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Okay, so "The Screwtape Letters" is... strange? Bizarre? Downright screwy?

Yup.

I'm finding it kind of hard to wrap my head around what seems such an alien, backwards concept. I'm imagining this is the type of book you'd have to read several times to really start to grasp the deeper things in it.

Mr Baldwin asked me last night how I was enjoying learning how Satan thinks, and I told him what I just wrote above. He said he thought it was a really weird book himself and felt several times "Should I even be reading this?"

I haven't finished it yet, so we'll see what I think at the end.

I like this quote:

"I have known cases where what the patient called his "God " was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer."

Seriously, we do this. We all do this, at some point, in some way. I know because I have at times... And I'm sure Satan loves every minute of it. Eeech.

More quotes from The Screwtape Letters

"...the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct."

"Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember, always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever."