Josh Saunders > Recent Status Updates

Pride, the utmost evil

Lewis labels “raw material” as what we’d now call “deterministic variables” and separates out “the real central man, the thing that chose.” This model attempts a determined/predestined world where some magical element still provides for an idea of free will which Lewis ‘answers for’ in Screwtape with love & discusses in more detail in The Problem of Pain

Poor random guy on the road rest in piece

Job 31:33-34 ~ Job admits to ‘others’ prompting concealment of a sinful heart

Jab 12:4 - how has God answered Job?
Job 12:14 vs Galatians 2:18
Job 14:4 - coming of Christ

Job 1:21 We can’t be upset for what we’ve lost as we’ve never owned as we never got it on our own account

You [Lord] are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away

I saw why the gods do not speak to us openly, not let us answer. Till that wires can be dug out of us, why would they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

The complaint was the the answer

I locked Orual up or laid her asleep as best I could deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive

I understood why men become drunkards. Got the way it worked in me was - not at all that it blotted out these sorrows - but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them. I was a great, sad queen in song. I did not check the big tears that rose in my eyes. I enjoyed them. To say all, I was drunk; I played the fool.

Hitherto, like all my countrywomen, I had gone bareface; on those two journeys up the Mountain I had word a veil because I wished to be secret. I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness. There had been a time in childhood when I didn’t yet know I was ugly.

A Greek verse says that even the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessing, debating, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my eyes by myself.

Everyone loved me once I was dead. But I am ashamed to write all these follies.

Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?

P ch 11 - if the test isn’t tempting, what is the point of testing at all? Brings to question why earth’s humans failed when Venus’s humans may not fail because of the way God set up the scenario.

P ch 10 - Akin to last chapter’s comment that older doesn’t mean wiser, stories are weaponized in the opening of The Bent One’s argumentation to create a certain image against the king. We ought to be careful why we fill our heads with

P. Ch 9- “To be older is not always to be wiser” questions the value of learning new ideas for the sake of learning them

Ch 9: dead frog “it would have been better for the whole universe to have never existed than for this to have happened” - sounds like Ivan’s argument from brothers K

Ch 5: paradisal man
Ch 6: ban on solid land related to ownership?

Perelandra - ch4 - The root of all evil is wanting to relive to good parts over and over. Like how the Hrossa are contented where humans aren’t

Perelandra - 20 top - Eldila influencing our minds. Akin to an argument Lewis makes in The Problem with Pain, where an individual cannot distinguish ones will from another unless we see differences. We cannot differentiate our will from the devil/God influencing our will in the same way we can differentiate from other humans

74 - “What will it be when I remember it (the pleasure of our meeting) as I lie down to die, what makes it in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting”

404 - mid, Accountability-esque relationships are not easy
406 - top, Modernity casts out spirituality triumphantly
406 - mid, Distort our nature by swiftly satisfying our needs
407 - top, We are trapped fulfilling needs we invented
413 - top, To love all, start by loving the small
413 - mid, Elder’s answer to Ivan’s Q of kids suffering?
413 - bot, Anyone can love casually, even the doer of evil

375 - mid, Elder’s mother see’s the brothers change as madness rather than miracle. Another way man might avoid seeing God
376 - bot, It’s not guaranteed that a soul can remember things fondly
382 - mid, Witlessly, nature accomplishes the goal of a sinless life
383 - mid, People have ‘good hearts’ despite wicked behaviors
393 - mid, Solitariness of wealth is suicide
403 - mid, Ljke Silence (2016)

345 - top, Ivan is actually upset that Alyosha didn’t dissuade him
346 - mid, Ivan scapegoats Smerdyakov for his negative emotions
358 - bot, Ivan can’t pin down his anger or what motivates his need to spy. He isn’t in touch with his emotions and can’t “rationalize them” the same way as everything else. He’s not aware he’s missing something

332 - mid, Free will is a seductress and a torturess
333 - top, Ctrl w/ miracles, mystery, or authority
333 - bot, Man seeks miracles, not God
334 - top, Christ selfishly thirsts for love freely given
334 - bot, We were created with sin as some kind of joke
338 - mid, Ivan tries to fix by flipping the utilitarian calculation
343 - bot, Can one love while in despair?

308 - love man v mankind (pg79)
308- love is blind. We loathe when we understand others
311 - beasts aren’t cruel like people
318 - Ivan still wants justice in the world
319 - famous Ivan excerpt
321 - salvation is a ticket paid for by the suffering of the innocent
328 - people believe themselves free
328 - man is a mutineer

302 - love life more than its meaning
307 - did man create God or did God create man?
308 - wit is a scoundrel
309 - not hurt you but be healed by you