TWO SPHERES
It has become the default assumption among the smart set that there are two non-overlapping spheres of human understanding. One sphere is Nature, where star fish, starlets, and stars are reducible to elemental forms of matter and energy. Here, direct observation and the powers of reason and science make knowledge certain.

The other sphere is Supernature, populated by soul, spirits, God, and everything else originating from human imaginings, needs and yearnings. Beyond the reach of empirical examination, knowledge here is tenuous and uncertain.

The former is the realm of Facts, the latter the realm of Faith, and betwixt them, there is no connecting thoroughfare. Such was not always the case.

The early Greeks believed in a primal source of harmony that made the universe, in its diversity, a coherent whole. (The word “universe” contains the idea of “in the many, one.”) Accepting a common rational structure for the mind and the universe, they supposed that nature and knowledge were unified. Even “things unseen” were thought to be knowable through the powers of unaided reason.

The presumption of unity held sway until “hard” empiricism jettisoned the questions of ultimate causes to the Empyrean.

FROM UNIFICATION TO BIFURCATION
Reliance on reason alone led the Greeks to many false conclusions about the universe—aether, geocentrism, and spontaneous generation, to name a few. Corrections to those errors were held back for well over a millennium until the scientific method was introduced, adding experimentation to rational analysis. 

The new, empirically based approach enabled the discovery of laws and mathematical relationships that described the workings of the universe with breathtaking accuracy.  And with that came a new theory of knowledge.

Inspired by the smashing success of the scientific revolution, John Locke and George Berkeley concluded that the only reliable source of knowledge was empirical. Unlike the ancient and medieval rationalists who believed that the cognitive powers of the mind were sufficient for discovering the true nature of things, Locke and Berkeley insisted that knowledge stems from sensory experience. They insisted that the mind is a blank slate with no in-built organizing architecture. It is our senses that inform our mind, not the other way around. With each new game-changing discovery of science, rationalism fell deeper into the shadow of empiricism, until fully eclipsed by the “hard” empiricism of David Hume.

Undergirding the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley was the presumption that true knowledge was possible, even for things not directly accessible by sense perception, like physical laws, and abstract mathematical concepts like infinity.  But David Hume said, “No!”

According to Hume, we have no access to physical laws; they are not implanted in us from birth, or writ large in the sky for all to read. All we have is a continuing stream of experiences from which we construct associations and relationships that have no necessary bearing on what is really real. We may have experienced a sunrise every morning, but that does not guarantee the sun will rise tomorrow.  Without access to the true nature of things, we are left to form working assumptions to help us order our lives. Hume’s “hard” empiricism jolted Immanuel Kant out of his dogmatic slumbers.

To rescue rationalism from the onslaught of Hume, Kant synthesized it with empiricism by proposing that the mind comes endowed with faculties that give meaning to our experiences. This synthesis, Kant submitted, makes possible the identification of laws, even the moral law. But Kant’s deliverance of reason did not include the presumption of unity upheld by the early rationalists.

In the Kant schema, reality was split asunder into the phenomenal world and noumenal world. In the phenomenal were the things of the sensible universe, Nature; in the noumenal were the ultimate causes (the logos, the good, God) and the true nature of things (ideas, forms, spirit). For Kant, certain knowledge was only possible in the phenomenal.

In time, all of Supernature and the moral law (Kant would have been pained to learn) were pushed to the sphere of faith. The resultant fact-faith split had a tremendous influence on the gatekeepers of science. Caught up in the anti-clericism of the times, they sought to liberate science from the fetters of faith by reducing its scope to “natural” explanations. The result was scientific materialism.

But as we will see, materialistic science is far from faith-free.

FAITH ALL THE WAY DOWN
The materialist operates on the belief that “nature is all there is.” The word “belief” signifies something that is not scientifically proven. In fact, this founding proposition is not scientifically proven nor provable because, given that only natural explanations are allowed, materialistic science depends on the very premises it is trying to demonstrate. Like all worldviews, scientific materialism is founded on a faith statement. But faith is not limited to its groundwork; it comprises its superstructure as well.

