Bruce Charlton's Notions

It is pretty well recognized that if you want to understand how demons think, the CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters - followed by Screwtape Proposes a Toast - are the best source. 

It is much less widely appreciated that the best understanding of why so many reject Heaven and prefer to choose Hell can be found in Lewis's later The Great Divorce - text version here, and downloadable ebook from here.  

The story has the protagonist (Lewis himself) visiting Heaven on a holiday from Hell with a group of other (self-) damned souls, with the chance of remaining in Heaven - if only they will repent their sins.

The meat of the book is an exploration of the foothills/ outskirts of Heaven and series of encounters between Lewis and a range of representative unrepentant sinners (insubstantial ghosts - by comparison with the hardness and density of Heavenly beings and landscapes). 

What comes across - in a way that I found revelatory and unforgettable - is why people will not give-up and be cleansed-of what seem quite 'trivial' sins, even when the reward is Heaven. 

It is shown how people come to build their life and self-image around some particular sinful activity, such that they can scarcely imagine putting it aside - even when it makes them miserable. This is a fact of everyday life, found in many people around us - and we can surely see it in our-selves. 

A few examples include a 'liberal Christian' Bishop whose self esteem is so based upon his delight in debate and skeptical analysis, that he does not want to know the real answers to his questions - but only to go on showing-off his cleverness and discussing them forever, without end. 

A particularly hard-hitting instance is when a ghost from Hell meets a man who was a murderer in earthly life but repented and chose Heaven; whereas it emerges that the ghost is kept in Hell by his own consuming resentment against the murderer, and the 'unfairness' that a murderer can be forgiven. He chooses Hell rather than forgiveness. 

A woman who spent her life micro-managing her miserable husband into someone more in-line with her own wishes, wants nothing more than to be 'given him' so she can continue the process forever. Unless she can continue to tyrannize over this husband (now one of the happy and blessed in Heaven) - she insists on remaining in Hell. 

A ghost man called Frank meets his Heavenly wife who has become a saint and is followed by a joyous 'family' of those whom she loved and sustained during mortal life. But this man will not speak to his wife directly, but only via a kind of Shakesperian ham-actor 'tragedian' puppet; who is always speechifying to make her feel sorry for him. 

Lewis here quotes some deep insights about this particular sin, through the mouth of the sainted wife (slightly edited by me):

You are using pity, other people's pity, in the wrong way. 

We have all done it a bit on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity... 

Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic... because you knew that, sooner or later, one of your sisters would say, 'I can't bear to think of him sitting up there alone, crying.' You used your pity to blackmail them, and they gave in in the end... 

"And that," said the Tragedian, "that is all you have understood of me, after all these years!..." 

"No, Frank, not here!" said the Lady. "Listen to reason. 

Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenceless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? 

For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. 

Here in Heaven, everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. 

No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?"

This is marvelous stuff, making points I've never found elsewhere, and there is a good deal more of it; making The Great Divorce one of the key books in my Christian understanding...

Because it is a very common stumbling block that people literally cannot understand why anybody would choose hell over Heaven; and therefore they jump to the conclusion that God is keeping people out of Heaven and that our task on earth is to persuade God to let us in. 

The truth is almost the opposite. God's intention is, through the experiences of our mortal lives, to persuade us to set aside sin and accept the offer of resurrection (which leaves-behind sin) and follow (as a sheep follows the Good Shepherd) Jesus Christ to Heaven. 

Yet it seem to be the hardest thing in this modern world to persuade Men that it is worth giving up their favourite sin to receive the blessings of Heaven - which can only be Heaven when inhabited by Men who have, voluntarily and by positive choice, set-aside evil.

Probably it has not always been thus - and in the ancient world Men merely needed to be told of Heaven and believe it was possible, to wish to follow Jesus. 

Indeed, those who come to know the truth about Jesus and the possibility of Heaven only after their death, and who then recognize and love him, can also make the choice.

Anyone who loves and wishes to follow Jesus, and is prepared to pay the 'price' of repentance, is welcomed by God. 

But Modern Man does not want this - he prefers to hold onto his favourite sin (often some resentment disguised as a political 'ism'; perhaps a sexual sin - a preference for lust over love; perhaps a clinging to mortal life and the refusal to regard death as a portal to everlasting life; perhaps that despair which prefers extinction to eternal participation in creation)... and to take the miserable consequences. 

And if the above does not make sense to you; then you need to read and ponder CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. 

Although it is perhaps not CS Lewis's very best book (which would probably be, according to taste, The Screwtape Letters, That Hideous Strength, Abolition of Man, or the Narnia Chronicles), his fable The Great Divorce is perhaps the one that I find comes to mind more often than any other.

You can find a copy here. 

The reason I think of it frequently, is that TGD is the wisest of books concerning the most significant, yet difficult, of Christian doctrines for modern people - the nature of, and necessity for, repentance of sins. In particular, that The Problem for salvation (the choice between Heaven and Hell) is not the size of a sin (how sinful it is), but whether a person is prepared to recognise and acknowledge a particular sin as a sin. 

Thus, a repentant murderer is in Heaven; an insincere Bishop prefers to remain in Hell.

A further value of TGD is that it shows exactly and plausibly why a 'normal', everyday person might actively-choose Hell, and for reasons that would perhaps be regarded as utterly trivial by another.

The title of 'The Great Divorce' has always been the book's biggest problem - since it is both off-putting and misleading. In fact the book is an easy and enjoyable read, full of humour and satire - as well as poetry and visionary fantasy, along similar lines to The Screwtape Letters. It is also manageably brief (about 150 pages).

If you want to know a bit more before giving the book a try, I can recommend Adam Greenwood's article; which discusses the book from a Mormon Christian perspective.

But why not just read the thing! 

Fadedpage.com is a great website run by volunteers who produce excellent free downloadable online books from authors out of copyright - your one-stop shop for Biggles or Enid Blyton, for instance. 

Well, they have just made available The Great Divorce by CS Lewis - which I regard as the best book I've ever read about sin, repentance, and what makes people choose Hell. 

