Peg Kerr's Journal

Oh, for Heaven's sake!

And on the news, just last night:

"An Indiana pet shop owner says a turtle that was the only animal to survive an October fire has developed an image of Satan’s face on its shell.

"Bryan Dora says it looks like the devil wants us to know that he was there.

"Dora says he can see a goatee and a pair of pointy horns on the shell of the palm-sized red-eared slider turtle named Lucky."

I saw Dora. He was very grim. He said, "Wherever there's a fire, Satan has to leave his mark somewhere."

The attack on Lewis' character and the nature of his conversion is kookish and tacky, and describing "Mere Christianity" as a heresy seems to me to be willful indifference to the words on the page. Let's not be too hard on it, though. As someone who once put Turkish Delight into his mouth expecting a pleasure worth betraying Narnia, I appreciate the imagery that Edmund's sample might have been laced with hashish. :)

Still, the argument that Aslanism is crucially different from Christianity is somewhat sound and perhaps underreported. I'm surprised that the author didn't get around to the heresy that actually bothers me, which is the Calormene who is welcomed into Heaven on the grounds that a noble deed done in the name of a false god is good enough for the true God. It's a sweet notion and one that keeps Aslan from looking like merciless during the Apocalypse, but it's completely opposed to what Jesus was talking about. I'm not an evangelical Christian with my eye on the number of souls I've converted, but if I were I can well imagine that this popularism would stick in my craw.

That's some... impressive reasoning.

You know, if I were absolutely positive it would wear off in a few hours, and if I were in a safe place (no internet access, for one thing), I'd love to try some of what they're smoking. Just one hit. Once.

Imagine what they'd do if they read The Screwtape Letters. Lewis said somewhere that it wasn't very long simply because he couldn't stand writing in the Screwtape personality as it made him feel kind of squicky. (My words, not his, obviously.)



Actually, since I was raised Mormon, the "heresy" which so bothers King Tirian never bothered me, since one of the Mormon prophets once said that anything truly good came of God, our Heavenly Father, and I often drew a line connecting the two statements in my head.

I'm not sure how such an idea was really opposed to what Jesus was talking about....after all, the idea seems to be that as long as the Calormene had no idea that Aslan existed, he dedicated his noble works to the god he had been raised to believe in, and he lived a good life. He was prepared, therefore, to recognise Aslan for the real deal and forsake Tash as a god. The story of Emeth the Calormene isn't a blanket coupon for saying that you can do good deeds for an unworthy cause, but rather saying that truly good people who have been unexposed to the true god will recognise him and have already been worshipping them in their hearts. They will THEN forsake the less worthy god or cause they had been serving.

(Notice that Tash technically is a god, and has the powers of a deity in the book. He's not a nice god, certainly, but he is a god. Is it the polytheism that bothers?)


Side note: While my analysis is somewhat rooted in my theological background, and presupposes a belief in a God, I am only writing that way, because Lewis honestly believed in God, and I was trying to explain why I didn't think the story of Emeth was a heresy or oppositional to Jesus's teachings. (Myself, I am now an agnostic Zen Buddhist....kind of.)

Oh, I love that site. One of my favorite bits is that of course Lewis isn't a Christian, because he (gasp) Smoked A Pipe.

p. 60 "He...lit his pipe. Marshwiggles smoke a very strange, heavy sort of tobacco (some people say they mix it with mud) and the children noticed the smoke from Puddleglum's pipe hardly rose in the air at all. It trickled out of the bowl and downwards and drifted along the ground like a mist. It was very black and set Scrubb coughing." (Now this is a strange description. I am suspicious that it could be a description of some kind of drug or other. If someone knows what this "tobacco" might really be, please send email. Also, we see that smoking makes people cough, which is accurate enough. But this is also quite a description.)

You know, I used to buy homeschool materials from folks like this. They had the best engineering toys and logic games and puzzles, but their attitude towards "fiction" and "fantasy" finally go to me.

Even when I was a fundamentalist, at least I wasn't THIS far out. And unfortunately, these are the sorts of folks that many Americans see as defining what a "christian" is in our country today. (And for them, the lowercase 'c' is intentional.)

I was so baffled and incredulous, having been raised agnostic/atheist, when I first began to understand that Christians who are prone to denouncing people tend to be far more vicious to other devout Christians (of other denominations or differing interpretations of their faith) than they are to those who are not Christian at all.

I wonder if that's true of all bigotries.