Neanderpundit

my uvula swelled up to (I’m estimating here) 3x it’s normal diameter. i was a bit concerned about suffocating on it, actually.

Ed Bonderenka– a respected commenter here- asked what problems I had with C.S lewis, and then asked what the reference was that I made to Buddha. I commented on that but I think it deserves a bit more coverage. First, the “if you meet the buddha’ reference, explained fairly succinctly.

next, my comment, which is easily a post in it’s own right:

The point is, like Buddhists on the road to enlightenment, Christians on their journey through life are often distracted by people purporting to have a solid handle on the truth.

the fact is, CS lewis was on his journey. You’re on yours. If you accept CS Lewis (or Calvin, or Luther, or Mahomet, or ANYONE) as your guru on your journey, you have allowed yourself to be distracted from your true path.

Was CS Lewis wrong, or bad, or whatever? Surely not. Was he still searching for the identity of his own soul as he wrote? Most certainly, he was. Why in searching for the identity of your soul, should you follow the example of someone who has not found theirs yet?

I have personal issues with Lewis because the people who follow him tend to do so blindly, as if everything he said was some new sort of gospel, when it clearly is not.

This is at the core of evil today: the idea that you read something in a book that resonates with your personal beliefs, and you latch onto that book as if it were a life preserver in a storm. This is how Mao and Trotsky and Lenin acheived so many followers, people read their bullshit and found a piece here or there that resonated, and took the whole thing as The New Truth. Followers of CS Lewis in that respect are just as uninformed as followers of Lenin, or Marx, or Mahomet.

If you want to read Lewis, and learn something from him, that’s great! lewis doesn’t have a thing to teach me, and i suspect that the majority of readers here are more than clever enough that they can’t learn anything from him either. Want to learn something about what it is like to be a Christian?

Pray, and go out into the world and live, and then pray some more. that’s how it’s done. It doesn’t come from any book written by man.

If you aren’t interested in learning what it is to be a Christian, I truly pity you, for what you’ve lost, for what you lose in turning your back on Christianity is amazing.

Finally, as an aside, I can safely say that CS Lewis believed in his chosen creed as thouroughly as it is possible to believe in anything. I am also convinced that he wrote the things he wrote to turn his beliefs into real faith. I hope he was successful, but turning belief into faith is the penultimate example of spinning straw into gold. Faith is real and pure, and belief is tawdry and cheap. I have striven all my life to have no beliefs, and it is a struggle I still deal with.