If you haven't already read TGD: why not try it? 

Every faithful Methodist that has lived up to and faithfully followed the requirements of his religion,... will have as great a heaven as he ever anticipated in the flesh, and far greater. Every Presbyterian, and every Quaker, and every Baptist, and every Roman Catholic member, - ... that lives according to the best light they have,... will have and enjoy all they live for... This is the situation of Christendom after death.

You may go among the Pagans, or among all the nations there are... and if they have lived according to what they did posses, so they will receive hereafter.

And will it be glory? you may inquire. Yes. Glory, glory, glory.

Brigham Young - President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints 1847-77. Quoted in Wrestling the Angel by Terryl Givens, 2015, p253.

Givens goes on to cite Wilford Woodruff saying 'there will be few, very few, if any, who will not accept the Gospel'; meaning at some point in the endless time of post-mortal life. And Lorenzo Snow stating: 'very, very few of those who die without the Gospel will reject it on the other side of the veil' - meaning the veil of mortal death. 


I was very pleased to see these, and other, endorsements of my own inferences about salvation (several times posted in this blog ever the past years) cited by Terryl Givens as typical of the Mormon Apostles and Prophets from the years up to the early 20th century (perhaps especially related to the Presidencies of Lorenzo Snow, and that of Joseph Fielding Smith who, in 1909, published an article called Salvation Universal); after which such near-universalist ideas of salvation became less often  articulated, or contradicted.

But it is, from our perspective more than a century later, to notice that near-universalism with respect to salvation is Not universalism; not all are saved, because always there has to be the exception of the 'unpardonable sin' of the 'sons of perdition' - which recognises that human agency (or 'free will') means that a choice in favour of damnation may be made by a person; 'in perfect clarity and understanding' (p252).

As Givens says: 'It is unforgivable not because [the sin] is so grievous or offensive, but because it is the only sin a human can make with no mitigating circumstances that could be the basis of re-choosing under different conditions... Only the choice of evil made in the most absolute and perfect light of understanding admits of no imaginable basis for reconsideration or regret.'

Such a sin is comparable to that of Lucifer's, and as such there is no possibility of repentance. Hell has been chosen.  


What we need to recognise is that the average Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist or Roman Catholic of 2018 would not want the heaven that was desired by their namesakes of the middle 1800s - indeed, the modern adherents probably would not be considered Christians at all, by the men of the past.

And that brings us back to the Sons of Perdition and the strategy of the powers of evil for damning as many Men as possible...

If you accept (as I do) that Hell is ultimately only for those who want it, who actively-choose it (and all others will go to a degree of glory in accordance with their own deepest wishes - bearing in mind that apparently many or most people do not aspire to any very high degree of glory, if the promises of their religions are regarded as a guide) - then the task of the demons is a difficult one...

The demons must bring a Man to the point where he clearly understands what Heaven is, and that (thanks to the work of Jesus Christ) Heaven can be his dwelling at an astonishingly cheap price - And Yet, at this point of clarity and understanding; that Man will permanently reject this gift of Heaven and Glory; and instead choose Hell.  

Let us suppose that that is the difficult task of the demons; then, for the powers of evil to win a human soul for Hell is, in most cases, not going to be easy...

Such was one of key, repeated, messages of CS Lewis in both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. And Lewis gave many hints towards an accurate prediction of what seems to have been the demons' answer in Screwtape Proposes a Toast - which is: to work gradually towards the inversion of Good. So that a Man will (overall) regard Good as evil, and evil as Good. Such a Man will regard Heaven as Hell; and by choosing his-personal-Good, he will in fact be choosing Hell. 

This was, Lewis implies, a major strategic shift requiring great restraint on behalf of the demons; because it required them to set-aside the short-term gratifications of Men suffering and dying (as with the world wars of the early twentieth century); and instead to be contented with progress (decade by decade since the 1950s) towards a long-term goal of mass moral-, aesthetic- and truth-inversion among Western Men.

Men were to be corrupted by comfort, prosperity, materialism; by irony, hedonism and despair. By a pride so absolute and individual and cut-off; that it attained to solipsism: in doubt of its own existence, cynical of its own capacity for knowledge; and denying of external reality...

And the tremendous success of that demonic strategy explains the strange - unprecedented - nature of the modern condition, the way in which it resembles a self-chosen and cure-rejecting insanity. The average condition of modern Man is, in fact, the precise state of soul required to make someone actively choose Hell - in perfect clarity and understanding.


Note: I was not so clear or solidly confident as I am now; but I first made this kind of argument in Thought Prison (2011) and Addicted to Distraction (2014). 

*

From The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, 1946.

The scene: Heaven.

A group of ghostly souls from Hell are visiting to have another chance of salvation. A liberal Anglican Bishop is one of the visitors. He meets an old college friend, Dick, a Spirit who now inhabits Heaven.

Dick is speaking first:

*

"Is it possible you don't know where you've been?"

"Now that you mention it, I don't think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?"

"We call it Hell."

"There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently."

"Discuss Hell reverently? I meant what I said. You have been in Hell: though if you don't go back you may call it Purgatory."

"Go on, my dear boy, go on. That is so like you. No doubt you'll tell me why, on your view, I was sent there. I'm not angry."

"But don't you know? You went there because you are an apostate."

"Are you serious, Dick?"

"Perfectly."

"This is worse than I expected. Do you really think people are penalised for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken."

"Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?"

"There are indeed, Dick. There is hidebound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed-they are not sins."

"I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions."

"Mine certainly were. They were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk."

"What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came-popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?"

"Dick, this is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?"

"Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?"

"If this is meant to be a sketch of the genesis of liberal theology in general, I reply that it is a mere libel. Do you suggest that men like ..."

"I have nothing to do with any generality. Nor with any man but me and you. Oh, as you love your own soul, remember. You know that you and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn't want the other to be true. We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes."

"I'm far from denying that young men may make mistakes. They may well be influenced by current fashions of thought. But it's not a question of how the opinions are formed. The point is that they were my honest opinions, sincerely expressed."

"Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man's mind. If that's what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent."

"You'll be justifying the Inquisition in a moment!"

"Why? Because the Middle Ages erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction?"

"Well, this is extremely interesting," said the Episcopal Ghost. "It's a point of view. Certainly, it's a point of view. In the meantime . . ."

"There is no meantime," replied the other. "All that is over. We are not playing now. I have been talking of the past (your past and mine) only in order that you may turn from it forever. One wrench and the tooth will be out. You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow. It's all true, you know. He is in me, for you, with that power. And- I have come a long journey to meet you. You have seen Hell: you are in sight of Heaven. Will you, even now, repent and believe?"

"I'm not sure that I've got the exact point you are trying to make," said the Ghost.

"I am not trying to make any point," said the Spirit. "I am telling you to repent and believe."

"But my dear boy, I believe already. We may not be perfectly agreed, but you have completely misjudged me if you do not realise that my religion is a very real and a very precious thing to me." (...)  Oh, must you be going? Well, so must I. Goodbye, my dear boy. It has been a great pleasure. Most stimulating and provocative. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye."

*

The Bishop returns to Hell.

***

The Bishop's attitude is very familiar to me since I used to share it.

After all, what could be wrong with 'honest opinions, sincerely expressed'?

*

Oblique reference:

In the old days Church of Scotland ministers did not mince matters.

In the course of a sermon one said: Ah hed a dreem, an in that dreem Ah saw a vision o' better folk than you, efter they were deed, in the place where the wurm dieth not and the fire is not quenched, callin' out tae the Lord in their agony, callin' out:

'O Lord, we nivver kent it wud be as bad as this.'

And the Lord, out of His love and tender mercy looked down on their agony and He spoke and answered:

'Weel... ye ken noo.'


*

We want more than this world can provide - we want the best that we can imagine.

Of course, some people don't have much facility for imagination - yet at the very least, we want what this world cannot sustain. This would be Paradise - the best things of this world (or, the feelings induced by the best things of this world), sustained; Paradise is engineered as a place of happiness - but it would not be Heaven.

Some people most want very evil things - power, domination, destruction, to see others suffer - to themselves be the cause of suffering, to take pleasure from the suffering they have inflicted... and so on. Paradise for such people would be a place dedicated to their own satisfactions (therefore indifferent to others) - it would not be any kind of Heaven.

Heaven is for divine beings - can we imagine ourselves as divine, yet still our-selves; can we imagine life in a world of similar divine beings? in general - we need help in imagining Heaven, whereas Paradise comes naturally and spontaneously.

Indeed, Paradise does not need to be imagined - because we already know what it is like; all we have to suppose is that it is like the best things that we have felt, and sustained - this does not need imagination, it is merely an extrapolation.

Heaven does require imagination, indeed in mortal life Heaven could be said to exist only in imagination. This is not to say Heaven is 'imaginary' and false - but that imagination is the primary reality - and if Heaven cannot be imagined, then it does not exist during our mortal lives.

We need help in imagining Heaven, and if we do imagine it, we may not be able to communicate that knowledge - because the task is to induce that imagination we have experienced in the mind of another person. Speaking of our imagined Heaven, or writing it down, or painting it - does not necessarily do this - indeed it may induce some quite different and false imagination in another person.

Nonetheless, communication of imagination can happen, and imagination is the place where knowledge of Heaven exists (and no other place) - and I think perhaps more people lack this knowledge, and need this knowledge, more urgently than ever - so Heaven is something that needs experiencing and communicating, if at all possible; and this has to be by imagination - with imagination taken seriously, and imagination recognized as knowledge.

People who can imagine, and can imagine Heaven have a job to do. They can only do half the job - but that half, they should be doing.


Note: Imagined depictions of Heaven which have helped me include from Tolkien the Undying Lands, Rivendell, Lothlorien and the afterlife in Leaf by Niggle; from CS Lewis the end of The Last Battle, the end of The Screwtape Letters, and most of The Great Divorce, from Joseph Smith the King Follett Discourse, and from William Arkle his Letter from a Father.

Among Orthodox Christians of various churches and denominations, there is a tendency to conflate unorthodox Christians with Liberals - but (leaving-out the inevitable gray areas of overlap) these are in principle quite different - and the tendency to lump the two together has been a factor in driving some extremely creative, honest and vital individuals altogether out of Christianity and into an opposition which has sometimes been devastating.

The lineage of Christians who have perhaps most deeply recognized the importance of imagination as a form of knowledge are all unorthodox - William Blake, ST Coleridge, Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield, William Arkle. But they are not Liberal.

A 'liberal Christian', by contrast, is not really a Christian; but instead one who (in practice - even when this is denied in words) subordinates Christianity to the changing dominant secular ideology of the day. This is almost always achieved by dilution' - that is, by a reduction in the scope, status, power, strength, devoutness, centrality of Christianity in their own lives - and the proposal and policy that this should be the case for others.

Liberals can usually be identified at a large scale by evaluating their attitudes to the 'hot button' or 'litmus test' political issues of their day - when they always side with the secualr ideology; and at a small scale by evaluating their attitude towards those (orthodoxly defined) sins that they themselves are most inclined and prone to - do they fully acknowledge that these are sins, and the necessity for repentance?

It is interesting that almost all high level creative activity is necessarily unorthodox - even when the individual is highly orthodox in their religious observances - consider Tolkien and Lewis.

JRR Tolkien was 100% orthodox in his Roman Catholicism - but in his best creative writings on or about Christianity, he is extremely unorthodox: e.g. the theology of his Silmarillion legendarium - with its many gods, and reincarnating elves; and the allegories of Leaf by Niggle or of Smith of Wootton Major.

CS Lewis was very conventional in his Anglican worship, and advocacy for others - but his creative allegorial theologies of the Narnia Chronicles, and of his brilliant and underrated The Great Divorce - are unorthodox.

Both Tolkien and Lewis are often (by legalistic and literalistic Christians) regarded as unorthodox (and rejected, and labelled as evil) by the mere fact of writing fantasy, and including magic in their worlds. (Numerous YouTube videos attest to this orthodox attitude.)

