Posted on 04/13/2023 8:51:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It must be miserable to be a citizen of the United Kingdom these days. To be an unwilling participant in a nation’s slide into tyranny must be an awful thing. I know that we are witnessing it in the States, but they’ve been at it for a while now in the United Kingdom, which is tumbling with near-terminal velocity toward the bottom of the slippery slope. The UK, let us not forget, mobilized its citizens to evacuate troops from Dunkirk during the Second World War and to stand firm against Nazi Germany during the Blitz. But it would seem that it is interested in crafting its own form of tyranny.
Writing in The Spectator, Douglas Murray talks about a plan by the government’s Prevent program to list certain works as having the potential to lead to radicalization. The list includes works by a number of commentators and authors including Murray, Peter Hitchens, and Melanie Phillips. Murray writes:
There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.
RICU refers to an arm of Prevent and is an acronym for “Research, Information, and Communications Unit.” Reading the works by the authors above could allegedly launch one on the road to right-wing extremism. As could watching Civilisation, The Thick of It, and Great British Railway Journeys.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Not only do the characters act on faith against overwhelming evil, but the story’s climax is built on the backs of two ordinary people who sacrifice everything to defeat the darkness, and for that matter, one could argue that the One Ring is ultimately destroyed through an act of divine intervention. Woven throughout are themes of friendship, opposition to tyranny, reconciliation, and even redemption. These ideas perhaps may be heretical enough to land the books on RICU’s list.
Lewis also served in the First World War. During the Second World War, he often addressed the British people via the BBC. And he gave lectures about faith to British servicemen. Those talks formed the basis for Mere Christianity. And there can be no doubt that Lewis is a Christian writer. His Space Trilogy bears witness to that, and The Chronicles of Narnia is solidly and immutably Christian. Some people claim that Aslan represents Christ, while others say that Aslan is Christ and has come to redeem another world. Whatever your feelings on that, Aslan is meant to portray Christ.
Men Without Chests posits a moral law and refutes relativism.
The Abolition of Man also wrestles with these subjects and goes so far as to foresee a future in which thought and values are controlled by a group of elitists.
The Great Divorce in part forces the reader to examine the thoughts and choices that separate people from one another and from God.
The Screwtape Letters is a collection of missives from a senior demon in Hell named Screwtape to his nephew on Earth called Wormwood who is trying to take a man’s soul. The letters instruct Wormwood on how to use and leverage the most ordinary things in life, along with the traumatic ones, to lead a person to damnation through his own desires, fears, and ambitions.
Oh good grief...Huxley was a progressive/lefty and Orwell was a Socialist!
That list is a hodge-podge of insanity and makes NO sense at all. Thank GOD I have hard copies of this stuff!
The way things are headed, reading itself will be considered subversive.
I do not think Orwell was a Socialist in the normal sense of the word.
Tolkien himself said the Lord of the Rings is fundamentally a Catholic book, which means it's a Christian book.
If the only books of his that you've read are ANIMAL FARM and 1984, you wouldn't know. But DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON and KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING would prove I'm correct.
Perhaps, but in the United Kingdom of today, reading Rudyard Kipling is definitely a subversive act.
You are right.
bkmk C. S. Lewis
But Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Feuerbach don’t make the list. Hmm...
Hmmm, I don’t think that list holds together.
Oh good grief...don’t be an ignorant dumbA.
Fahrenheit 451 here we come......
Of course, that will be banned, too.
Not necessarily.
Catholic does not by default equate to Christian.
Catholicism has elements of Christianity in it, but there's too much syncretism in Catholicism to classify the whole religion as Christian. And besides, there's this whole issue with your pope and the College of Cardinals that installed him......
Simply adding Jesus to a religion does not make it by default Christian. He's not a window dressing.
That’s your personal prejudiced opinion. The fact is, Catholics are Christians no matter what anti-Catholics say. It is an irrefutable matter of history that that the Catholic Church was established by Jesus himself 2000 years ago. All other Christian churches were founded long after the fact by fallible men, including the one you now belong to.
why not?
i am sure the mufti would have a fit if he saw one of his mohammdan brethren reading either o e!
Every time I see a Catholic attempt to explain matters of church and religion, I hope to finally observe one who would know the difference. But, alas, each remains Catholic and so cannot. It is an irrefutable lie that Christ founded the Catholic Church. He founded a religion and churches are institutions created among adherents for the practice of that religion. The one church today which least resembles the assembly of Christ's followers at the time, and the one which is most hostile to the religion's initial form and doctrine, is the modern Catholic Church. Jesus would hardly recognize it. If we were to try to recreate the original form as experienced by the Apostles themselves, the Catholics would denounce it. Christianity is the following of Christ, not a two-thousand year old game of tapping a bishop on the shoulder and saying "your it".
From 2016...
Note the timing of the funding increase.
2015/2016.
Fighting Islamism was the excuse, not the reason.
Personally, I find both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis absolutely boring to read.
To Lewis’s credit I’ve always found apologetic writers burdensome in their arguments.
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