Aiya Iluvatar

Screwtape on the Anglican Communion

Tobias Haller has written an "addition" to CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters relating to the self-inflicted so-called "crisis" in the Anglican Communion. It's very clever...

"Along the line of credit where due, I must say you appear to have taken a leaf out of the Enemy’s book, and are becoming positively creative. You have got your patients to the point where they are simultaneously claiming and rejecting authority (of any and all sorts, no less!) without seeing the contradiction. You’ve got them taking each other’s arguments at the very worst, and picking nits like there’s no tomorrow — true enough for some of them, as they will soon discover when they arrive in the Infernal Kitchen."

and

"Which brings me to my central concern: this unfortunate attention on the part of some of your patients to these so-called Millennium Development Goals. It would really be most unhelpful to our cause to have them actually do the things the Enemy wants them to do, to set aside self-obsession and do something about disease, poverty, ignorance, and so on. Anything you can do to persuade them that these MDGs are just “secular” will be to your advantage. I had a lovely curried Goat last night — one of the Old Souls that I’d kept in reserve; and you know, he still didn’t get it! As I savored him bite by bite, he kept whimpering, “But when did we see you hungry or thirsty or in prison...” Delicious. "

He's right on - you can read the entire post here.

David+

Technorati Tags: anglican, christianity, episcopal, C.S. Lewis

Republican Recovery - Finally?

It's very seldom you get to celebrate Christmas in early November, but it feels like that today. I know for some people, this day is sweet because the Republicans are out of power. That's not my case - I'm still a registered Republican. It is sweet for me because it might mean the end of my self-imposed exile from the party.

The sweeping Democratic victory is a refutation of the Neo-Con elements of the Republican party, which have held sway since before Bush came into power. In my estimation, the Neo-Con ideology was closer to fascism than conservatism, as is basically meant, "Whatever viewpoint Carl Rove (And by extension George W) currently agrees with." It has been a long nightmare for the party which finally seems to be waking up from it. Their fall from grace hopefully indicates a move back to the center for the party - I might be able to vote Republican again if that happened.

Even more sweet is the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, whom I have always considered an inept Secretary of Defense. It is apparent from the books about Iraq from both sides of the aisle that Rumsfeld operated on his own erroneous military assumptions and brow-beaten any general that tried to oppose him with reasonable arguments. He is the one that resisted calls for more troops to secure Iraq and has repeatedly said that he thought high technology could replace boots on the ground. Military nonsense.

Combine his inept military policy with an (how should I put it?) "Incurious" president and you had a recipe for disaster. I don't know that the Dems will do any better than the Republicans, but it will mean that the Iraq conflict will be subjected to a higher level of public scrutiny. My hope is that the new SecDef will actually listen to the professional military. We have hard decisions to make in the coming months about Iraq, but hopefully they will be decisions made with a larger amount of consultation and transparency instead of "Staying the course" and making undercover deals with Haliburton.

If anyone really won, it is the moderates from both sides of the aisle. The current state of the congress and the opposition with the executive will demand a large amount of compromise, which is the foundation of American democracy, but has been absent since the Republicans took the House and imposed the no-compromise "Contract On America."

Is that the actual party of Lincoln I see on the horizon?

David+

Technorati Tags: anglican, episcopal, military, politics