In sum, I consider the unorthodoxy of individuals to be a vital and positive feature of Christianity; not least because all creative people are almost always unorthodox when they are being creative - and if Christainity expels and excludes all creativity, or treats it as too hazardous for wise men to risk; then Christianity will become dead obedience to external rules - and therefore not Christian at all.

Of course there are hazards to unorthodoxy. And people may be deceptive - may attack, and attempt to subvert Christianity under the guise of creativity. But there is no 'safe' path for Christians - hazards lie on both sides - orthodoxy is prone to apostasy just as is as unorthodoxy. On the other hand, all paths are 'safe' given the right attitudes of love and repentance. 

The orthodox ideal should not be that indvidual creativity be weakened, shackled or destroyed because it is too hazardous, but the opposite.

The ideal is that ultimately (further on in our theosis) all real and true Christians will quite spontaneously become unorthodox - simply by the spontaneous exercise of their natural, God-given, creativity which is an intrinsic part of their real, divine selves.

The difficulty of Heaven is that it requires mutual love, mutual harmony, mutuality of purpose. Whereas Hell is potentially a solo venture - we can 'go it alone'. Hell does not need other people, and tends-towards solitude.

It is typical of the value-inversion of an atheist-communist that Sartre got things exactly wrong; when he said that Hell is other people." 

Rather: Hell is what you get from having Sartre's conviction that Hell is other people. Hell is a consequence of souls who regard other people merely as instruments or obstacles to the assertion of one's own Self; who regard 'other people' as objects to be manipulated or eliminated as required to attain one's own goals; and this attitude is itself a product of the rejection of Love.

 

Heaven is essentially a family; and for a family to work - all of its members must be loving of each other. Any one can opt-out of family, reject family, unilaterally; but sustaining family requires mutuality. 

This shows, in microcosm, the sense in which Heaven is difficult, and Hell is easy. 

But when Heaven does happen (which it can, since the work of Jesus Christ has - by resurrection - made possible a permanent and eternal commitment to Heaven); then the possibilities are open-endedly expanding. 

Heaven will spontaneously increase, will develop, will create - without limit; because in Heaven creation is mutually-reinforcing and cumulative - because Love feeds on itself, nourishes itself. 

 

However, in Hell the opposite is true: Pride feeds upon itself; Pride increases at the expense of everything-except My Self. 

The long-term tendency in Hell is towards rejection of cooperation, towards solitude; thus towards diminution.

 

In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis depicts Hell as a place where everybody tries to get-away-from everybody else; by spreading-out, locking themselves in and others out; by socially-distancing. 

Lewis's Hell spreads-out even as all human interaction breaks-down. Men contract and repel, thus Hell spreads.*

This contraction of Hell to self-isolated and mutually-hostile souls happens as a natural consequence of increasing Pride: Self-assertion, self-ish-ness, and ever-more immediate short-termism... all these ensure that life trends-toward a continually-escalating conflict of each against all. 

 

*However, in a Hell ruled by Satan; the population who crave self-isolation would be prevented from spreading-out; and would instead be forced-into close proximity in over-populated cities; in order to torment them further. And this is indeed the Global Establishment's plan for planet earth. 

Note: By no coincidence; we can perceive an earthly approximation towards Hell in the global developments of 2020: towards a world of self-asserting, resentment-driven, mutually-hostile individuals - each of whom increasingly regards himself as a victim of the prejudice and selfishness of others. A world that regards other people as threats and obstacles. A world of physically-distanced and identity-obscured solo-individuals; fighting (hopelessly) against overwheling impersonal tyranny by asserted entitlements and 'rights'. A world demanding to 'use' others and their lives to extend my personal survival. Here in the UK millions of people are currently legally consigned to the literally-Hellish state of 'self-isolation'; characteristically (fiend-ishly) presented (by our inverted morality) as a public duty, for the 'protection' of others. PSYOPS...    

My answer would be to break the answer down into two levels: the (probable) specific human agents, and the demonic masters whose plan this truly is (and who fully intend to sacrifice the human agents, when they have performed their function).

The ultimate aim of the demonic powers is mass spiritual damnation, which is one that benefits only the (immortal, spirit) demons - and this is where secular analyses fall-down, since they always try to explain everything in terms of worldly self-interest.

To understand what I mean, CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast helped me to understand the demonic perspective.

Lewis's book The Great Divorce was helpful in understanding why so many people choose Hell when they might choose Heaven; and thereby what are the strategies of the demons.

...In this way we see the workings of perfect justice, for once we leave this physical world at 'death', we enter into those responsive realms where like will be with like absolutely, in a way which we are able to circumvent on earth. 

So it is there that what we are will catch up with us. 

We will find ourselves with surroundings and people who are of the same quality of nature as ourselves. 

For those who have troubled to be kindly and helpful to others, it is something to look forward to. For those who have caused misery to others, they will find themselves on the receiving end of their own unpleasant natures. 

Not only will they be surrounded with people of their own attitude, but the very environment will be alike to it as well. This is the hell made by man and not by God. 

But God allows it as the best means to making such people face up to themselves and know themselves for what they are. 


This passage immediately reminded me of The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, where hell is described very much along these lines - although this rationale is not given.

But there hell is self-chosen, and the consequence is that its inhabitants dwell among the others who have made this choice. They are then, intermittently, given a chance to visit Heaven, to experience the contrast. Some learn from the experience, others do not - and choose to return to hell.

Although mortal life is primarily a time of learning, rather than of 'perfect justice' - there are temporary and imperfect instances where we can experience and learn-from the kind of 'law of attraction' that Arkle is talking about.

We live-in and observe groups of similar people, some better people and others worse - and we have a chance to recognise the consequences of such 'attraction'.

A small example I experienced from both sides was in science and academia - in my earlier work I lived among some groups of honest scientists and academics; and then later I also observed (and somewhat experienced) life among career and status-orientated researchers and scholars. The consequences were broadly in line with Arkle's description of justice.

