Lewisian Apologetics for Beginners

That's either CS Lewis or Tony Soprano.

Okay, so I hate CS Lewis. I always have. I hated CS Lewis when I was 5 and my mother was so excited to share one of her favorite authors with me* and I still hate him. First of all, I don't think he was much of a writer. I think his writing was clunky at best. It's not that I dislike British authors of that era. I like Tolkein and Orwell, two of his contemporaries, but Lewis' writing is like a clumsy elephant with an inner ear infection to me.

I get allegory, I really do. I like allegory. I write allegory myself. It's a proud tradition. However, with CS Lewis, I feel like a British intellectual is beating me over the head with a Bible while shouting I. AM. A. CHRISTIAN. YOU. SHOULD. BE. ONE. TOO. Subtlety, dude. You Brits are supposed to own that shit.

Which brings me to Lewis' Christian propaganda lesser known series , the Space Trilogy. This time, Lewis does scifi! I like early scifi . The first thing I did when I received a Kindle was load HG Wells' The Time Machine. That is good stuff. But Lewis takes Martians and Venusians and, well, humans, we're sinful. And wicked. And it's our fault. Oh, and in the third book, the part of evil is played by scientists and lesbians. How . . . nice.

What struck me most about the series is in the second book, Perelandra. In this book, our hero, Ransom (yes, the name is meaningful, and no, I am not opposed to meaningful names) is sent to Venus to stop the Devil from tempting the Venusian Eve.

First of all, this is how we know Venus is the new Eden:

The rafts or floating islands are indeed Paradise, not only in the sense that they provide a pleasant and care-free life (until the arrival of Weston) but also in the sense that Ransom is for weeks and months naked in the presence of a beautiful naked woman without once lusting after her or being tempted to seduce her.

Lewis, dude, get a grip. The Chronicles of Narnia end with the preteen protagonists dying in a train crash, which is good because it means they'll never be adults and have the sexy feelings. I am not kidding you. To Lewis, desire was the ultimate evil and better to die at the age of 12 then ever feel lust. The man probably danced at the funerals of stillborn babies.

You know how I know that my health has taken a turn for the worse? I stop having any interest in sex. Even on days when I'm in too much pain for sex to be achievable, I'm still interested in it, I still fantasize about it, I still find people sexually attractive. It's only when I'm a few hours away from an ER visit that I stop having any interest in sex at all.

Admittedly, I might very well be set to high when it comes to all things lusty, but sexual desire is normal**. It is human to feel desire, to think about sex, to fantasize about sex. Christianity twists this normal human condition around until it is the greatest of evils, and the greatest of good can be characterized by its lack.

It's not really Lewis, it's Christianity. Thinking about sex with a person other than your spouse is the same as actually fucking someone other than your spouse. It's right there in the Bible. Lewis just carried the idea out to its natural, and very disturbing, conclusion.

Then there is the dramatic ending to the book, in which Ransom punches the Devil. You see, Satan is gifted with the rhetoric and spends a good portion of Perelandra attempting to convince Eve to sin. Ransom tries to win with rhetoric, but he can't. So he punches Satan instead.

Stop and think about that for a second. God's champion, a well educated Brit, couldn't win in a rhetoric contest being judged by a woman who had never even met another person besides Adam. That's like trying to convince a small child of something. My mother once not only convinced a 3 year old that she had 3 legs, she had the girl looking for her third shoe***.

Satan is trying to convince Eve that she should go ahead and sleep in the place she is forbidden from sleeping. It's the only solid land on the planet. So tell her it's covered in spiders. Tell her the truth: that sleeping on bare rock sucks and she'll wake up sore. Tell her you'll buy her a pony if she doesn't. Or, better yet, tell her what happened to the humans on Earth when their own Eve made the mistake she is contemplating.

But no, God tells Ransom to punch out the Devil. I'm not kidding you. Might makes right, apparently. Or, rather, might makes truth. If you can beat the snot out of somebody, they must be wrong about things. Obviously. That, my dears, must be pure Lewis, because I don't recall Jesus going Rambo on the Morningstar.

