“My Dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.
At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that.
Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, outworn, or contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.
Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about. The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on the to the Enemy’s own ground.”Screw tape letters, C.S. Lewis.
Have you ever wondered why debate is not tolerated by those who wish to cancel out their opposition? It is simple. For centuries the ‘enemy’ has known that the very act of argument awakens ‘reason’, and ‘reason’ is feared.
Once ‘reason’ is awake, who can foresee the result? There are two kinds of predictability that reason creates, one the ‘enemy’ loves, the other is feared. The enemy of reason wants to ‘know the outcome’ and will go to any length to achieve it.
What they fear is the ‘reasonable’ man, who does not fear the unknown...who adapts instantly with the confidence of his own mind and experience to create a ‘future’ without having been told what that future will be. Reason, makes life predictable and when combined with freedom, creates Liberty...the most hated condition of the enemy. This is why the ‘enemy’ has created voting machines. They are tools to create a ‘predictable outcome'...the ‘machines’, ‘destroy’ Liberty and the conditions for 'reason' in society.
James M. Miller