Consider one of the most familiar, and basic, features of nature: gravity. Like angels, heaven, and God, we can’t see, smell, taste, or touch gravity. Sure, we feel a pull toward earth, but we also “feel” a pull toward heaven.  Even the most successful theories of gravity are not explanations, but descriptions that are wildly different.

In one pitch, gravity is an invisible force, associated with matter, mediated by who knows what—some say gravitons, which, by the way, have never been isolated, observed, or measured, but, nonetheless are a convenient placeholder for our ignorance. And talk about matter—no one knows why gravity is fond of it and not other things, like photons.

In another depiction, gravity is not a force but, rather, the topography spacetime shaped by the presence of matter. As one physicist puts it, “Matter tells space how to bend and space tells matter where to go.” Again, why does matter, and nothing else, have this effect? No one knows. More fundamentally, which came first, matter or space? If space, did it have no shape? If matter, did it occupy no space? To such tail-chasing, it seems, there is never an end.

That is not to take anything away from the formulations of these theories. Indeed, they have led to many space-age advancements. Yet the gravitational phenomena we observe, and the laws and equations that describe them, are independent of their explanation or ultimate cause. Whether the orbit of the earth is the result of an invisible force, a spacetime warp, or the guiding hand of Him in whom “all things hold together,” our observations and mathematical descriptions are unaffected. The explanation we accept is an exercise of faith, not a demonstration of fact. The same goes for the common-day forces of magnetism and electricity.

When we drill down to subatomic dimensions, we enter a world of bare faith. Quarks, electrons, and muons, and the nuclear forces that control them, are foreign to anything we know from everyday experience. And the infinitesimal scales involved make direct examination impossible. Everything we “know” comes from particle accelerator—that is, “atom-smashing”—experiments.  

As a working approximation, imagine riddling a steel box with an AK-47, then trying to reconstruct the mystery object inside by piecing together the resulting shrapnel.  Because we do not know how the strafing affected the object in its undisturbed state, our reconstruction is based on inference. The same goes for our depictions of the atomic world, with a little fancy thrown in the mix.

For example, there is a whole category of stuff in the quantum realm labeled “virtual.” It includes subnuclear-sized particles and photons that have never been detected and, indeed, do not exist except as ethereal abstractions in the minds of physicists to make sense of phenomena that make no sense without them. 

Even the quantum field, which is credited with preventing the annihilation of matter by keeping the negatively charged electron cloud from combining with the positively charged nucleus, is nothing more than a rarefied label for something (the stability of matter) that is, materialistically speaking, inexplicable.

From the cosmic scale of gravity down to the micro scale of the atom, faith undergirds scientific knowledge—faith in materialism. Nowhere is that more candidly expressed than in the words of evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises . . . because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”

For those whose faith will not be shaken by patent absurdities, astrophysicist Robert Jastrow warns that “the story ends like a bad dream.” After their final ascent on the mountain of discovery, they peer over the horizon to see a group of theologians who have been awaiting their arrival for a long, long time.

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“But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea ‘God did it’ has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it.” (Jerry Coyne)

In a recent essay in The New Republic, evolutionary scientist Jerry Coyne asked, “Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?” Coyne has no doubt that the answer is yes.

Religion is so hopelessly inimical to scientific progress that any attempt to reconcile them is futile. As Coyne explains, “Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard.” And to make sure you are clear on what religion is at issue, Coyne adds that “rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births.”

While hallowed bodies, like the National Academy of Sciences, claim publicly that faith and science do not conflict, privately, their “dirty little secret” is that religion is a science-stopper. Their public face, Coyne lets on, is all in the interest of maintaining public trust—one that is overwhelming religious and, professedly, Christian—and with it, public funding.

To the illuminati, a believer lumbers to the edge of every frontier of knowledge, poised to retire his investigations with “God did it!” contentment. Meanwhile, dead ends caused by their own faith in scientific materialism remain unexamined—the premature designation of “vestigial” organs and “junk” DNA being two examples.