So the next time someone throws some Lewisian apologetics at you, ask them if they'll accept atheism if you can beat them bloody. It's a CS Lewis approved argumentation technique, after all!



*Don't tell my mom. She's a really great person and she was so excited about it, so I read every Narnia book and told her I loved them all.

**Asexuality is also totally normal for people who are asexual.

***I can't imagine where I get my sense of humor from.

Books, Covers and When It's Polite to Point

What the hell was Lewis talking about, anyway?

For me, the expression "you can't judge a book by its cover" is especially amusing. My mother is the published author of over 35 romance novels. The names of the books and the cover art were a constant source of embarrassment and horror for my mother because while she had no control at all over those things*, she knew that people thought she did and judged her for it.

So, don't just a book or its author by the cover.

And don't take dog training advice from Ray Comfort or CS Lewis. (Dude, I loved Narnia, why you gotta play me like this?)

An ex-atheist [CS Lewis] once wrote, "You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind."

Actually, most dogs do understand pointing. They are, in fact, one of the few species other than humans to do so. It's possible Lewis' dog did not understanding pointing, but my dog does.

Also, how would anyone know if dogs engage in . . . "factual realism"? Dogs, while capable of understanding 300 or more words, lack the throat and jaw structures to speak as humans do, so we won't be talking to them anytime soon. And what's wrong with factual realism? Sure, my dog regularly bites his own tail, but he's never invaded the Holy Land because god told him so. We'd probably be a lot better off thinking as dogs do.

Seriously, facts and reality are bad? *sigh* That reminds me, you know what happens at the end of the Narnia saga? The preteen protagonists all die. Lewis considered that the best possible ending the story could have had. Yay! Children died! Isn't that great! O_o

How true are his words. Evolution believers dumb themselves down, believing that they are simply apes that have evolved a little more than their animal brethren. But man isn't slightly brighter than the animals. He outshines them in the area of arts, creativity, music, the preparation of his food, an appreciation of his being, the study of his history, language, speech, God, and in many other complex facets of life.

Food preparation? Humans are weenies when it comes to food. My dog doesn't need his meat cooked because his digestive tract is quite capable of eating raw meat, whereas I would likely die trying the same trick. But what about sauces and spice rubs makes us better than animals? Music? Sorry, birds and whales do that all day long. Art? Gorillas and elephants love art. Creativity? What does that even mean? What about birds and their nests or spiders and their webs? Are those beautiful creations not marks of creativity?

Ray, having recently been called out on his characterization of African natives as "savages", decides that it wasn't the hate that was the problem:

However, one area where he completely outshines the animal kingdom, is the area of law. No animal comes anywhere near man’s desire to see that justice is done. The most primitive of us (foul-mouthed white men with ugly tattoos and gaping holes in their ears) believes in retribution. Snatch his beer from his clasping hand, and it’s payback time. This is because those of us who are still sane are moral beings, made in the image of Him who is called "the Habitation of Justice."

Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray. I know you've been told a thousand times that a) vengeance is not justice, and b) humans are not the only animals capable of desiring justice. Monkeys and dogs both have a sense of fair play and demand justice.

Habitation of Justice? The same guy who recommends raping prisoners of war and killing babies? That guy?

Foul-mouthed white men with bad tattoos and gaping holes in their ears? So . . . you're pro tattoos as long as they are well executed? Foul-mouthed white women with bad tattoos and gaping holes in their ears are less "primitive"? I bet most of those people know dogs can understand pointing and monkeys are capable of justice. Unlike you, Ray.

*Editors chose the titles based upon their personal loathing for the authors as far as I could tell. The publishers would send over an "art fact sheet" for the author to fill out, including physical descriptions of the main characters, location of the story, era of the story, and then apparently shred the completed art fact sheet upon receiving it, because the covers never matched those descriptions at all. It was like some sort of bizarre metaKabuki.