Tag: That Hideous Strength

Five Favorite Novels

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THE CHESSMEN OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Mars Book #5)

Bob Abbett’s cover art is only one of many delights!

We’re living in an age of rampant cultural decay; and there are times when we need to NOT have it on our minds. We need escape! It’s as simple as that.

Here are five novels that I can always count on to provide escape.

The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not only does ERB provide you with the rules of Martian chess; he also brings on Ghek the Kaldane, one of the most intriguing non-human characters ever created. Any description I might briefly offer would fall short by a long shot.

Freddy and the Ignormus by Walter R. Brooks. The Freddy the Pig books are marketed as children’s books, but they’re full of fun for adult readers, too–maybe even more so. In this outing, the legendary pig and his barnyard friends take on a haunted house. But is it really haunted, or just set up to look that way?

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. What can I say? I consider this the greatest fantasy novel of all time. Tolkien’s artistry with words will put you there. And although this tale is full of monsters, good is stronger than evil. Can’t hear a more welcome message than that, can you?

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea  by Jules Verne. A lot of modern readers don’t like this book, but I do–and always have, since I was a boy. It was written well before the invention of SCUBA gear and deep-sea vehicles… but it’s so easy to forget this, once the story sucks you in.

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. This is the climax of Lewis’ “space trilogy,” but it works just fine as a stand-alone story. Can the world be saved from a cannibalistic alliance of Science and Government? Better hope so! Lewis wrote it some 70 years ago, and it seems prophetic now.

So there’s five books to get you started on a summer of fabulous escape fiction. The idea is to step aside for a moment and take a breather, hose down your brain, and get ready for the next round. In that sense, these books are part of God’s divine, all-foreseeing providence. Be thankful for them.

How Wrong Have I Been?

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Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy by Christiana Hale

Someone (I suspect my Chalcedon mentor, Martin Selbrede) has sent me a book by Christiana Hale (Hail, Christ?)–Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to C.S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy. I’ve already begun to read it. There is profound wisdom here–one might almost say “intimidating” wisdom.

I want to be a servant of the Lord; but my sins, my worries, my fears, and my inborn limitations hold me back. Lewis based his Ransom Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) on the medieval model of the universe, which our modern Science says is simply not true. I mean, how could anyone believe in that? But Truth goes way beyond just “facts.” So does C.S. Lewis.

The Truth is that God Himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Second Person of the Holy Trinity, came to be born–incarnated–here, on Earth; and died, and was resurrected, here. He did it to save us, to pay the ransom for our sins. And it’s simply not possible that He did this in vain.

I stand in awe of this. The material that I ignored as twaddle is really of critical importance. It’ll take me some time to understand this. I have to read more, pray more, study the Bible more, before I can write any more about it.

But we do have this: God’s Word never returns to Him unfulfilled. Never.

Lee’s Homeschool Reading List (6)

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That Hideous Strength (Literature) - TV Tropes

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (12 and Up–all the way up!)

This book blows my mind. Written in 1943, it only grows more applicable–and more alarming!–with each passing year.

Some of it will slide past you if you’re only 12 years old; but you won’t be 12 forever. There’s always more to this book, every time you read it. I’m 73 now and still learning from it–currently re-reading it, and still picking up tidbits I didn’t get the last time.

This is a story of Scientific Progress as performed by the Devil, featuring a sophisticated young married couple who have a lot of growing up to do but are very, very far from knowing it. Their desire to conform, to be with it, to hang out with the really cool people, almost kills them.

Science, higher education, government, bureaucracy, the whole academic world–Lewis just plain fricassees them all. He takes no prisoners.

His vision scares the daylights out of me. How did he see so clearly, so far into the future? There’s much in here to remind one of George Orwell’s 1984; only of course That Hideous Strength is a fantasy featuring a resurrected Merlin.

There is a bit of twaddle at the end; but maybe after another ten years I’ll find some merit in it. But 99% of the book is pure rocket fuel.

What’s Wrong with Britain?

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Fahrenheit 451 (1966) | Alex on Film

She forgot to clap

The following is just about the creepiest news story that I ever heard. It’s hard to believe, but true.

