going to have a happy life, and instead his life is cut short in a bombing raid in World War II. And so that's supposed to be the tragic ending. But the whole point of Screwtape Letters is that if you believe in a spiritual world, there is no sad ending. There is only a happy ending from the perspective of the divine. The young man has now gained access to something higher. Quote, you die and die, and then you are beyond death. How could I have ever doubted it? It's a beautifully written book. It's got wonderful pieces of advice, even for people, by the way, who are not totally religious, and how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, how to have better relations with your spouse. But when it comes to the spiritual world, there's so much good advice in here. So much good advice. Okay, let's take a look at some of your questions. Pam says, is our culture experiencing a strong demonic influence? I mean, you'd be hard pressed to say no. So I am, as I say, a believer in the Jewish tradition. And so the idea of demons is pretty controversial in the Jewish tradition. There's. There's sort of a debate within Judaism about active demonic forces in the world. But you'd be hard pressed to say that it is not demonic in the either traditional or the colloquial sense to say that young children should be ushered into a world of gender confusion and sterilized. I mean, to say that's not demonic is beyond me by any definition of the word demonic that you choose to use. Kate asked a question. Kate, let's go.