Left behind

In December 1999, I went to a grocery store in Boulder, the town where I lived at the time, and bought a box that had four 1-gallon jugs of water. They were on sale, on a special pallet in a prominent aisle. The store, of course, was trying to capitalize on the "Y2K" scare. My preparations for the coming calamity didn't extend much beyond this purchase, but I spent whatever amount of money I spent to get it. The following summer, there was still a box with four 1-gallon jugs of water in the room of my apartment--it served as a nice little table--and I had to empty the water when I moved out.

There was a certain amount of ridiculousness to all this. On most levels, I didn't believe the Y2K scare was much more than a scare, or I thought that, at most, maybe ATM's wouldn't work for a day or two, or perhaps the wrong date would appear on my bank statements, or my television, reverting to an earlier, double-digit aught-aught, would show only reprisals of Mr. Dooley or old "Mutt and Jeff" cartoons (okay, I made the last one up).

My purchase of water was also ridiculous for another reason: if things were going to be so bad that I needed 4 gallons of fresh water on stock, I would probably need a lot more than just 4 gallons of water. One can, I have heard, go without food for weeks and still survive. But without water, it is hard to survive (again, so I've heard) for much longer than a day or two. Four gallons likely would not have lasted me a week, and I'd probably feel obliged to share that with my roommates. One final point: I had water bottles and mason jars and the like--probably more than a mere four gallons worth, especially if I had sanitized old milk jugs that we saved for recycling--and could have stocked up on good ole tap water without paying whatever price the grocery store charged for what was probably also tap water.

The changeover to Y2K had no noticeable, direct affect on me personally or on anyone I know. I imagine some things stopped working as they should, but I either didn't notice them or if I did, they were so insignificant that I have since forgotten them.

Now, I hear that the much anticipated (by some) "rapture" of Christians has failed to materialize. The "rapture," as I understand it, is the notion that as part of the beginning of the end of this dispensation, Christ will take up the last remaining generation of Christians before the world undergoes a series of "tribulations" that will result in the second Kingdom of God. I suppose there are variations on the theme and although I think I have gotten the gist right, my description may fail in certain particulars. Anyway, apparently, some reverend somewhere has anticipated that the "rapture" would come yesterday, and it either failed to come or the number of Christians taken up was so small, and the Christians apparently so humble and so unworldly, that the remaining coterie of mammon worshipers has not noticed their absence.

This prediction has elicited at least some commentary (but then again, what prediction never elicits any controversy whatsoever?), most of it humorous or mocking. At Ordinary Gentlemen, Jason Kuzinicki has a quite funny post--followed by an amusing comment thread-- about the rapture predictions. And Alex Knapp, author of a "sub-blog" at Ordinary Gentlemen, has his own, more pensive, commentary on it. Other such commentaries abound. One facebook friend, for example, suggested that this was an essentially American phenomenon (if she meant that this particular prediction and instance of hand-wringing were mostly American, then I agree; if she meant that only Americans are susceptible to such millennialist anxieties, then I disagree). Most of the commentary I have seen (I have read nothing by those who purported to believe yesterday was THE DAY) embrace one or more of the following themes or ways of looking at the issue:

• The people who believed that the rapture would happen yesterday are stupid.
• The people who believed that the rapture would happen yesterday are/were so caught up in the narrative of their religion and are so willing to discount disconfirming evidence that their faith--or at least the faith of most of them--will remain, if shaken, largely unchanged.
• These people are rightly objects of our mockery.
  
• These people are rightly objects of our pity.
  
• These people are different from us, who are rational and not so subject to such wacky epistemological claims as those made by the true believers.
• The belief that the rapture would happen yesterday represents to some degree an absence of faith.
• The belief that the rapture would happen yesterday represents a misreading of the scriptural authority on which the notion of the rapture is based.
  

Perhaps humor is the right way to comment on these things. I have done and believed some wacky things in my life and sometimes the price of believing and doing wacky things is to be made fun of. And if one has even a modicum of a sense of humor, one can, hopefully, laugh at oneself after the sturm und drang is over.