Contrary to modern criticism, the scientist who approaches the world as a product of intelligence, rather than of matter and motion, is less likely to stop short of discovery. Instead of dismissing a feature that, at first glance, appears inert, unnecessary or just plain mystifying, he is more inclined the push the envelope of investigation to unravel its function and purpose.

Rather than obstructing science, Christianity, with its emphasis on a personal Creator, inspired an age of discovery that opened the way for science.

IGNITING DISCOVERY
The ancients generally viewed the world as an unpredictable place governed by the fates or by the whims of the gods. But once investigators understood the universe as a creation—the work of a rational God embedded with rational principles—they dared to imagine that discovery was possible. One of the first was an astronomer whose theories ignited the scientific revolution.

Speculations about a sun-centered universe had been around for some time; but challenges to the Aristotelian model refined by Ptolemy didn’t gain serious attention until the “Copernican Turn” in the 16th century.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Christian who understood the universe as an intelligible creation that operated according to mathematically coherent principles. His initial attraction to heliocentrism was not the result of new observational data, but of his notion that the sun—symbolic of God as Light and Lamp—seemed a fitful center of divine activity. He, along with other early researchers, believed that the elegant structure observed in creation should be describable in an elegant fashion. Thus, when heliocentrism proved more mathematically simple than the reigning earth-centered model, it gained a slow following.

Like Copernicus, Johannes Kepler was a man of faith who believed that the mysteries of nature could be unlocked with the key of mathematics. Kepler put it this way: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He has revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

Kepler’s belief in the mathematical precision of the universe led to his discovery of three fundamental laws of planetary motion—the foremost, that the planetary orbits are elliptical, rather than circular as modeled by Copernicus.

While the discovery of mathematical elegance was the product of faith for these pioneers, it has been the source of faith for others. In his book, Truth Decay, Douglas Groothuis shares the account of a Russian physicist: "I was in Siberia and met God there while working on my equations. I suddenly realized that the beauty of these equations had to have a purpose and design behind them, and I felt deep in my spirit that God was speaking to me through these equations." In that moment, the young scientist stepped over the chasm from atheism to theism and, ultimately, Christianity.

Copernicus and Kepler published their paradigm-shifting theories without much controversy. It was a different story for Galileo, who drew the full ire of the Catholic Church.

THE GALILEO AFFAIR
To hear the secular elites tell it, Galileo was a hero-martyr in the enduring struggle of free inquiry against the tyranny of Religion. But the truth is that the Roman Curia did not object to his heliocentrism on religious grounds, but on scientific ones.

Despite the groundbreaking work of Copernicus and Kepler, the Catholic Church and the general populace remained thoroughly Aristotelian. Resistance to heliocentrism was due to three things: 1) it was contrary to the common sense perception of a static earth, 2) there was no accompanying physical mechanism to account for it, and 3) it lacked a sufficient body of evidence to overturn a model that had proven quite successful for centuries.

Compounding the problem, Galileo published his work in Italian, the language of common folk, rather than in the scholarly language of Latin. It was an attempt to mainstream his theory by bringing the force of public acceptance to bear upon the scientific establishment. Galileo added to his troubles by writing scathing satires intended to embarrass his clerical critics.

For his offenses, Galileo was sentenced to a short prison stay followed by house arrest in his own villa until his death in 1642. While the Church’s punitive actions were overly harsh, its reluctance to accept novel theories in the absence of scientific vetting was reasonable.

Nevertheless, secular elites summon Galileo from the grave as the star witness in the ongoing case of Science v. Religion. Much overlooked is that while the Catholic Church was resistant to the new theories, not all Christians were. Specifically, Lutherans and Calvinists encouraged, and even helped fund, Copernicus and Kepler in the publication of their works.

