Re: 25 Classic Books That Have Been Banned

On Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:11:17 -0700, Bobbie Sellers
<bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> wrote:

On 6/24/25 09:30, Paul S Person wrote:

<snippo>

As to the New Jerusalem, it is Revelation's view of the matter. The
second /Ice Age/ film showed a Saber-tooth Squirrel Heaven at the end
which is a good representation of what most people I have encountered
actually think Heaven to be, golden fence/gate, green grass, and all.
Not to mention the One True Acorn, of which all lesser acorns are but
images.
 
Note that CS Lewis goes for this sort of thing in /The Last Battle/,
which knows nothing of a New Jerusalem. And where, indeed, would he
put it? Earth or Narnia?

>
No with the Diety of your choice "further in and deeper in" as was
recounted
in one volume when the end of the Narnian world happens.

Which, IIRC, is /The Last Battle/.

But thanks for confirming my point.

I do find it odd that various evil types should be mentioned as not
allowed to enter -- not that they can't enter, but that they /exist/.
Only a bit earlier, these were said to /all/ have gone into the Lake
of Fire. So how is it they are still around? Surely after everything
has been destroyed and renewed human beings will no longer have the
knowledge of good and evil and so be restored to their original state
as well. There appears to be some confusion here. Probably mine, to be
sure.

>
Perhaps Lewis;a diety of choice wants all to be eventually returned to
Grace as he understood it.  So they suffer in the "Lake of Fire" to be
purified
so that like humans in Purgatory they can eventually enter into Heavenly
bliss.

I apologize for being less clear. The Lake of Fire precedes the New
Jerusalem in the Biblical book Apocalypse. Not in Lewis.

CS Lewis had two versions of Hell: one was a place from which God, in
His mercy, withdrew his presence so that those who would suffer if
subjected to it could avoid it; the other was that everyone went to
the same place, but those not prepared (by the Church) for it would
feel the presence of God as painful.

Luther, at one point, agrees with a Scholastic school that the damned,
while indeed in Hell and while indeed in pain are not in pain because
of the fires of Hell but because of the absence of God's presence.

Yes I read the Narnian books quite some time back along with the
extraterrestrial adventures of Ransom.
>
In Christian Mythos as in Tolkienian adaptation the Evil One corrupts
but only the Diety of choice creates. Melkor was powerful but by no means
did he create Dragons, Orcs or Trolls which by the scheme of things are
creations of the one which he bent to his will. And despite his great power
he was forced back into the Void by the others whom Ainu had set to guard
his creation.  Sauron was far less powerful but managed to further corrrupt
men and orcs.

Not a bad interpretation of the final form of the material. In the
first form, the dragons (at least) were mechanical. The later is a bit
ambiguous: some of his followers simply liked being on his side, some
may or may not have been genetically engineered from innocuous forms,
but, yes, none were created.

Melkor was weakened enough to be banished because he also inserted his
"stuff" (no, literally, "Melkor-stuff") into Arda. So that everything
was corrupted by it. There was a theory that Man, by living a short
time and dying, was removing it as a result and so helping to purify
Arda.

At one point, the difference between Melkor and Sauron (other than
strength) was clarified: Melkor wanted to destroy all of Eru Iluvatar'
creation -- and had he succeeded in reducing it to atoms, would still
have been unhappy because the atoms still existed.

Sauron, OTOH, wanted to rule Arda. Or at least Middle-Earth.

Note: This relies on a very large set of very large books collectively
called /The History of Middle-Earth/, by his son Christopher (CJRT).
These provide JRRT's other writings, edited by CJRT. It includes a
subset on how /The Lord of the Rings/ was written.

There is a separate 2-volume set on /The History of The Hobbit/, which
deals with how /The Hobbit/ was written. Some of it is pretty
interesting: that the Shire map is the Beleriand map rotated 90
degrees; that the Arkenstone was, in fact, a Silmaril.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"