Still, I hesitate to think that I or my more rationalist friends, are really all that free of such millennial or otherwise incredible (to others) thinking. Of course, maybe I'm an outlier--not everyone bought 4 1-gallon jugs of water, just as not everyone believes that if only we have a workers' revolution we will usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and widgets for all--but at the same time, maybe I'm not.

I don't know what lies in people's hearts,. what others secretly fear. And for what it's worth, especially if the notion of a "rapture" is untrue, we are all probably going to die someday and will worry about our final end, especially because probably none of us has complete certainty about what will happen afterward, or if some claim to have certainty, that certainty will not necessarily ease every and all anxiety:

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore.

It also seems to me that most branches of Christianity that accept at least some of the claims of the miraculous--even if it's only the incarnation--at least leave open the possibility, in the abstract, that something like the "rapture" might happen. Having been raised Catholic, I have never, or at least do not remember ever having heard, a priest expound on this possibility, but I have trouble believing that the notion of a rapture is so contradictory to Church doctrine that it is not at least debatable. I was, in a large chunk of my life, involved with what I will call evangelical faiths on at least some levels, and there I heard about the "rapture" in much more explicit and credulous terms. My point here is only that the most recent rapturists perhaps have committed an error (of faith? of timing? of hermeneutics? of hubris?), but they have done so drawing on beliefs that are not necessarily much different from those of some of their detractors.

It is easy to mock. It might even be necessary to mock. Still, I can't forget that I once bought 4 gallons of water.

On taking a position

Somewhere in my blog-reading career--I think it was on a thread at the Volokh Conspiracy or at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, although I don't remember exactly--one commenter wrote that atheism and theism were not "arguments," but positions that one takes. I think I agree, and I would add (heck, I will add) that agnosticism can/should be viewed in the same light. What I mean is, that each of these ism's takes a certain position for which it tries to argues or through which it processes evidence. (I am using "it" as a shorthand for those who believe in the athe- / agnostic- / the-ism). Here are the essential positions I see each ism taking:

• Atheism: there is no god.
• Agnosticism: it is impossible to know if there is a god or the jury's still out on whether there is a god.
• Theism: there is a god.

Now, this brief summary of positions leaves unanswered and undefined certain terms and questions: what kind of "god" are we talking about? what does one mean by "know"? who is sitting on the jury?

There are facts and arguments in support of each of these positions, and I tend to believe that these positions are not so hard and fast. Most atheists I have known, even the strident, proselytizing ones, admit that it's logically possible that a god of some sort might exist and that there might come a day where they might be proved wrong. Many theists I have known, although not necessarily the proselytizing ones, admit, on some level, that they might be wrong. Agnostics, perhaps by definition, seem to admit of the possibility of knowing one way or the other.

I am basing the preceding assertion based on what people of "goodwill" who take these positions would say. ("Goodwill" is a hard thing to define, and I'm not even a Kantian! I imagine that by "goodwill" I mean some question-begging definition that identifies "goodwill" as being willing to acknowledge discomfirming evidence.)
tend to believe that knowledgeable and curious people of goodwill who take such positions will acknowledge the discomfirming facts and arguments as well as the ones that tend to confirm the argument.

I'm not sure where I'm going with these thoughts, but I thought I'd put them out there.

Varieties of being Christian, or is there really a universal religion?

Probably because this is the Christmas season, I have decided to write about something that's been on my mind for quite a while. Many people who know me know that I enjoy reading the works of C. S. Lewis, and I think I have read most of his works that don't have to do with literary criticism: in other words, I've read most of his fiction and his pop-theology (he himself denied that he was properly a "theologian").

One of Lewis's most famous pop-theology works is Mere Christianity. In this book, he sets out to explain what he believes is the essence of Christianity, hence the word "mere": Christianity stripped to its bare essentials. (He also sets out to make a not very convincing proof of the truth of Christianity, but that's the topic for another post.) If I read and remember correctly, the main, Christianity requires the recognition that

1. Humans are depraved and subject to self-worship (Pride). (Lewis does not believe that humans' depravity is total or else, as he says, they would not know it.)
   
2. Humans' subjection to pride is inherent in their nature and leads them ultimately to spritual death.
3. Only Christ--through the free gift of salvation (grace)--can remedy this condition.
   

