Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

My Notes On, The Screwtape Letters, By: C.S.Lewis

My Notes On, The Screwtape Letters, By: C.S.Lewis

Here are my notes on, The Screwtape Letters, By: C.S.Lewis (Amazon):

The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked. –Thomas More

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.

In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.

Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.

I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of.

All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive. Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground.

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.

The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.

As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened.

I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble’, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them.

Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.

Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word ‘Love’: let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment. While it lasts you have your chance to foment the problems in secret and render them chronic.

They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so.

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned ‘Experience is the mother of illusion’;

Apparently He wants some—but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can,

Nor, of course, must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether ‘democratic behaviour’ means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?
The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils.

My Notes On, Bringing Up Girls, By: Dr. James Dobson

My Notes On, Bringing Up Girls, By: Dr. James Dobson

Here are my notes on, Bringing Up Girls (Amazon), By: Dr. James Dobson:

It is my conclusion, based on these and other more rigorous studies, that the sensitivity of which I have written has a downside: adolescent girls and women are more easily wounded than males, and many of them experience a lifelong sense of inadequacy. The pain that results from being ridiculed, bullied, or left out as a child or teen—as well as from wounds originating within dysfunctional families—is remembered painfully thereafter.

To both mothers and fathers, let me share a suggestion that you may not want to hear: good parenting almost always requires sacrifice. Childhood lasts for only a brief moment, but it should be given priority while it is passing before your eyes. Watch your kids carefully. Think about what they are feeling, and consider the influences they are under. Then do what is best for them.

Little and not-so-little girls need to talk too, especially about what they are feeling. Let me speak directly to the busy mom and dad who are too exhausted at the end of the day to get your kids talking, either at the dinner table or in those intimate few minutes before bedtime: you may be making a serious mistake. You need to know what your children are thinking, and they need the pleasure of telling you about it. Even though some loquacious kids will “talk the horns off a billy goat” and you come home too tired to listen, it is imperative that you tune in—especially to your girls. There will come a time when they will be talking primarily to their peers, and the missed opportunities for understanding and intimacy today will be costly down the road.

Females of all ages tend to interpret masculine silence as evidence of rejection. Based on this understanding, the best thing dads can do to connect with their daughters is to talk to them about whatever is of interest. Ask questions and then listen carefully to what is said in return. This interaction helps to produce the affirmation I have been describing. Meaningful and affectionate dialogue with a daughter is evidence that she is worthy, secure, and loved. Those beneficial effects can be achieved so easily through simple, genuine conversation.

if I want to be a princess, I need to act like one and expect to be treated like one.–Kim Davis

Virginity actually represents an expression of respect for the awesome power of sexual passion—and a manifestation of fidelity to something higher than momentary desires. It is, as essayist Sarah E. Hinlicky has written, “a sexuality dedicated to hope, to the future, to marital love, to children, and to God.” It’s also an expression of self-respect. Girls who refuse to play the hookup game are asserting that they deserve something better than sexual fumbling either with boys who want them for nothing but their bodies, or with those who may claim to care about them—but not necessarily enough to commit to a formal relationship such as marriage (or to promise marriage should an unexpected pregnancy result). Being a virgin means being truly in control of oneself: body, heart, and soul. It’s a way of determining which boys care about a girl for herself, rather than simply for her body. And although it’s no guarantee against heartbreak, virginity does ensure that a girl will never know the bitter regret of having given part of herself to someone who was unworthy of the gift.

The quality of the relationship between teens and their mothers was the primary factor in support of virginity.[ 245] Attachment, anyone? When the girls felt close to their moms and were aware that they disapproved of premarital sex, they were less likely to engage in such activities. Parental closeness was pivotal, but it resulted less from family activities and “lectures” than it did from parents’ regular involvement in their children’s lives.

Other studies reveal that older teenage girls who have better relationships with their fathers tend to postpone sexual activity longer. The researchers concluded that those who are close to their fathers tend to have fewer boyfriends, feel more guilty about having premarital sex, and tend to eat more meals together as a family.

Even when she is most unlovable, she needs love and connectedness from her mother, but also from her father. She needs them to be as calm, mature, and parental as possible. There is no room in their relationship for an out-of-control, screaming, confused, and scared adult. A voice of reason is desperately needed, even with a child who has become entirely unreasonable.

The most interesting finding to date, however, has revealed a significant link between family cohesion and the onset of sexual development. Specifically, girls who have close, positive relationships with their fathers tend to mature later than those whose dads are cold, distant, and uninvolved.

The classical Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky considered the consequences of moral relativism in his book The Brothers Karamazov. He wrote, “If there is no God, everything is permissible.”