Thus one aspect of divine justice is allowing the consequences of Men's choices: the tendency of virtue and sin to be (to some significant extent) self-rewarding and self-punishing. 


It is an operation of self-selection that is going on here, which naturally tends to create un-alike, unequal niches. Therefore it is significant that the post-1960s New Leftism has made self-selection more and more difficult (and indeed illegal) in one after another domain of society - by means of slander, subversion; and then inversion imposed by top-down bureaucratic takeover, monitoring and allocation of persons and transfer (by cross-subsidy and coercive extraction) of resources. This done under the fake-justification of the primacy of 'equality' - meaning sameness-of-outcome. The procedure can be seen as the active undoing of natural justice, and the deliberate removal of natural consequences from actions (good and bad) - and, on the flip-side, the active punishment of goodness and other forms of superiority, by removing their natural rewards.     

I was always struck by CS Lewis's hardline attitude to happiness or self-gratification in relation to Christianity - the way he emphasized the problem of mixing-up the 'therapeutic' aspect of belief with the business of what is actually true. 

In the Screwtape Letters and Great Divorce (as well as his more abstractly theological works) Lewis negatively depicted people who fluently excused whatever they wanted to do - what they currently enjoyed doing, or what made them feel better - by making arguments that linked these to Christianity. 

In the Narnia chronicles; this was encapsulated in the phrase stating that Aslan (i.e. Jesus) is Not a Tame Lion. That is to say; Christianity cannot be comfortably domesticated and stay Christian. 

Certainly it is a real problem; but - especially in The Last Battle - Lewis also depicted the opposite problem, which happens when the cruelty and destructiveness of the evil demon Tash is explained as being the actions of Aslan; or later, the oxymoronic false-invention Tashlan, syncretized from both good and evil deities. 

These actual evils - in reality motivated by greed, selfishness and sadism - were effectively propagandized as consistent with the fact that Aslan is Not a Tame Lion 

And therefore the fact that God is not aiming at our immediate self-gratification is twisted into a mask for 'the devil'. 

In other words; on the one hand it is true that, at a superficial level of here-and-now, the goodness of God may be experienced as harsh life-lessons that are, nonetheless, necessary for our ultimate and eternal benefit. 

Yet, on the other hand, to know when this is actually the case, and when evil outcomes are instead a product of evil intent; requires honest discernment as to the motivations. 

So, the experienced and observed miseries and sufferings of this world are not evidence in either direction - they might be necessary and temporary means to a good end; or they might be the end in itself: cruelty, destruction, misery, suffering might be the actual purpose of evil beings. 

The correct answer must come from discernment, and the discernment - while taking-account-of-evidence, cannot derive-from evidence. 

As always, we are driven down to an acknowledgment that all knowledge depends on intuition; an individual act of an individual being. 

And, further, that Christian discernment entails acknowledgement that there is a side of Good (i.e. God) and a side of evil (i.e. the demons). We first need to know this in order to choose one or the other side; and only by choosing a side can be - even in principle - make a discernment as to whether a particular event was motivated by good or evil intent.

For a Christian; to deny that good and evil are separate and opposite sides, amounts to the false-deity of Tashlan - in other words, to base discernment on an assumption of unity, oneness, 'non-dualism' is itself (merely) a type of evil. 

From this analysis we can see that Christianity is related to self-gratification (i.e. the pleasurable, comfortable, desirable) in that God wants us to be deeply and eternally happy; but such a goal entails that we must sometimes be temporarily and superficially miserable. 

To know what is going-on in the here and now we need to depend on divine guidance - which (because God is The Creator, is Good, and is our loving parent/s) we have all been equipped-with. 

We all have potentially available both direct access (i.e. in our stream of thinking) to true inner guidance (because we have within-us something of the divine, being children of God)...

And this inner guidance also enables us to have access indirectly to external guidance - both directly from the Holy Ghost, and indirectly from all other sources of information such as legitimate and wise authority (e.g. of Men and books), true-tradition, and any other cultural product. 

In sum; deep self-gratification is a sure guide to the operations of God and His agents; while superficial self-gratification may be a consequence of the manipulations - or sadism - of evil Men and/or the beings of supernatural evil.

 

I enjoy sleeping, and generally do plenty of it; but I do find myself irritated by the propensity of my subconscious mind to torment me with dreary dreams - so dreary that they are a significant factor in making me an 'early bird' who tends to rise a couple of hours before most people. 

Getting-up before dawn is a lot better than suffering the tedium of such mundane, materialistic and repetitive dreams as I frequently experience - particularly at the beginning and the end of the night. 

(Because, if I do go back to sleep after such a dream, I will almost invariably take up the same dreary dream much at the same point I left-off before surfacing.)

There is a resentment that I am having these experiences when I might instead (perhaps ought instead to) be experiencing magical and ecstatic - or, at least, pleasurable and interesting - dreams. 

(Note: I do sometimes, quite often, have such good dreams - but they don't seem to need explaining.)

What is the purpose of one part of my mind torturing the other part? And torture not with anything spectacular and terrible, but merely with the kind of dreariness of location and events with which CS Lewis depicts Hell in The Great Divorce.

I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town. However far I went I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains...

With me it is likely to be seedy rented flats; dirty, leaking, insecure. Loud and intrusive people crowding in. 

Tiring journeys with inevitable repeated delays; cramped, slow disintegrating vehicles; and when I wander in a state of perplexed dementia - forgetting where I am going and why, but insisting that I keeping-going anyway...

And my dream self is no better than the setting - I am peevish, petty, spiteful and dishonest. Altogether as mundane and materialistic as the places I inhabit. 

What is interesting about these dreams is that they are an exaggerated caricature of everything I have always most disliked In Real Life; living in a context where all is trivial, superficial and sordid - and yet where the people around me insist upon keeping things that way; refusing to think or speak deeply, truthfully, from the heart. Where people strive to conform to a world without purpose, meaning or love. 

My general perspective about this mortal life is that its experiences are for us to learn from; and I believe that this applies to our dreams - including those of which we remember nothing. Our dream experiences are an opportunity for us to learn lessons, and to make good choices and benefit spiritually from them - or suffer the consequences of bad choices.  

Overall; it seems likely that these tedious dreams are trying to teach me that we should choose Not to live like that - and when we do live like that should notice and repent the fact. 

These dreams are indeed a negative of Heaven (that is - Hell); and remind me what it is that I so much desire to escape from - forever - by salvation... Noting that Heaven is as much about escaping from the many bad aspects of myself, as from bad environments.  

It really is an educative shock to bemoan the miserableness of the dream that I have just had, and then to reflect that the whole thing was my doing; either coming direct from my own invention, or maybe as a consequence of my inviting dark spirits into the dream.

It is - at any rate - All My Fault. 

And, if I don't like that sort of thing - then I know what I must do.

*

Accepting that 'traditional' depictions of Hell in terms of flames and tortures (whether true or not) are simply ludicrous to modern intellectuals - Hell can be depicted in 'modern' terms as was done by the likes of C.S Lewis (Screwtape Letters, Great Divorce, all over the place) and Charles Williams (Descent into Hell, theological essays etc.) simply as giving people eternally what they have chosen on earth.

*

Just suppose that modern hedonistic individualism was given what it has chosen: but given 'only' this, and for eternity.

A life of complete individual autonomy to the point of utter isolation, a life of endlessly varied hedonism according to choice.

A thought-experiment:

*

Imagine, for example, a wholly-convincing perception of an endless parade of novel and gratifying sexual encounters of exactly your favoured type with your favoured type of person (or other entity) - adding that even if this perception were actually a delusion rather than real, it would nonetheless be experienced as real.

And suppose that this went-on forever.

Is this state Heaven or Hell?

*

If you think it is Heaven: congratulations, that is what you will get.

If you think it is Hell: congratulations, there is an alternative.

*

I have often heard it emphasised by Christians how remarkable, how shocking, it was that God was incarnated as a little baby, lived, suffered and died an ignominious and agonising death.

But is it really so shocking? All of these are familiar possibilities for a being that is an 'avatar' of a God - a spirit part of God that takes on human form and lives as a human, perhaps a super-powered human, maybe even breeds with humans etc.

(Jesus is not an avatar - but my point is that the general idea of a God taking on a human form is common enough.)

Neither is it all that shocking when the incarnated God comes back to life after being killed - since all societies seem to have believed in some kind of continuation of existence after biological death (so nothing really dies altogether), posited some kind of afterlife; and Gods in particular would be expected to be unkillable. 


What is really shocking that that when the divine Jesus came back to life it was not as a spirit. Instead God became a Man again, in a Man's body, and for eternity. Jesus was resurrected.

I think that this is so shocking that - as far as I can tell - most Christians still don't believe it, and have never really believed it; but instead have always tried to claim that Jesus's resurrected body was 'not really' what it seemed, but some kind-of embodied spirit.

I think it is very difficult for people to accept that a creator God could have a body like ours, eternally; and still be God. To most intellectuals, at any rate, this seems intrinsically ridiculous that something solid and unbounded might be superior to something unbounded of pure spirit; so they resort to various types of 'yes, but'... argument, that retain the appearance of an incarnate body while replacing its inner reality with spirit.

If this was so, the question is why? Why did Jesus bother with resurrection, if the body was merely a kind of illusion? Why didn't he make eternal life a thing of pure spirit?

Why go to all the trouble of making it 'look like' Jesus had an absolutely humanish body, why the emphasis on how normal his body seemed?

(An emphasis, but not not exclusive; after all Jesus was hard to recognise, could apparently appear and disappear etc; but certainly the primary point being made is that this was in some essential way the same human body that Jesus had inhabited before he died, with the same appearance, wounds etc; and it was certainly solid to touch, and he ate food.)


If we take the Fourth Gospel as primary (and the other Gospels as partial confirmations) it is evident that the resurrection was into a 'normal', solid, material human body - and that was the main thing about it.

We should not allow secondary explanations to remove that major - and shocking - fact.

The distinctive thing about Christianity is therefore not 'eternal life' in Heaven; but eternal life in some version of our actual solid human body. 

There Must Be something very important about The Body, if it is to become eternal for us, in Heaven.


Note: On further reflection, the fact of resurrection has very wide-ranging implications for the nature of ultimate reality; including the nature of life in Heaven. In a nutshell, resurrection implies that the life eternal promised by Jesus to those who follow him is A Resurrected Life - a life certainly including resurrected entities, beings, things from this mortal life. Not, therefore, a life of pure spirit or thought; but a life of everlasting solid beings and objects of many kinds - thought consisting-of/ interacting-with solid things. Perhaps CS Lewis intuited this, in his fantasy of The Great Divorce? 

I have a new essay on L. Jagi Lamplighter's Superversive Inklings blog.

An excerpt:

Starting with Lewis; we can see that he was the more creative and accomplished writer, and that he was able to express instinctively more than he could (or would) comprehend explicitly. For example, there are depths, there is heart and resonance in Lewis’s imaginative fiction – especially the Narnia stories but also the Planetary trilogy, and also in his imaginative essays such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce – that are absent from, and even contradicted-by, Lewis’s theoretical and explicitly-Christian writings.

Barfield was a deeper, more rigorous and honest theoretician than Lewis. Indeed, Barfield understood Lewis and Lewis’s writing, better than Lewis understood himself. In this sense, Barfield was ‘larger’ than Lewis – but Barfield could not accomplish what Lewis did – so it could be said that Lewis expressed Barfield better than Barfield expressed himself!

This is why they are complementary.


Read the whole thing...

*

I read a great deal of Enid Blyton in my early and middle childhood, and was aware of the continual denigration of her work which came from the likes of critics, teachers and librarians.

I just ignored them and carried on reading.

Since her brooks are for the younger child, there is not much to attract adult readers, so from teens onwards I don't think I re-read any Blyton.

*

Then when my children came along I read some Blyton with them, and read Barbara Stoney's biography of Enid Blyton - which I re-read with great enjoyment and profit last week.