A CLOCK WORK
The modern charge against religion would have been summarily dismissed by the vanguard of science, including the father of the mechanical worldview, Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton was a gifted polymath whose three laws of motion and law of gravity were the crowning achievements of the scientific revolution. Newton’s law of universal gravitation gave Kepler’s planetary laws a physical explanation that validated heliocentrism. But most significantly, Newton’s discoveries led to the notion that the universe was a giant “clock-work”—cosmic mechanism reducible to its constituent parts, operating autonomously according to inwrought universal laws.

For some, the clock-work universe allowed for a Creator, but not a Tinkerer. For others, it allowed for neither. For many, it led to brimming confidence in science as a wellspring of knowledge that would enable man to harness and manipulate nature.

It is a great irony that Newton’s theories became the foundation of scientific materialism—a worldview that excludes, a priori, any supranatural causation. Newton was a devoted Christian who was motivated, in part, by a desire to prove the existence of God through the design of creation.

Against those who were eager to embrace the machine model, Newton warned "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.” This was no “God of the gaps” argument from ignorance but, rather, a design inference from evidence. Although Newton has been co-opted by the scientific materialists, in truth, he was a forerunner of the intelligent design movement.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Christians remained in the vanguard of scientific discovery well into the 19th century. Groundbreaking advances in electro-magnetism, microbiology, medicine, genetics, chemistry, atomic theory, and agriculture were the works of men like John Dalton, Andre Ampere, Georg Ohm, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, William Kelvin, Gregor Mendel, and George Washington Carver—all believers whose achievements were the outworking of their Christian faith.

Scientists in the truest sense of the word, these were investigators who doggedly followed the evidence wherever it led, approaching the gaps of understanding not with “God did it!” resignation, but with “God created it” expectation.

Whether they realize it or not, every scientist, including Jerry Coyne, stands on the shoulders of these giants. As German physicist Ernst Mach once acknowledged, “Every unbiased mind must admit that the age in which the chief development of the science of mechanics took place was an age of predominately theological cast.”

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(This article first appeared at www.breakpoint.org)

WHY ME?
Early in my career, I spent two years in the Big Apple commuting daily on the city’s transit system. The sights, sounds, and smells of a New York subway are enough to make even the most iron-clad stomach queasy. So when I heard Ken Boa tell the following anecdote, that experience came back, in Technicolor.

One day a commuter boarded the “C” train with a stomach rumbling from an overindulgent lunch. After a few stops, the pressing bodies, squealing breaks and the stench of perspiration, bad breath, and urine became too much. When the train doors opened to let the woozy traveler off, all he could do was pitch his entire carte du jour onto the poor fellow waiting to board. As the doors closed, the bewildered man on the platform looked up blubbering, “Why me?”

“Why me?” is the great existential question of all time. When the “subway of life” dumps its refuse in our lap, we shake our head in wonder. After all, we reason, we haven’t hit the wife, neglected the kids, lied to the boss, or kicked the dog—least wise, not today.

Life’s unfairness is troubling. When the church member slanders us, our job is “surplused,” the diagnosis of cancer comes, or our neighbor is killed in a car accident, we are stupefied by the injustice of it all. Centuries ago, the wisest man in the world was likewise confounded, declaring it meaningless that the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked get what the righteous deserve.

Some, like Clarence Darrow, take such troubles as proof that life “is a ship that is tossed by every wave and by every wind; a ship headed to no port and no harbor, with no rudder, no compass, no pilot, simply floating for a time, then lost in the waves.” Indiscriminate misfortune, they argue, is the logical outcome of an unsupervised universe governed by chance.

Nevertheless, our initial reaction betrays the nagging sense that there should be a cosmic order at work; that life must be fair; that rewards can be earned; and that, if one is successful, life will be good. Some even imagine a benevolent Bookkeeper who immunizes them from calamity if their ledgers are “in the black,” while those “in the red” are left to suffer.