Now, two further points that Lewis makesL:

First, he does not insist that one must profess Christianity to attain salvation. Even though he believes that Christ is the only way, he is open to the possibility that others might be saved by Christ without knowing him.

Second, he claims that other world religions actually are approximations to Christianity. He claims that other religions shed their peculiar characteristics and become more "Christian" as they progress. In another work, Abolition of Man, Lewis appends a collection of moral sayings that he claims demonstrates that all humanity follows more or less the same ethical rules.

It's this second claim I'd like to interrogate further. But first, I'd like to discuss what I consider the "varieties" of being Christian so as to avoid mixing terms. Here they are, in rough order from less to more "spiritual":

1. Growing up in a Christian society (which for the sake of convenience, I'll define as a society in which an overwhelming majority of people self-identify as "Christian") makes one "Christian" in one sense, even if one does not profess Christianity. They are compelled to observe, or endure, Christian holidays and are compelled to undergo the casual references to Christianity-as-the-true-religion: the "in God we trust" logo on our currency; politicians' frequent invocation of a God that is almost always assumed to be Christian--even though they give a shout-out to Judaism and Islam; the sometimes transparent/sometimes not quite so transparent Christian messages.
2. Being raised in a Christian tradition also makes one "Christian," even if that "one" later rejects Christianity, i.e., converts to another religion or moves into atheism or agnosticism.
3. Professing "Christianity" makes one Christian in another sense. (I'll not go into what "truly" counts as Christian; it's too complicated and I'm too ignorant to do it well.)
4. Adhering to a belief system that somehow incorporates "essential" elements of Christianity. In this sense, to use Lewis's thesis that non-Christian religions approximate Christianity, people who don't profess Christianity approximate it in their beliefs. (Also, arguably, people who profess or self-identify as Christians but whose beliefs and actions do not approximate whatever is the essence of Christianity are not "Christian." Still, I'm not going to go into which denominations are and are not accurately called Christian.)

The last point is bothersome. Why say that other religions "approximate" Christianity? Why not say that Christianity, for example, "approximates" Hinduism and that as it sheds its conception of God and salvation it becomes more like the "true" way of Hinduism? Or any other religion. Heck, maybe even some sort of humanitarian atheism is the ultimate way and Christianity "improves" as it approximates that atheism.

Or maybe there is one universal "right" that all sincere religions "approximate." Of course, once I use the word "sincere," I get into trouble. Who is to judge sincerity? What standard is one to use in so judging? Still, I'll not go into that, at least not here. (I'm rejecting the possibility that there is more than one "right way." I do so partly for the sake of argument, but also because it seems to me that the notion of a singular "right" inheres even in the pluralistic notion of "all religions are equal.")

Since the notion of a universal "right" (nb: I'm not using "right" in the sense of, say, the "right to freedom of speech," more in the sense of "truth"; in fact, I should have used "truth," but I don't want to rewrite everything :)) is the last possibility I mentioned, it's obviously--following traditional expository style--the one I want to endorse, at least tentatively.

I hope to write later on this topic. But for now, I'll leave myself--and anyone who happens to be reading this blog--with some problems and challenges that this notion brings up:

1. It does not suffice to say, for example, that Christianity can be interpreted to sound like, say, Buddhism. It's probably possible to interpret any belief system and find elements common to other belief systems.
2. If I claim to identify certain "truths" that appear to be common in all major religions (the word "major," like the word "sincere," gets me in trouble here, too), maybe all the religions are wrong and there is another truth that they're missing or that they pervert irreparably.
3. What counts as a religion? Is Spinoza-like pantheism really a religion in the sense that, say, traditional Christianity is? Is the Daoism (Taoism) of Laozi really on the same level as, say, Islam, or vice versa? Is it even on the same level of the "popular" Daoism that appears to have emerged in China during the first millenium A.D.? Is atheism or agnosticism a religion? Is there such a thing as one atheism or one agnosticism, or are there variants?
   

Caritas in a world ruled by sin

Stanley Fish has a new column (click here to see it) that he devotes, in part, to describing the difficulties of charity when it comes, for example, to giving money to panhandlers:

If I don’t do anything, I feel guilty. If I reach into my pocket and hand over a few dollars, I feel guiltier. I thought for a while that the problem was the amount, so I started giving more, sometimes significantly more; but that only felt like an effort to buy my way out of an imbalance between what I had and what the objects (that’s the problem; I was making them [the homeless, the poor, et al.] into objects) of my largesse either lacked or had lost.

