“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
-Screwtape, a senior demon, writing to his nephew Wormwood, also his apprentice. From C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”

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Foods for thought?

The package of corn chips found in the health foods aisle noted how not un-good the contents were to eat: “No Artificial Ingredients” “No Artificial Flavors” “No Preservatives” “Certified Gluten Free” “NON GMO Verified”.
The package of drama found on the cable channel noted how not inhuman the program was: “For Mature Audience” “Adult themes” “Adult Language” ….
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“Fantasy covets the gross, the explicit, the no-holds barred display of the unobtainable; and in crisis of the display the unobtainable is vicariously obtained.
Hard-core pornography provides another instance. Indeed, modern society abounds in fantasy objects, since the realistic image, in photograph, cinema and the TV screen, offers surrogate fulfillment to all our forbidden desires, thereby permitting them…The ideal fantasy is perfectly realized, and perfectly unreal – an imaginary object which leaves nothing to the imagination.” – from Fantasy, Imagination and the Salesman, Roger Scruton’s “Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”

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The fantasy objects removing the sacred from our view? A short list:
Movies and cable TV programs showing ‘snuff films’, violence, mutilation, slaughter, wanton sex, promiscuous sex, misogyny, the profane.
Video games engaging you in violence, mutilation, slaughter, wanton sex, promiscuous sex, misogyny, the profane.
Movies which employ special effects to convey a larger than life experience titillation while offering nothing of value for real life.
Social media – each media element readily offered and responded to, and obtained remotely, removing one from true community towards self-isolation
Animation – the shadowland of phantom cels
Marriage as a secular convention to secure benefit from another up to and including the commodification of the partner’s wealth, insurance, emotional dependency and sexual organs.
Socialism as Utopia
The Social Justice Narrative of “Diversity” and it cognates, wrought by the iron fist of “equality”
Homosexuality, the phallic and misogynistic, and its associated bacchanalia (e.g., Gay pride parades)
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Imagination gathers up the hard-won gold of reality, submits it to the refiner’s fire, allows it to be molded and then offers the higher karatage gold as sincere praise to God.

Fantasy gathers up the hard-won gold of reality for smelting and casting into the golden calf of ephemerality, of likeness, of certainty.

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“The contrast here is between the active work of the imagination, which points to a God beyond the sensory world, and the passive force of fantasy, which creates its own god out of sensory desires…

– from Fantasy, Imagination and the Salesman, Roger Scruton’s “Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”

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The Adoration of the Golden Calf 1633-4, Nicolas Poussin

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One wonders:   does the left brain seek certainty and see fantasy as that certainty while the right brain is dismissed as flaccid and unreliable?