This “pay for performance” mentality conditions us to view tragedy as judgment, either from a nebulous principle of karma or from God himself. Reality, though, is another matter. The Indonesian tsunami claims the lives of righteous and unrighteous alike. Sudanese children are massacred while their totalitarian butchers run amok. Christian bookstores struggle while adult bookstores thrive. Such inequities not only disturb us as they did Solomon, but they disturbed the people of Jesus’ day as well.

A QUESTION OF JUDGMENT
Pontius Pilate was a difficult and insensitive tyrant in Palestine. First, he incensed the Jews by erecting Roman ensigns with Caesar’s image throughout the Holy City. Then, he demanded tax from the temple treasury. When the Jews objected, Pilate directed an armed force, disguised as ordinary citizens, to go into the temple crowd and slaughter the rebellious malcontents.

Like the Birmingham church bombing that took the lives of four young black girls in 1963, the killing of God’s people at the hands of a pagan tyrant was unthinkable. It wasn’t long before Jesus was forced to field the question that was on everyone’s mind: Was this a divine judgment?

Jesus quickly countered the suggestion, replying, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:1-5). In plain language, Jesus said it is wrong to read God’s intent into life’s tragedies.

To drive the point home further, Jesus continued his discourse by recounting another incident involving a group who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,: “[How about] those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Notice, in both cases, how Jesus turns the focus from why some die to how one can live.

Death, Solomon writes, is “the destiny of every man,” and along with pain, loss, and suffering, is the natural consequence in a world tilted on its axis from sin (Ecclesiastes 7:2). But while we can’t choose whether we’ll die in this world, we can choose whether we’ll live in the next. Jesus explained, "Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."

All the same, we pine for the day when justice will reign and all things will be made right. In the shadow time, we struggle with a God who admits, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Ecclesiastes 8:14). Does that mean God plays favorites, and if we could figure out what makes Him tick, we get on the inside track of his good graces? Well, yes and no.

PLAYING FAVORITES
Diversity in the kingdom hall of fame is legion. From Abraham, whose geriatric wife was far beyond childbearing age, to Mary, a young peasant girl without a husband, God’s selections seem strange and ill conceived to any modern-day HR consultant. His most strategic assignments go not only to the least able and least qualified, but often to those who don’t even want the job, like Moses, Jonah, and Paul.

Such is the nature of God’s “favorites,” chosen not according to personal wishes, merit, or achievement, but according to a different selection criterion: “It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy” (Romans 9:16). If we think this unfair, we would do well to consider the fate of the Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles before we insist on being the beneficiaries of God’s favoritism.

DIVINE INEQUITY
OK. Maybe God doesn’t play favorites in the usual sense. But what about the inequity of his punishments? Consider Ananias and Sapphira who were struck dead after they lied to Peter about the proceeds of a land sale. Their sins were hardly any different from the person today who fails to tithe, and yet the disparity in consequence is incomprehensible. Granted, but the inequity there is only apparent. For in both cases, as with all of humanity, the punishment is death. The only difference is the timing—in one case, it is immediate; in the other, it could be 10, 20, or 70 years.

What’s more, punishment in this world says nothing about destiny in the next. For example, when Paul addressed the church in Corinth about a man having an affair with his stepmother, he pressed them to turn the man “over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:4-5).

Thus, punishment in the “here and now” has no necessary bearing on destiny in the “yet to come.” At the same time, an untimely death does cut short the opportunity to fulfill our earthly commission—to restore culture and multiply God’s kingdom—affecting our rewards, rather than our membership, in the world to come.

Some are sure to view such punishment as brutally severe. However, in the case of the believer, as for the Corinthian adulterer, such discipline, Paul writes, is intended so that we “will not be condemned with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32). Discipline, up to and including death, is a merciful act of Him who keeps his sheep in the palm of his hand, allowing none to be snatched away.

God, to hold us secure in His kingdom without violating our free will, would not only be justified, but merciful in executing the sentence we rightfully deserve before we reach the point of apostasy. Thanks to Him, Jude writes, “who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy” (Jude 1:24).