The accounts could never be squared. They would always be behind in resources, I would always be behind in the obligation to care for those less fortunate than I. I could just stop giving altogether, but that would seem even worse. Or I could give away all my earthly goods, but the hook of material possessions is too deeply in me for that. I could do more, but I could never do enough.

Fish goes on to relate this phenomenon with his study of 17th-century English literature (he himself is a specialist on John Milton). He notes that such poets as Andrew Marvell and George Herbert have noticed the same tendencies in their own writing. Instead of glorifying God--in the poems Fish refers to--these poets note the unrelenting resurfacing of the ego, of the selfishness that they believed inhered in their works.

Charity--or, to use a more laden word, caritas, or the unconditional love of others that is supposedly the essence of Christianity--exists, as Fish points out much more clearly than I am, in a world in which we are ever more inclined toward ourselves, to the exclusion of others.

In the case of the column I linked to, at issue was charitable giving (alms), but anything else that threatens to take us beyond ourselves and our own selfish desires can serve as an example. There's the old adage, for example, that "you always hurt the one you love."

The purest of emotions, the purest of acts, are nevertheless still impure in this world

A death remembered

The first time I ever saw someone die was two years ago today.

I arrived at Denver International Airport sometime in late morning or early afternoon on September 7, 2007, and my sister and her partner picked me up at the airport. They asked if I was comfortable going to the hospice, especially since it was all just a matter of time before my father would pass. I wasn't sure if I was comfortable, but I went anyway.

My oldest brother and his wife were there. My siblings, except the one who, like me, didn't live in Colorado, had been visiting my father in shifts. My father, who was a tall person (over 6 feet) and rather heavyset, seemed very small on the bad, as he gasped regularly for breaths of air.

My father shared his room with another person who was also dying. Two of this person's friends were there. It was clear that they had gotten to know my siblings in the past couple of weeks. The shared experience was some sort of bond for them.

We all left briefly to get some sandwiches for ourselves and for these other people in the room.

We ate in the cafeteria of the hospice. My brother and sister talked about the times when they left home and started out on their own. To my surprise, because I had remembered it all differently, they described it as "running away" from home.

We came back and my father was much obviously closer to death. He continued to breathe, but he was noticeably paler than even a half hour or so before. The hospice nurse said that patients tend to keep from dying while family are around, and when we had left, he must've progressed much more to that end because we were not around.

My brother talked to him. Told him it was okay to die. Told him they would all have coffee together on the other side, like they used to at Denny's (or whatever the name of that restaurant was they used to go to).

My father's breathing was more and more labored. He opened his eyes in my direction. My sister's partner told me "he's looking at you." He breathed in but didn't seem to breathe out again. For some reason a line from James Joyce's Dubliners (from the short story called "A Painful Case") flashed through my head: "His father died. The president of the bank retired."

We all cried for a few minutes. The crying started spontaneously and stopped just as suddenly.

The two other people, who were staying with their friend in the same room, stood up and bowed their heads out of respect.

The hospice nurse came in and verified that my father had died.

On the cusp of death, he had seemed small and frail. Now, after dying, his body re-assumed the proportions I had been familiar with. He was obviously not alive. His spirit, soul, elan vital--whatever it's called--was no longer there.

Mr. Obama and King David

I've been meaning to write for some time on the sadness of what I take to be the best case scenario for Mr. Obama's imminent presidential term(s). By "best case scenario," I refer to the prospect that Mr. Obama will implement many of the reforms he campaigned on and that his governance will be beneficial to the U.S. and to the rest of the world. By whatever standard one might measure a presidency, in the "best case scenario," his presidency would be a success.

By "sadness" I refer to the toll that the presidency exacts on the president. One has only to look at the before-and-after pictures of most past presidents to realize the tremendous personal price they each (or at least most of them) pay. Even in the "best case scenario," Mr. Obama will probably look old and gray by the end of his term(s). I recall in a recent interview he gave--I believe it was on "60 Minutes"--in which he stated that he liked to take long, solitary walks and will not be able to do so now.

In Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East, the character Leo comments to the narrator on King David of Israel:

He was also a musician [like the narrator, "H. H."]. When he was quite young he used to play for King Saul and sometimes dispelled his bad moods with music. Later he became a king himself, a great king full of cares, having all sorts of moods and vexations. He wore a crown and conducted wars and all that kind of thing, and he also did many really wicked things and became very famous. But when I think of his life, the most beautiful part of it all is about the young David and his harp playing music to poor Saul, and it seems a pity to me that he later became a king. He was a much happier and better person when he was a musician.

God's Gonna Cut You Down

President Bush, in a recent interview recapped in an article published on Yahoo news, admits that he made mistakes. The two the article mentions are his "mission accomplished" declaration shortly after the invasion or Iraq and his "bring 'em on" challenge to Iraqi insurgents. This is the first time that I'm aware of that Mr. Bush has publicly admitted mistakes. At any rate, the rest of the article comments on Mr. Bush's thoughts on his recent visit with President-elect Obama:

It was interesting to watch him go upstairs....He wanted to see where his little girls were going to sleep. Clearly, this guy is going to bring a sense of family to the White House, and I hope Laura and I did the same thing. But I believe he will, and I know his girls are on his mind and he wants to make sure that first and foremost, he is a good dad.

It is quite possible to see such comments as so much political hay. Anyone with a sense of public image--and I think Mr. Bush has a very strong sense of public image--knows that token expressions of humility and gracious acknowledgment of an opponent's virtues look good. But maybe his statements also signify a new, genuine humility.

I don't know and it's not my place 1) to decide if Mr. Bush has attained a new humility from performing his duties as president or 2) to judge Mr. Bush in that particular at any rate. Humility, to my mind the highest virtue (if properly defined), is an almost divine quality and only God (if he exists) has the prerogative to judge that quality.

As a random musing, however, I might state that it's possible that having a post that requires one to carry out any responsibility--let alone the office of the presidency--can be humbling, can create humility, a realization that one is not sufficient to oneself, nor "an island, entire unto itself." Maybe this is a positive development.

The Army of Unalterable Law

Leon Fink has written a column for the Newsobserver in which he notes the awe-some feeling of joy and empowerment at the Grant Park celebration of Mr. Obama's victory:

For the first time I could remember, the power of a crowd seemed not merely unthreatening but positively intoxicating: We each felt connected to a power larger than ourselves and envisioned the world a better place than it is.

While this rally may have been much of what its supporters make it out to be--a democratic/Democratic moment of a new hope and a hope for new change--it is also an instance of a collectivist mentality that can have its malign, mobocratic effects. Mr. Obama's election seems to have reflected the hopes and aspirations of many who otherwise felt powerless. His election may yet provide substantive results to the good of the republic, but the election was also the product of a slick campaign, well-organized and heavily funded, well compromised and carefully worded. Mr. Obama's/Mr. Axelrod's strategy was simple and understandable: not to lose.

I believe my critique and words of caution ought to be well-heeded. Yet I cannot help recalling William Blake's admonition that

The questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to reply

And that

If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out

There is hope, and there is realism. Hope, carried to an extreme and placed in an idol (be that idol a drug, a lover, or a politician), can descend into vicious fanaticism and self-righteous pride. Realism, carried to an extreme and placed in the idol of an immutable disbelief in the efficacy of action to improve society and to help others, can descend into a despairing cynicism and self-satisfied pride. I don't mean to go Ariostotelian on anyone, but either extreme is dangerous, and should we adhere to either too assiduously, our foot "shall slide in due time."

To throw yet another allusion and mixed metaphor into this hodgepodge, I might say that in such reflections on the Grant Park rally as provided by Mr. Fink, even a proto-cynic like myself can feel like the antagonist in George Meredith's sonnet, "Lucifer in Starlight". In that poem, Lucifer decides to take a trip away from his kingdom (the earth, the world) and when he attains the lower reaches of heaven,

....he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

The Idolatry of Struggle

I have had some "radical" friends, usually of a radical Marxist bent, tell me that life is one of constant struggle against the Power (usually, but I suppose not necessarily, "capitalism," which I have a hard time at any rate defining) . They say that ideally, all our actions should be directed to realizing "social justice." The art we patronize should advance "the cause," the poetry we write must have political purpose, the songs we listen too must not be reactionary, but "progressive."