It is very clear now that Enid Blyton was a genuine female genius - not just in terms of the quality (bearing in mind that she is par excellence a writer for children and must be evaluated as such), and quantity of her work - which was simply staggering (topping-off which was that she did not even employ a literary agent or secretary, yet solicited letters from readers and personally answered a huge mailbag) - but a genius, too, in terms of her mode of work, her way of thinking.

*

Blyton left a detailed account of her method of composition in some fascinating letters to a psychologist called Peter McKellar. Here is part of an excerpt given by Barbara Stoney:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knees; and I make my mind a blank and wait - and then, as clearly as I could see real children, my characters stand before me in mind's eye... The story is enacted almost as if I had a private cinema screen there... I don't know what is going to happen... Sometimes a character makes a joke, a really funny one that makes me laugh as I type it on my paper and I think, "Well, I couldn't have thought of that myself in hundred years!", and then I think: "Well, who did think of it?

Blyton thus wrote in a trance state, a shamanic state - and her mastery of this state was the key to the reality of her world and her tremendous productivity. 

*

In the days when Blyton was criticized without restraint, people used to say she was a 'bad writer' in the sense that her prose was supposedly badly formed and her plotting was supposedly crude. 

This is false. Her prose is clean and smooth and the books are very tightly written. Compared with most of the feted modern children writers - whose work is often padded-out, flaccid - Blyton's stories are all meat with no gristle.

*

So why was she so hated?

The answer is obvious, her work was designed to exemplify and promote Goodness:

...my public, bless them, feel in my books a sense of security, an anchor, a sure knowledge that right is right, and that such things as courage and kindness deserve to be emulated. Naturally the morals or ethics are intrinsic to the story - and therein lies their true power.  

Blyton was brought up a nonconformist Christian, a Baptist, but (as with many geniuses) her observance and belief faded as her created talent waxed.

She consequently did not live fully by Christian ideals, especially in terms of the sexual arena - marriage and divorce and remarriage, both to divorced men; however, unlike most literary geniuses, Blyton retained almost all her Christian practices, ethics and principles. Indeed, she wrote a great deal of Christian literature for children. 

Blyton was, therefore, that thing most loathed by the Left - a hypocrite. That is someone whose life does not match up to their publicly stated beliefs. Not all that much of a hypocrite, in fact, but enough for the Left who wanted to destroy her.

*

To try and destroy, Blyton, the Leftist establishment said (and are still saying) all kinds of incompetent and ignorant nonsense and gibberish (indeed, I have never read or heard so much pure garbage talked about any other writer) to conceal that what the Left really hate about Enid Blyton was her effectiveness as a writer, and that her books were a good influence on children.

Therefore, being both good and effective and amazingly productive; quite naturally (to the Leftist mindset) Blyton should be slandered, ridiculed, bowdlerized, suppressed.  

*

                                   

*

Advocates of the sexual revolution often point out that most mainstream sexual sins are not all that sinful in the larger scheme of things.

They are right.

Why, then, are sexual sins (those advocated by the sexual revolution) perhaps the largest underlying problem in the West, and sexual sins are primarily responsible for the catastrophic decline and (near-) death of Western Christianity?

Firstly, because sexual sins are so popular - unlike murder, many people want to do them (or, at least, be able to take the chance of doing them, if the opportunity arises).

But secondly - and far more importantly - because sexual sins are not repented.

Sexual sins are not repented in our culture, because people have come to deny that they are sins at all. You cannot repent a sin if or when you deny it is a sin.

From arguing, correctly, that these are not necessarily very big sins, people have concluded that sexual sins are not sins at all - therefore they do not need repenting.

Indeed, many self-identified Christians have begun (usually indirectly, sometimes explicitly) promoting sexual sins - as if they were virtues; for example they criticize or punish people who recognize that sexual sins are sins.

(This pattern is altogether typical of unrepented sin - it leads on to moral inversion.)

Repentance wipes us clean of sin - that is the gift of Christ's atonement. But failure to repent is what chains us to hell, because it entails a deliberate rejection of God's order.

It is not by committing some spectacular sin, but rather clinging to a 'minor' sin that is probably the main cause of (self-) damnation.

(CS Lewis portrays this convincingly in The Great Divorce - where souls in Hell are shown Heaven, and offered the chance to dwell there - but at the price of repenting their favourite, habitual, 'minor' sin; the sin around which they have organized their lives: Most choose to stick with their sin and stay in hell.)

We are safe from sin if we know and acknowledge sin; repent and repent again. 

We may not reform our behaviour, we will very probably continue to be sinners of the same type to a greater or lesser extent; but sin cannot get a grip on us. Salvation is assured.

But unrepented sin - even one, no matter how relatively minor it may be - can, and often does, take hold and tighten its grip, until we are altogether pulled-down by it.

CS Lewis was certainly a wise man - and almost everything he wrote (including ephemeral correspondence) has at least glimmers of this wisdom; but there are four of his works in particular, which seem to me to be the wisest - by the test of my returning to them most often in thought:

The Screwtape Letters
The Great Divorce
That Hideous Strength
The Last Battle

It is often said on Christian blogs that the demon-serving high-level globalist Establishment (Them) live in fear of death; because They know They are going to Hell. 

But I do not believe that They necessarily live in fear of death. Some do, no doubt - but not all, by any means; and that has been an important fact in the nature of global evil.

But this may be changing; and more and more of the most evil Men of this world may be becoming terrified of the own deaths; and behaving accordingly with their most evil natures...

What follows are my intuitively-guided speculations on this subject.  

Some of Them do not fear death, I think, because in some instances Hell (accurately understood as a personal fate, rather than a uniform destination) is exactly what They desire, and what They prefer to Heaven.

In other words; They have understood and rejected Christ's offer of salvation. They do not wish to affiliate to God's creative intentions, which entail making an eternal and unbreakable commitment to live in Love. They prefer, and choose, Hell (at least, as They understand Hell will be for Themselves). 

Their choice is, instead of Love; to live (after mortal life, as well as in it) especially in-accordance-with that sin to which each is personally most devoted: pride, resentment, fear, lust, sloth, or whatever. (This is well described in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce.)

