CS Lewis said he would give everything he had if the doctrine of Hell were taken out of Christianity. But, as he admitted, the Doctrine of Hell is there. Jesus himself said, in the Parable of the Wedding Guest, that most people would go to Hell, and not for any serious sin.

Most people end up in Hell, according to that Parable, because they were invited to Heaven, in the Parable a wedding, and they have worn the wrong clothes, which could only mean the wrong doctrine.

Lewis HATED that.

But the very term “Salvation” means Hell. You seek salvation FROM, not TO.

So why love God?

St. Augustine and Calvinists who believe in Predestination are wildly thankful to God for choosing THEM for Salvation from the Eternal Fire. Their point is that while God is viciously unforgiving to most, he chooses not to damn EVERYBODY.

This makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

In fact, when a terrorist who holds people captive shows the tiniest bit of mercy, the captive tends to fall in love with him. Like God, he has no reason whatsoever not to torture you anymore, so your gratitude is for his showing any mercy at all when his whole reason for being there is to do all the harm he can.

This reaction to terrorists and torturers was discovered a generation ago.

CS Lewis recognized it and HATED it.

It is called The Stockholm Syndrome.

Outside of theology, that is.

I say that because that greeting is sort of semi-politically incorrect.

Happy Holiday is inclusive, Merry Christmas is exclusive. So those who use the latter are excluded.

It is generally known that the Emperor Constantine who legalized Christianity and called the Council of Nicaea was a Mithraian. It is assumed he was baptized on his death bed.

It is generally known that Saturday was well known to be the Sabbath. But under Constantine Christians adopted Sunday as the Sabbath.

Sunday was the Holy Day of Mithras.

Christmas was the birthday of Mithras!

These two facts have always been mentioned and instantly avoided.

If Constantine had originally been a Moslem, and made the Sabbath a Friday you would instantly have some questions about that. But I have never heard anybody discuss WHY the Church adopted Mithras’ holy day and Mithras’ birthday.

Mithraism came from Zoroastrianism. In the Gospel, the Magi, then well known as the priests of the largest religion known by Romans, accept Christ as the Savior at his birth, whereas the Jews certainly did not.

I am fascinated by this precisely because my specialty is not theology, but politics.

There were a huge number of Mithraians at the time of the Council of Nice. They were concentrated in the military forces.

No one goes to pieces when one mentions that Christianity replaced each god with a saint to pray to. A god for each purpose was smoothly replaced by a saint for each purpose. It was simply a matter of what Paul said, “All things to all men.”

But Pauline politics in spreading Christianity did not start or end with saints replacing gods.

I cannot understand why other people who are fascinated by history and politics do not have the same itch to know the process in detail by which these compromises were made. Given the loud and sometimes bloody fights over the Divinity of Jesus was God and other doctrines, I kind of doubt somebody just walked in and said, “Hey, gang, I have an idea!”

“Let’s change all the Holy Days and invite the Mithraians to join us!”

It is hard to believe that people who claim to be historians or political scientists just leave such questions unasked.

Christmas is a Public Secret.

I  have repeatedly made the point that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are looking  for a picture  of a  starving child or a violation of Political Correctness with all the desperation Americans used to reserve for finding gold  ore.   This  is of enormous, immediate,and practical importance.

In the 1950s when my brother was an intern it was well known that clinics for the poor got better drugs than the rich people did.   The reason  for this was well-known, one of  those  Public Secrets I talk about.   Poor  clinics could use new drugs, whereas drugs used in regular hospitals had to go through the whole many-years-long end of clearance process with the FDA.

Please note that what was universally known was that poor patients were getting BETTER drugs.   If you needed a drug that was still going through the  final stages of FDA approval, you got them if you were poor, you couldn’t get them for love nor money in a regular clinic or hospital.

Needless to say, even back then,  organizations saw  a gold mine.  A major campaign exposed the outrageous fact that drugs that were not ready for prime time were OK  to be used on poor people.    Lots of people made lots of money pushing this cause.

So  by the 1960s the poor people were only getting  drugs which had gone through the WHOLE clearance process.   So they got the same outdated stuff the rich did.

Even today it is well known that “all new drugs are nonaddictive.”   Valium was approved by the FDA as nonaddictive.  So was just about every other addictive drug now on Schedule 2 (Schedule 1 drugs are illegal, like heroine.  There is Schedules 3 and 4, going down the count to over the counter).

My point is that even the endless regulatory process used  by the FDA does not really make drugs safer.   In fact, until equality raised  its ugly head, it was well known that, on average, early   approval for the poor made their drugs famously more modern and  better.

The regulation is not to  make things safer.  Regulation depends on how much money  can be raised on an issue.

If you had looked at the facts, this was a clear conclusion sixty years ago with the Public Secret that poor folks got better drugs than the rich did.

But no one  looks at the basics.

There’s gold in them thar hills!   There is MONEY in a Conspiracy Theory where the Rich and Powerful (says the left) or the Establishment (says the right},  secretly plot Evil.

There is not a dime to be made by explaining reality as I just have.

“Denial” has become part of the common jargon.

Like most common jargon, it is bullshit.

Now that alcohol and drug recovery has become a industry, any person who gets drunk or high has to admit he has a disease called addiction or alcoholism is “in denial.”

To repeat, now that drug and alcohol recovery has become an industry, everybody, at least everybody who has medical insurance, needs “treatment.”

The Big Book, which is as close to an official statement as AA or NA has, states a heresy to the recovery industry:

“Most people who have a drinking problem are not alcoholics.”

But, as the saying goes, “If you want to hide something in AA, put it in the Big Book.”

In most magazines there’s always a place

For people with talent for filling up space.

That’s why they pay me a nickle a syllable

For filling up spaces that still remain fillable.

Some folk complain that I earn my pence

By writing some drivel that doesn’t make sense.

But that is quite absurd.

What I need is not logic, but words and words and words and words and words and words and words.