Someone–we are not told whom–started this custom in Britain: at 8:00 every Tuesday night, everybody–and they do mean everybody–is supposed to come outside and “clap for the carers.” National Health Service workers fighting off the epidemic, and all that.

Recently a woman, tending her sick child, was unable to get out the door to join the neighborhood clap. (Yes, I know it sounds icky.) Her neighbors promptly “named and shamed” her on Facebook (https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/tired-mum-named-shamed-facebook-18143150), going so far as to say that since she didn’t come out and join the–ritual? can we call it a ritual?–she and her family “don’t deserve” health care if any of them catch the Chinese Wuhan Communist Death Virus From China. That’ll learn her, they said on Facebook, “for showing the street up.”

Hello! Hello? Did we just blunder into The Hunger Games? Or into one of Ray Bradbury’s cautionary tales? I mean, whoa! This is conformity with a vengeance! You’d almost think you were in North Korea.

Maybe the woman was lucky they didn’t bash her door in and drag her outside.

Magna Carta. A country that cherishes eccentrics. P.G. Wodehouse. Rumpole of the Bailey. Alice in Wonderland. None of that great stuff seems to fit in Britain anymore. Suddenly That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, doesn’t seem far out at all.

We have noticed in recent years that even the most tepid criticism of the National Health ignites a wildfire of near-hysterical wrath. It’s not really that great, you know. Just socialized medicine. There’s a reason why they sell do-it-yourself tooth-pulling kits over there (https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/399032/Now-we-pull-out-our-own-teeth-Boom-in-DIY-dental-kits-as-patients-cannot-afford-NHS-fees).

But fail to turn out for the weekly cheering fest, and see what happens to you. Go ahead, I dare you: say “The National Health could use some improvement.” Walk into any British pub and say that.

This, by the way, is one of the chief reasons why our country’s founders were so against trying to create a democracy. In a democracy, the majority devours the minority. That’s why they created a republic instead.

Some of you reading this must be in Britain. Please tell us–what’s up with Britain? Is your country going full-throttle Fahrenheit 451? Are they going to start eating people who won’t clap for the National Health? Has Political Correctness gobbled up all your liberties? I only ask that because I’m an American and we might be next.

God help us.

‘Happy Earth Day…Not!’ (2012)

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Lest we forget…

In 2009, the prime minister’s top”science” advisers advised him that Britain would have to get rid of more than half its population so as to build a “sustainable” society. They didn’t tell him how he was to dump 32 million people off the island.

Happy Earth Day… Not!

C.S. Lewis got it right, after all: the ultimate goal of the satanic enterprise we know as leftism is to exterminate the human race. If they can knock off the animals and plants, too, they’ll do it. Because their master’s objective is to un-create Creation.

That’s what lies behind all the “science” and the virtue signalling. Read Lewis’ That Hideous Strength for a crisp, clear picture of it.

My Newswithviews Column, July 4 (‘C.S. Lewis Nailed It’)

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Holy moly, it’s not Saturday–it’s Thursday! What with all those doctor visits, and then me crashing and burning yesterday with allergies, I went to bed last night feeling like it had already been Friday. Anyway, it’s time for Newswithviews.

C.S. Lewis Nailed It

If you haven’t yet read That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, you ought to go ahead and read it now. You’ll be amazed by how clearly he was able to see our own problems of 2019 when he wrote the book in 1943. It’s the third book of a trilogy, but I’ve never had a problem with reading it on its own.

For liberalism, leftism, call it what you will, is a satanic project aimed at un-creating God’s creation.

That’s why they have to be defeated.

Their Own Reality

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Reader “Re-Farmer” hit the nail right on the head yesterday, when she commented on the “cultural psychopathy” of liberals. See her full comment under the post, “Yet Another Censorship Tactic.”

“Their alternate reality is whatever they believe it is,” she said. Bull’s eye. And that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. They have their own reality, and anyone who doesn’t embrace it as reality must be an enemy, and worthy of destruction.

A lot of people now consider leftism to be a mental illness. Like, if you have your own reality that’s different from the real reality, that does mean you’re crazy–right? When a man says, “I am a woman”; when a Democrat says “Donald Trump is trying to install a white supremacist government”; when Elizabeth Warren says, “I am a Native American”; when a liberal insists that any disagreement with his point of view constitutes violence, or criminal assault–well, those are all loopy things to say, and leftids say them all the time.

