Posted on 06/01/2024 4:40:17 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Here is the formatted transcript with proper capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphs added (formatting by Claude.ai):
Yeah, even the phrase for Chapter 5, the title of Chapter 5 is called "The Rise of the Materialist Magician." And that phrase "materialist magician," I took from C.S. Lewis's book "The Screwtape Letters." For those that don't know, "The Screwtape Letters" is an epistolary novel that takes the form of a series of letters that this demon Screwtape writes to his nephew demon Wormwood. Wormwood is assigned a person to try to damn to hell, to tempt and to enslave.
Wormwood asks Screwtape a question about whether or not it is our, the Demons', policy to remain hidden or to reveal ourselves. Screwtape responds that for now, our policy is to remain hidden because if we reveal ourselves, then we cannot make materialist skeptics out of mankind. In other words, if we reveal ourselves, we kind of reveal the existence of the supernatural world, and we want to keep people in a state of materialist skepticism so that their mind will remain closed to belief in God, which Screwtape calls "the Enemy." God is the enemy to demons.
He says, "So for now, our policy is to remain hidden," but he looks forward to a time in the future when we can create a new kind of man, a materialist magician. Several developments on this front may be promising in that regard. The idea is to maintain in mankind a fundamentally materialist worldview, a skeptical worldview, but introduce elements of psychoanalysis, sexual obsession, astrology, and tarot card reading that invite man to engage with what he calls spiritual forces while refusing to acknowledge the spiritual beings behind the forces.
If we can achieve this amalgamation of the materialist on the one hand and the magician on the other, a secular rationalist who rejects God but accepts the existence of spirits or spiritual forces while not worshiping them, then we will have created the materialist magician. And if we can do that, then the end of the war will be in sight, the enslavement of humanity.
So, they're able to have both sides. You would manage to hoodwink people into rejecting God but accepting essentially worship of devils. And so, I call the chapter "The Rise of the Materialist Magician" because I open it by talking about the growing popularity on social media, particularly TikTok, of witchcraft, especially among young women right now. There's this burgeoning interest in witchcraft, but it's not like traditional witchcraft. It's sort of like witchcraft for the TikTok set. I call it "moral therapeutic paganism," following Rod Dreher's "moral therapeutic deism," and it's very much tied up with identity and feminism and living your own best life and sort of this empowerment witchcraft.
It takes on the trappings of identity politics, identity affirmation, feminism, and female empowerment. But at the same time, they're opening themselves up to real spiritual forces, and they believe, and they're not wrong to believe, that there's real power behind it that can affect things in their life, their circumstances, and their world. So, they see themselves as tapping into a source of power. Obviously, in their mind, it's for good.
They even name certain familiars and invoke pagan gods of the past. So, like this one teenage girl in Texas that the Washington Post profiled a year and a half ago, she's a TikTok influencer, a witchcraft influencer. She cites as her familiar Hecate, an ancient Greek goddess. She's using that name as she does these things; that's part of her. And she's identifying Hecate as her Patronus or whatever.
And her boyfriend is into this stuff too, and his familiar is Odin, the Norse god. So, they are explicit about the fact that they are reaching out to these beings for guidance, and they disclaim any notion that they're worshiping them. They're like, "It's not like worship; it's more like a partnership."
In the piece, they kind of even mock Christianity and organized religion. They'll say, "Well, you know, they've got that blind faith, and they worship God and whatnot. So, we're very rational; we don't buy any of that." But at the same point, they're still engaging in these spiritual things with gods. They don't call it worship because they want to still be in charge, but the point is that them being in charge is actually a facade because they want to, just like Screwtape says, their mind is closed to belief in God.
So, they don't say what they're doing is praying to these creatures. It's more that they're journeying with them or whatever, using kind of therapeutic, narcissistic language that they employ there. But as I say in the book, whatever it is that they say they're doing, they are calling on a demon. As Christians, we believe that stuff is real.
And by the way, Hecate and Odin are not nice figures. If you look them up, these aren't harmless beings. So, these young people are getting caught, are falling into the trap that Lewis describes in "The Screwtape Letters." It's part of a larger process of kind of what we talked about in the last episode, the disfigurement of reason, because these same teenagers will say, "Oh, I'm not superstitious. I believe in science and stuff like that, you know, but at the same time, I'm also going to burn sage and come up with this potion," and do all this stuff that's totally foreign to the Western scientific mind.
They are creating an unstable admixture of spiritualism and sort of Western materialism. These are the materialist magicians that Lewis describes.
Pretty sure Lewis would take issue with being called a prophet. But the guy was very insightful.
I’d like to encourage Freepers to check out C.S. Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, and his essay, Democratic Education. He recognized early on the dangers to society of allowing leftwing ideology and moral relativism to infiltrate the school system.
I'm pretty sure the speaker in this case was using the latter.
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