Even if they [Christians] stop hating each other, even if their hearts reunite, their heads can't. Their divisions are eternal. In fact, they are doomed to divide forever, until eventually there are as many Christian churches as there are Christians. And that's the religion where the more sincere you are, the fewer converts you make: the worship of yourself.. . .But it gets even better. The division between churches is only one of three great divisions we've fomented. A second is the division within each church between the faithful and the "dissenters." (Back when they still believed in truth, they called them "heretics." People who call moral laws "values" call heretics "dissenters.") . . .And there's a third division. We have set their two absolutes against each other: truth and love, justice and compassion. . . . And we have done that by politicizing their religion into Left versus Right, or liberal versus conservative. . . .In the past, we religionized their politics, and that got us some nice mileage, like persecutions and religious wars. But our current policy of politicizing their religion is proving even more successful. We've gotten most of them to classify themselves as liberal or conservative and then use these political categories to classify their faith, instead of vice versa. They now use the world's categories to judge the Church instead of using the Church's categories to judge the world.. . .You've got to get them educated before they'll fall for the Big Lie[, . . .] the very essence of hell's philosophy: absolute relativism.This was the philosophy behind my original glorious rebellion against the Enemy, when I refused to let him define reality or truth or goodness for me. I am who I am; I am the measure of all things -- of what is real, of what is true and of what is good; of the origin, of the meaning and of the end; of the creation of being, of the design of being, and of the appreciation of being; of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.. . .. . . Indeed, the Enemy's Son spoke the truth when he said, "Search, and you will find." So our essential task is not just to block the finding but to block the seeking; not just to get them off the right roads and onto the wrong roads for a while, but to get them to throw away all their road maps, their principles, their belief in objective truth, especially about good and evil.Now their masses have not yet been massively suckered. You still can't fool a farmer half as easily as you can fool a scholar. But at the beginning of the century there were ten farmers for every scholar; now there are ten scholars for every farmer. The teachers buy our lies much more tamely than the students -- and soon they'll all be teachers!. . .The three main sets of teachers in their society today, the three main mind-molding establishments, are formal education, informal education (that is, entertainment), and journalism. (They call these last two the "media.") All three are eating out of our claws. See why it's working? Once you get the teachers, you soon get the students. . . .. . .. . . If your philosophy tells you that there are no real absolutes, then there can be no real war. If you reject the idea that there is any real evil worth fighting, and any real good worth fighting for, you reject the idea of fighting, the idea of spiritual warfare itself. What a terrific advantage this gives us on the battlefield: most of our Enemy's troops don't even know it is a battlefield.In the past, our strategy was to get them to vastly overestimate our power, fostering fear and terror. That was great fun. But our current strategy is working much better: they so vastly underestimate us that they don't even think we exist! We are as invisible to their minds as we are to their eyes.A wise old military adage said, "Forewarned is forearmed." That is the policy of the hawk. The corollary of this adage is "Unwarned is unarmed." That is the policy of the dove. Result: just put a hawk and a dove together and you see the result.
[To be continued. Meanwhile, buy the book! It's as essential a manual for the culture wars in the Church as Little Stone Bridges.]
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