Hello and welcome back to this special episode of the Ben Shapiro Show.

Today's show features a portion of my last book club where I went through the screw tape letters by C.S. Lewis.

It's a fantastic investigation of the nature of evil and good, human frailty and the power of God.

Listen now as we chronicle the handful of different ways that C.S. Lewis predicted the vices and predations of our modern culture.

There are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in screw-tape letters. The first one is that Satan's best weapon is the quote-unquote real world. And this is right. I mean, if you talk to people who are secular, they'll always say that the spiritual world, the spiritual world, God, is unreal. The real world is the material world. And then when you ask them about

what's important to them, they'll talk about their feelings, which of course are inherently

unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal. And this is a point that Lewis makes, is that

the definition of real is capacious and changing on a regular basis from secularists. So Lewis

believes that man's draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent. That's an idea that I obviously agree with. I believe that the notion of free will, free choice in the universe, guides you toward the idea of there must be something beyond us, that if there's a logic to the universe, that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician, who made the rules, for example. Lewis makes the same point. And then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing. It's to get you to focus on the thing in itself. That's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell, famous atheist. And so Lewis says this, even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, this is as screw tape, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don't let him ask what he means by real. So just keep him focused on the immediate. I'm focused on the now. There's nothing that's done this more than the internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas. If you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society. So what exactly does reality mean?

Well, according to Screw Tape, people ought to be taught that in all experiences, which

can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual

elements are subjective.

And in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main

reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist.

So the idea is that when you're thinking about death, that the only thing that is real is the death.

You're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death.

Or if you look at something that makes you very happy, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy.

Just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world. This is something

that Catholic theologians talk about a lot, the idea that the spiritual world, if you can

enmesh it in reality too much, then you can bring people away from the reality of something

higher. This means, for example, that you have to get people to stop thinking about death. It says, Scrut tape says, how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death, which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime, not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. The material world then is the chief ally of screw tape,

because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction, God has obligations, God has duties.

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