It is right for us to be upset over injustice in this world. At the same time we need to remember that the greatest injustice of all was suffered by Him who died so that death would not be the final word in a narrative filled with heartache, suffering, and pain. As C.S. Lewis writes,

Does God then forsake those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, 'Why hast thou forsaken me? . . . There is a mystery here which even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted... had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent to far more desperate posts in the great battle. (The World’s Last Night)

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“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed true even from his own angle.” (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters)

It has been nearly 70 years since C.S. Lewis made public a mysterious correspondence that became known as The Screwtape Letters. The “letters” contained advice, instructions, and warnings from a senior demon to a junior demon about the handling of an earthling in his “care.”

As disclosed in the last of the letters, Wormwood, the pupil, failed his commission. He has never been heard from again. It has been noted that his disappearance had some connection with a ravenous meal Screwtape, the tutor, enjoyed sometime shortly thereafter.

Recently, new correspondence has come to light that bears eerie similarity. With moist palms and brow, I share it with you now . . .

Dear Swillpit,

Up to this point, you have played your man well. Although he professes Christianity, you have kept him from thinking his attachment has any claim on him beyond the sanctuary walls that insulate him from that coarse manner of folk he tries all week to avoid.

This is just the sort of Christian we want. The man whose faith is “smells and bells,” who adores his pastor for his soothing homilies and pastoral touch, and who can listen to years of preaching about loving his neighbor, without it ever occurring to him that he has been slowly killing his coworker with his gossiping tongue. And, oh, what a delightful dagger it is!

Thanks to the hard work of master deceivers, this type has won us legions who would have slipped through our clutches had they not been skillfully handled to judge the message not by its truth content, but by the actions of the messengers. My, hasn’t hypocrisy served us well? But, now, if you are not careful, all the work you’ve invested in him will come to naught.

In your last letter, you reported that this fellow has been gripped by that blasted photograph. How does it keep surfacing? I understand that the sight of the tiny hand reaching out of its mother’s womb to squeeze the surgeon’s finger caused him, for the first time in his life, to give serious attention to the business of abortion; which, as you know, has been quite helpful to our ends. This could have dire consequences if you don’t remove this splinter from his conscience, and quickly!

Up until now, legality and popular acceptance have created a moral fog that has kept him from questioning the status quo. Be sure to steer his mind away from things like slavery, eugenics, and “Jim Crow,” which were, at one time, also legal and popularly accepted. Above all, keep the fog thick.

As that tender morsel, er, tenderfoot, Wormwood was advised some time back, muddle his thinking with jargon. Framing the debate with that ingenious gibberish of “choice” has been wildly successful. Among beings conditioned to fancy personal freedom as an absolute right, who would dare imagine, much less argue, that choice is not a good thing?

Of course, our advantage here depends on our ability to simultaneously suppress our Adversary’s call to virtue. Specifically, that rather hideous propaganda of His that people should delay, or (gasp!) deny, their gratification for the well-being of others, especially the weak and powerless.

Speaking of virtue, you can actually press that into our service. I know it sounds crazy to diabolical ears, but the Golden Rule has proven quite useful to our purposes, especially with the hellishly exquisite concoction of the “social gospel.”

With creative cunning, we have corrupted “loving neighbor as self” into “sparing my neighbor from any discomfort I would want to be spared from.” Since I would want my daughter spared from the “punishment”—as one of their statesmen have called it—of an unplanned pregnancy, I will not deny my neighbor’s daughter the same relief.

This is the perfect time to bring to his memory the girl from his high school who was raped by street thugs. Unfortunately, the act didn’t result in a pregnancy, but you can use it to play on his compassion.

