CS Lewis’ example of the fine wine described at the end of Screwtape Proposes a Toast has a special logic to it. It is a mixture of the souls of those who were fanatical Calvinists with those who think only in terms of pilgrimages, sterility and hunger as real religion. That raw hatred was delicious to the palate of Hell.

And it is unending. Each group will be suffering eternally, but each group will also be blaming the other for their torment forever. Any lost soul who tried to be logical — they’re BOTH THERE — would be subject to the same solution used in both Hell and Canada. They would be punished.

I have noted people leaving BUGS because they found a Word. Our original editor went back to Iraq and became an Intelligence bureaucrat and his views changed right into Good Soldier views. At the end he nearly went ballistic at my objection to his Beloved Comrade Sergeant marrying a white woman.

I note we have not heard from Pain since he went off to theology school and told me that only “amateurs” think that Zoroastrianism had any effect on Christianity. That’s the last communication I remember from him.

CS Lewis said in his forward to the Screwtape Letters that the existence or nonexistence of actual demons has nothing to do with his faith. He was exposing the Mind of Hell.

What influence Zoroaster had or his very existence is not essential to my beliefs. And that is not what drove Pain off. Hell, I don’t even know for sure if he has been driven off. I’ve often been wrong and I expect to be wrong a lot more. But that is my point here.

I have been deserted or stabbed in the back many, many, many times by people who believed they had become Enlightened. These are exactly the people one recognized as being neither back-stabbers nor cynics. They are as honest as Torquemada or Cotton Mather ever were.

They simply have no room in their world for simple honesty or simple mercy or simple truth.

Everything warped about this kind of people is a warping of their natural feelings they were born with. They ban sex because it is abused. Jesus himself condemned prostitution and adultery. If he had been a later Christian, he would not have seen that much a distinction between prostitution and adultery and sex itself.

But Jesus was not a Zoroastrian. I think that, in a world where the two great monotheistic faiths were Zoroastrianism and Judaism, you could not see yourself as a scholar if you did not include Z in your discussions. That is a lot like people who claim to be Intellectuals today. They have to have a lot of Marxism in their discussions.

If you feel strongly about things, the temptation to become a Wordist eventually is almost irresistible. It is not natural for a human being to resist suggestion, as commenters have pointed out here and the Great Kresky said.

It is hard to be dedicated to the idea of human freedom without eventually becoming some kind of absurd Libertarian. We Are talking about something people die for, so it very quickly becomes capitalized. A person can believe in freedom, but can he go out and die for anything less than Freedom?

Can Salvation be “free and without price?” Not if Wordist Theologians have anything to do with it.

In order to save our race it is almost irresistible not to take on the trappings of swastikas and heel-clicking. Soon the swastikas and the heel-clicking and calling Hitler Adolf instead of Adolph become the focus of one’s attention.

It is very, VERY hard to explain to people that, though I have dedicated my life to a cause, that cause does not lead into a dead end of implications. To me, the moment a person begins to capitalize he ceases to be human.

My idea of freedom is the right to do as you wish. My idea of truth is whatever turns out to be fact. My idea of mercy is making people feel better than worse. Only in the white man’s world can these “simplistic” ideas make any sense at all.

In the Orient it all ends up in the dead end of Deep Philosophy. In Africa it ends up as spooks. In the white world, we are always turning into an alleyway of Wordism and slamming up against a brick wall.

But science has made it in the white man’s world because, despite all these dead ends, we still eventually end up heading generally in the way of truth, of reality, of what works. The only white societies that have gone down for good are the ones which were once white and are now brown.

That is the fact. That is the truth.