The question then is: to what extent this choice is fulfilled in actuality? Can They actually get what They most want? 

In other instances, They do not fear death because They do not believe that they personally are going to die. Not fully: not in their essential nature.   

How They believe this continuation of consciousness is to be achieved is necessarily speculative, but I have written on this subject before.  

In a nutshell; I think They believe that They may continue to 'live' because what we might term Dark Magicians purport to conjure animate thought-forms by group activities that entail mental concentration and ritual. 

This is regarded - not as a spiritual activity; but instead as a quasi-science; a manipulation of the material world by means of channeled will. 

(This belief intersects with the most ideological forms of Transhumanism; when people hope for continued life in a 'downloaded', or perhaps transplanted, form of consciousness. This shows how a wholly materialistic/ atheistic perspective can lead to quasi-spiritual hopes and intentions.)

It is the group nature of such Dark Magical activities that lies behind the Ahrimanic, materialist quality of evil that has dominated the world in recent decades. 

In other words; Ahrimanic evil operates by organized, hierarchical, bureaucratic mechanisms - to create a unified global System that is a mechanism for damnation.  

I think it likely that Their oft-observed concern with symbolism, signaling, ritual, pain, sacrifice etc.; is part of a genuinely black-magic orientated group-concern. This is not just about somewhat extending mortal life (although that is part of it); but also, ultimately, (for perhaps the 'chosen few') with attaining a kind of immortality after mortal death in a material but ghostly, or spirit form, 

The personal goal is then to continue (self-gratifying) activities in this world, as an 'honorary demon'; that has been created (and, probably is sustained - because this state is subject to entropy, and therefore needs constant infusion of energy to remain viable) by Black Magical means.

But, having said all this; I also believe that there has been a change in human consciousness over recent generations, but particularly since the millennium; and that part of this change has been a sharp decline in the ability of group-activity to conjure thought-forms. 

This change in Men's consciousness has affected the 'good magic' of Christianity, as well as the black magic of the demonic Establishment. This development has been a part of the decline of church-based Christianity: the fact that it can no longer do for people as much as it used to do. 

Those Christian group practices that used to 'work' reliably and powerfully to sustain and enhance spirituality, are now diminished in effect, and still diminishing. Indeed, for many people in the West; these practices have altogether lost spiritual power; and church activities have declined to a wholly psycho-social and political role.  

However, this development of consciousness must - I think - also have affected the power of Ahrimanic evil - and this will probably be one of the major causes that the cooperation of evil consciousnesses, which sustains The System, is now breaking-down.

I am (again!) talking about the transition between Ahrimanic and Sorathic evil, about which I have written many times before. 

I mean the breakdown of long-termist and coordinated evil by the defection of individual evil Beings; into the chaotic state of many simultaneous personal agendas each characterized by short-termist and destructive spite.

This is something that can be observed in the world today. The globalist alliance that launched a successful (covert) coup in early 2020 has, this year, fractured geo-politically into Anglosphere/ Western European 'West' and its vassal states; versus the others. 

Furthermore, The West has fractured such that the dominant elements are beginning to destroy the vassal states by acts of sabotage - financial, economic, demographic - and recently actual physical sabotage. 

This must have a confidence-shattering effect on many Establishment members who, until recently, 'trusted' that They would be exempted from the planned mass destruction; and would be rewarded for Their cooperation by eternal 'life' - among other and more immediate gratifications. 

Whether the evil-Establishment were correct to trust in the integrity of the principalities of evil is, for Christians, a question that answers itself! Yet, such Faustian stupidity is a fact of human life. Many Men have believed that Their cooperation with The Plan would win personal rewards; believed that They had a contract with evil, an agreement that evil would "honour"... 

(Despite that the powers of evil cannot be trusted; and will lie and cheat as is expedient - or as provides Them with some kind of sadistic enjoyment.)

Anyway, the hope was that They could achieve a kind of eternal existence of self-gratifying worldly activity.

There must, I think, have been some such 'trust' between lower and higher evil-souls - however misguided - in order to enlist the cooperation of so many individuals in so many nations. 

Many of These are now realizing that They have-been, or soon will-be, betrayed.

They face a dawning awareness of the terror of bodily annihilation and eternal spiritual torment. 

Of course; this betrayal and disillusionment opens a window to repentance; to affiliate with God and accept the salvation of Jesus Christ. 

In this mortal life it is never too late to repent - although it gets harder and more painful, the further advanced in evil a soul has gone. 

But, when repentance is rejected, realization may lead instead to a kind of destructive frenzy of vengeance - the desire to inflict as much suffering on others as possible, before falling into the pit oneself. 

This very purely negative form of evil, a 'lashing-out' which takes 'pleasure' only in the doing of evil and not in rewards from so doing; is what I call Sorathic - and it seems to be gathering strength, perhaps especially in the Establishment of the dominant Western power: the USA. 

I would guess that the 'promised' reward of an eternal life of personal satisfaction was, at best - only ever, in practice, short-term. 

Sooner rather than later; the promised rewards are revoked, and the self-gratifications of eternal living are inverted into a state of eternal slavery; a continued existence only as objects of torment for the pleasure of other evil beings - who are Themselves destined for the same fate.  

As the cabal of organized evil breaks down; such betrayals will be happening, and be observed; more and more often; and no doubt some terrible conclusions will be drawn. 

If this interpretation is correct, and the Dark Magician cabal is increasingly breaking-down into mutual warring factions; factions that then themselves splinter break-down into each against all - then these times are both very dangerous and somewhat hopeful. 

Christians are no longer up-against a coordinated conspiracy - which is good. But those evil Beings (human, as well as demonic) that remain powerful in this world, will feel that - now that their chance at 'eternal life' is gone' - They have nothing to gain from long-termism or cooperation;: nothing to lose' by sheer spitefulness. 

They seem highly likely to behave in an increasingly reckless and frenziedly destructive manner - whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself. 

Be Prepared (spiritually, I mean).