Try an experiment. Sign up one or two libs as Facebook friends and watch what they do to your page. Go ahead, try it.

But it’s more than just plain mental illness. Much more. I have come to believe that leftism is a truly satanic enterprise. What, after all, did the serpent say to tempt Eve in the garden? “Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5) And down the hatch went the forbidden fruit, and into the world came sin and death.

Well, you can hardly be more like a god than by defining reality, can you? If you say someone is a racist, poof–! He’s a racist. If you say Trump is operating a network of concentration camps and carrying out ethnic cleansing–presto! It is so. And anyone who won’t go along, word for word and letter for letter, with every single thing you say–well, he must be a biggit!

As C.S. Lewis warned us in That Hideous Strength, the ultimate goal of the satanic enterprise is the total erasure of life on earth–of God’s creation. That is the natural end of leftism.

And just because they’re too full of themselves to know or understand what they’re working for, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.

Climbit Change Mob Takes Aim at… Babies

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Image result for images of crazy professor

You selfish and immoral people! Given the grim seriousness of Climbit Change, how dare you have a baby? You carbon footprint, you! Gyaaaaah….! [Collapses with pink foam oozing from ears. Funny: we thought that space in there was vacant.]

Yes, now the Climbit Change wackos have got a Big Professor of Bioethics to do their shouting for them, and he’s got his knickers in a twist over “the moral aspect”–like any of these guys would recognize morality if it bit ’em in the ass–of having babies in this age of we’re-all-gonna-die Global Warming blah-blah (https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2017/11/17/bioethicist-opinion-science-proves-kids-are-bad-for-earth-morality-suggests-we-stop-having-them/). ‘Cause, ya see, children contribute to Climbit Change.

He doesn’t quite come out and say, like, immediately completely stop having babies waddayou, crazy–! He just wants us to have a lot fewer offspring. Does that mean he wants us to go extinct slowly, instead of in just another generation? He actually likens having a child to releasing a murderer from prison, “knowing he will kill again.” Liberals do that all the time, of course, and it doesn’t bother them a bit. They like murderers. Murder reduces that ol’ carbon footprint. Anyway, says the Big Professor, stop having those confounded  babies!

Where was this great advice when his mother needed it?

In his novel, That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis described an all-powerful scientific consortium whose ultimate goal is to scour the planet clean of life, so it will be “pure.” Their scheme is inspired by Satan. C.S. Lewis never heard of George Soros.

Anyway, did he hit the nail right on the head, or what?

(Thanks to Linda for the news tip. Thanks to WordPress, the above news line doesn’t work. Not my fault.)

The Humanist Messiah

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Image result for images of c s lewis

When you take over God’s job, you have no end of problems.

Take that business about being the Creator. It’s maddening. All you’ve got to work with is stuff God already created. Even the minds of secular humanists were created by God. We do not know why He didn’t make them better at using them.

God created man, so humanists want to create something better. Their creation, their Homo sapiens 2.0, will be new, improved, far superior to the current version. It will be able to solve all the world’s problems that have licked us so far–war, poverty, hate, and getting blackberry seeds stuck between your teeth.

This is the humanist messiah. Artificial Intelligence. Flawed, sinful, mortal man will, with his own intelligence that has given us movies like Gigli and foreign policies that look like they were dreamed up by Punch and Judy, create intelligent beings that’ll be much smarter and much better behaved than their creators.

Yes, there are a few scientists who’ve been trying to warn us that the A.I. enterprise is bound to turn out like Windows 8–not quite as nice as you expected. But because there is no one as anti-human as a humanist, the God wannabes seem eager to scrap H. sapiens 1.0 altogether, just plain get rid of us, with all our stupid problems, and replace us with their own creation. “It’ll be sooo much better! You’ll see!” Although how we’ll actually be able to see it from the boneyard, they don’t say.

C.S. Lewis already told us all about this, way back in 1945, in That Hideous Strength.

We already have a God, a Creator and a Savior, and He has equipped us with enough common sense to see that something perfect cannot and will not be created by imperfect beings. But it was Satan who told us that it can–way back in the beginning (see Genesis 3).

And it is Satan who’s the god of humanism.