“In chapter 13 [of A Preface to Paradise Lost], C.S. Lewis… discussed the tendency, since the time of William Blake and Percy Shelley for critics to regard Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. Lewis put this idea in its place through an examination of the self-delusion of Satan as one who regarded himself as the injured party, and by reference to Milton's theology. Lewis declared, ‘We know from his prose works that [Milton] believed everything detestable to be, in the long run, also ridiculous; and mere Christianity commits every Christian to believing that “the devil is (in the long run) an ass”.’ Lewis said that we see the same ridiculous trait of the ‘Sense of Injured Merit’ in a variety of familiar situations: the spoiled child, the film star, politicians, and minor poets.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“To say [Garry] Geisel is appealing, of course, is to mean it only in the strictly legal sense.”

Linda Williamson in Ottawa Sun Oct. 4, 1999

“all scientific knowledge ‘depends upon the validity of reasoning.’ The reasoning of a person in a psychologically irrational state lacks validity and tends to be open to doubt by others. On this basis, Lewis proposed a rule: ‘No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.’”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [describing Lewis’s reasoning in Miracles and quoting it].

“Then he [C.S. Lewis] made a remarkable observation that would appear in several of his apologetics books later. The death of the gods into allegorical figures had not happened because of Christianity, for the dissatisfaction with the old gods had been growing since the time of Socrates. Lewis said that ‘monotheism should not be regarded as the rival of polytheism, but rather as its maturity.’”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [re and quoting from The Allegory of Love].

“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”

Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Epoch Times column I say fashion’s obsession with novelty and related denial of truth was bad enough when it involved clothes, food or music. When it’s body types, it’s managed to get even worse.

“I should write a book ‘The Seven Pillars of Stupidity.’”

Me Oct. 9, 2004, obviously prompted by The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia”, and the rather unkind thought that he wasn’t exactly a demonstrated expert on wisdom whereas I’ve been too busy living my title to write the actual book.