Along with this frame of mind is an interpretive school of thought, epitomized, for example, by historians Tera Hunter, George Lipsitz, and Robin D. G. Kelley, that celebrates "working-class culture" as a continual act of resistance against the strictures of capitalism. I do not say here and now that such scholars claim that all aspects of working-class culture involve a struggle against the power, although some of their works , at the very least, imply that.

This insistence on life as a perpetual struggle (for "social justice" or, what is also a popular term, "survival" because "survival itself is a political act), whether it comes from the "gramsci-ite" scholars, Trotskyites, or even early 20th century anarcho-syndicalists, suffers from at least one major flaw. Most people, or at least many people, don't want to have to constantly struggle. They don't want to be on guard all the time. They want space and they want leisure. (True, scholars like Hunter claim that "leisure" time, because it's out of reach of the bosses' work time, is a "space" of resistance, whether the resistors see it that way or not. But isn't this stretching the issue a bit?)

True, the social justice radical might tell me, but in our present, oppressive system, people don't have that choice. Maybe, although I have my doubts; still, I think they want the choice.

The anarcho-syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World inveighed against the practice of unions establishing collective bargaining contracts because the contractual obligations, if observed, hindered workers from engaging in class-solidarity through general strikes and sympathy strikes. Still, a contract, if observed by both sides, provides some breathing space to relax.

C. S. Lewis and Theocracy

Here are some of C. S. Lewis's thoughts on theocracy, taken from The World's Last Night and other Essays (p.40):

"Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All political power is at best a necessary evil: but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives. Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle with our private lives. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Thus the Renaissance doctrine of Divine Right is for me a corruption of monarchy; Rousseau's General Will, of democracy; racial mysticisms, of nationality. And Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is the worst corruption of all."

Gollum and the Sin of Pride

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the ring is the worst sin of all....the sin of pride. And Gollum represents what pride can do to someone. It can take a peaceful, hobbit-like creature and make him into a hideous, self-loathing hermit with a bifurcated personality.

Then again, no. Nor pride nor the ring did this to Gollum, he did it to himself. He let the ring do it. The ring was so powerful that no being, even Frodo, could resist it (witness Frodo's attempt at the end to appropriate the ring for himself; witness also the fact he never recovered from his tenure as ring bearer).

Gollum is an example of pride. Pride is normally defined (i.e., when it is defined as a vice and not something to be, well, proud of, like good grades.....I once got a "Pride Scholarship") as inordinate self-love. Why do I characterize Gollum's pride as self-loathing?

Because "love" is the wrong word for what pride represents. It represents self-worship, and self-worship, when the self is not a fit object to be worshiped, becomes self-imprisonment, or worship of a fetish, in this case, the self. He imprisons himself with himself and hates himself for it.

Gollum was so enthralled with his "precious" that he structured his whole life around it, retreated to the dark recesses of "Middle Earth" to be alone with it, and saw himself as another, different from himself. He saw himself as the ring, and he worshiped the ring. Such was the meaning of Tolkien's choice to write Gollum's internal dialogue/monologue with "we" instead of "I" as the subject.

Gollum, when we meet him in The Hobbit and when we see him in the later works, is in Hell. He is caught up in his own cycle of self-worship and self-hatred.

C. S. Lewis and Hell

I have read elsewhere (and I don't have the time or inclination to look up the source) that C. S. Lewis supposedly believes that hell is "a state of mind." This assertion, at least in the location where I read it, was written by a self-professed evangelical Christian who wanted to discredit what he saw as his co-religionists' misplaced praise of Lewis.

While I do believe their praise is misplaced because he did not really espouse the causes or the outlook that many evangelicals claim to believe in (he once wrote....I believe it was in "Mere Christianity"....that even though he believed homosexuality is a sin, he had no right to judge homosexuals because he, not being one, was not himself subject to the temptations and virtues of being gay, not exactly the official, DOCTOR Dobson sanctioned stance), this person had it wrong about Lewis's conception of hell, at least if his work "The Great Divorce" is any indication.