The line of thinking you want to exploit is that it would be uncompassionate, even cruel, for such a woman to be further victimized by carrying the child to term. This is delicate; you must not let him reflect too deeply here. Since, to our regret, he firmly believes that the taking of innocent life is wrong, he could, if you are not careful, realize that it doesn’t become less wrong just because it would ease the mother’s hardship. It’s that poppycock of “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

If, by your insidious devices, your man becomes convinced that abortion is justified for the difficult circumstance of rape, or for that matter, incest or the mother’s health (Oh, how we have been able to expand that to include any imagined or claimed distress!), it will have two wonderful effects: First, as he accepts such things as too big for his God to handle, his faith will begin to waver even in the smaller things. Seldom do they recall that He never promised them freedom from hardship, only strength to bear up under it.

Second, it is but a small leap from what might be legitimate exceptions to a general rule. As one of the Adversary’s own, Pascal, once said, “[You] make a rule of exception . . . from this exception you make a rule without exception, so that you do not even want the rule to be exceptional.” How true, how true! Just think, by slipping a few exceptions under their moral radar, they have been led to believe that unrestricted abortion should be an absolute right protected by the law of the land. And, mind you, all because of ever-so-small tweaks to principles so highly prized by Him. There is no victory that tastes sweeter!

And don’t forget, as in all things, and especially here, science is not our ally. Until recently we’ve been able to hoodwink many into believing that the “procedure” only involves a “clump of cells” or “mass of tissue.” This worked smashingly well with the clamor for personal autonomy, expressed most passionately with the “It’s MY body!” battle cry—as if anything, much less their bodies, is truly theirs. Everything—their minds, souls, and bodies—are either His or Ours. Such benighted creatures, humans!

But once their scientists discovered that a genetically complete (and distinct!) human being exists at the moment of conception, we’ve had to re-frame the debate around “personhood.” Only a “person,” possessing things like self-awareness, rational ability and self-determination, deserves legal protections. Amazing, how quickly they’ve latched on to that one!

But don’t push this too far too fast. Driving your man toward the logical ends of infanticide and euthanasia could awaken him to a most unwelcome conclusion. If you are patient in bringing him along, his initial objections to those practices (and more!) will lose their moral force. Nudge him ever so delicately. If he is the type who takes pride in his intellectual integrity this will be much easier than you think. Patience, Swillpit, patience.

Another ruse that has been infernally useful is sloganeering—especially the ever popular, “You can’t legislate morality!” Much to our shame, one of their officials cleverly twisted that into the moral cover of “I am personally opposed, but will not impose my morals on others.” Shame because, given its wide currency, we should have thought of that one. Nevertheless, don’t allow your man time for critical examination; for without ever-vigilant redirection on your part, he may quickly realize that every law is the attempt of someone (especially those who are “personally opposed”!) to impose their moral vision on others.

You will notice, Swillpit, that this is closely related to another twist on the “Golden Rule” we’ve worked hard to instill in him. Since his natural condition inclines him to take offense when someone criticizes, or corrects, one of his choices, he’ll not—out of “Christian” love—criticize one of theirs. Sometimes I get downright giddy when I think of how well we’ve been able to pull off this kind of thing. But enough rhapsodizing!

Always remember, as in everything else, abortion does our cause no good unless it delivers souls to the nether banquet. As much as we delight in the deaths of their little guppies, our real celebration is in the multitudes of caretakers and decision makers who have descended into our welcoming arms.

If all our work succeeds only in the death of a grub, for which the mother later feels remorse and seeks forgiveness from our Adversary, we have failed miserably. What we strive for is the woman who feels guilty, and so overcome by the deed that she is convinced she is beyond forgiveness, and atones for her “sin” by promiscuity or (and this is pure ecstasy, Swillpit!) another abortion until, benumbed by her penance, she has lost all capacity for love and meaningful relationships, only to be isolated from everything and everyone, especially Him.

While, to our displeasure, not all of her kind arrive in our dining halls, our real gain is the ripples of brokenness that abortion creates in the fabric of their society. Brokenness that strengthens our gravitational pull, drawing multitudes of souls, inexorably, down a life-long vortex of self-love or self-hate until they reach our gargoyled gates—that, Swillpit, is the goal of all our hellish machinations.

Swillpit, I anxiously await your next report.

Infernally Yours,
S.

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