In that story--I hesitate to say "allegory," because Lewis had a very precise definition of allegory and claimed that none of his writings, save for "Pilgrim's Regress" (unread by me) was properly "allegorical"--the narrator has a dream where he visits hell. He finds it is full of people who cannot live with each: they reside in isolation: no neighborhoods, no community. Each claims, more or less, to be self-sufficient and each is prey to blaming others for his or her problems. (In one scene, the narrator is on a bus in hell and a stranger tries to force him (the narrator) to read his (the stranger's) poetry.....quite humbling food for thought given my own poetic aspirations.) To top it all off, the people in hell either don't know they are in hell, or they vaguely realize it but find it so much more interesting than they imagine heaven to be. The story goes on when the narrator and a few of hell's inhabitants take an excursion to heaven, where everyone is much larger, much more "complete" and much stronger than the shadowy people from hell. Indeed, heaven is so much more "real" that it hurts the hellites even to walk upon the ground (as it might hurt one to walk barefoot along a gravelly road).

To me, this story suggests Lewis believed that hell is a state of being and not merely a state of mind. (In his other writings--I believe in "Mere Christianity"--he also says that hell is the principle of death counterposed to the principle of life, i.e., heaven. In other words, by focusing on what I see as Lewis's notion of hell as a state of being, I acknowledge that I am bracketing what for him was probably the more important distinction of eternal life versus eternal death, a distinction I'm not sure I believe in, since I don't know if I believe in eternal life.) The state of being is one of pride, or extreme introversion and egocentrism, the belief that the universe revolves around oneself (as, in the Christian scheme of the world, the universe revolves around God). In other words, the essential sin that lands people in hell is their choice to try to make themselves the center of the universe, to make themselves "as God."

How many evangelicals would fully buy into this notion of hell? Maybe a lot; maybe a majority. But I do wonder whether the DOCTOR Dobsons of the world would. They have, and I stand to be corrected, set up a universe that revolves around themselves.

When "Progressives" are bigots

Too Clever by Half, who apparently read the same Wall Street Journal articles I read this morning, claims that traditionalist Amish and Mennonites (and, just to salt and pepper the pot, he adds in a n unsupported jibe at "fundamentalist Christians") should, in his infelicitous phrasing, have help getting "their heads out of their own a---es." He bemoans the travesty of a "premodern" people trying to escape their responsibilities in the world and yet "free ride" on the services and protections that the world provides. In other words, Amish and Mennonites should take out health insurance just like everybody else instead of seeking charity care and then complaining when the hospital sends their bills to collections.

Fair enough, but he misrepresents the WSJ article we both read. The article discusses a Mennonite farmer who has already paid over $400,000 of his own money (he is now, according to the article, in debt for about $287,000). That should be mentioned before that blogger writes that "they don't pay their debts." Of course, "seriously, these people have no sense of restraint, shame, or responsibility."

Yes, there are compromises that a traditionalist has to make and he or she should take those compromises in account. But the "progressives" of the world could do without Too Clever's condescension.

Varieties of Judgement

A well known dictum from the Bible (I believe it's a verbatim quotation, but I do not know the book, chapter, or verse, so I stand to be corrected) states "Judge not lest ye be judged."

What does it mean "to judge." For example, regarding the story about the teenagers who beat a homeless man to death while others watched, I am inclined to say that I should not judge the others who watched. Yet can I at the same time say that watching without assisting the man was wrong (a statement that is a judgment about right and wrong) and still be consistent? I think so, as long as I am clear about what sense of judgment I mean. Here are the following senses I can identify.

• Judgment as to the truth or falsity of facts
• Judgment as the choice between at least two possibilities
  
• Judgment as to rightness or wrongness of a given act
• Judgment as moral condemnation or as moral approbation

I am inclined to say only the latter meaning is intended by the Biblical verse. Still, obeying such a verse--if one is so inclined--strikes me as particularly difficult.

Christianity and Buddhism are a lot alike, especially Buddhism

C. S. Lewis supposedly said this. I just think it's a neat quotation.

C. S. Lewis and the Idol of Money

The protagonist in Perelandra, one of C. S. Lewis's science fiction novels, has the following ruminations shortly after landing on Venus (ellipses in original):

"The itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards...was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself--perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film."