Lewis and democracy as seen on atheist forum

[postodave]

Thought people might be interested in this one: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/1244
The comments are so self-congratulatory it gets a bit unreal - all the way from the guy who suggests Lewis may not have been aware of Clifford's essay on belief (Lewis takes on Clifford's central idea in a paper he delivered at the Socratic club called Obstinacy in Belief) all the way to the guy at the end who thinks Lewis was reflecting on Psalm 3 and chides everyone else for not looking up the source without being aware of the content of the Lewis book being quoted. But it does give an insight into the way militant atheists view Lewis.

[larry gilman]

The guy at the end isn't saying that Lewis was reflecting on Psalm 3, he's pointing out (correctly) that the quote doesn't come from Lewis's book "Reflections on the Psalms," Chapter 3, as cited in the original quote.

The passage is actually from the unfinished essay "A Reply to Professor Haldane," which has appeared in several anthologies: I have it in _Of This and Other Worlds_ (1982).

[postodave]

I hang my head in shame. I have both books and didn't check.

[larry gilman]

Ah well -- you'll have to go to one of those English pubs where male patrons pay to be paddled publicly by young women dressed as schoolgirls (as seen on TV, at least by me) -- it is the only 100% appropriate penance --

Cheers,

Larry'

[galion]

S&M in an English pub?? Point me at it!

[postodave]

I've been in lots of English pubs. I've seen transexuals, satan's slaves, drag queens, underage drinkers, cajun bands, gypsies, labourers, business men - floods, fires - including one pub where the money for coal ran out and the landlord invited us to burn the chairs to keep warm - in fact the same pub used to have a cellar where we had a psychedelic disco but the landlord collected WW2 memorabilia so you had all this sixties music and the walls covered in gas masks. In fact just about all this was in one and the same Bradford pub just before it burned down in what most of us thought was an insurance job. And as soon as I mentioned the place someone said 'I know that place, just after the war I went in there and all the women had prices on the soles of their shoes. Anyway the point I was trying to make was I never saw the school girls there or anywhere else.

[galion]

Yes, there are pubs catering to a variety of more-or-less exotic tastes in England if you look for them (for example, I was introduced to the Admiral Duncan in London's Soho a long time before it had a wider reputation as a gay venue, and when indeed homosexual acts could get you 2 years with hard labour - and in Leeds at a similar time there were pubs known as haunts of ladies of "easy virtue". However, like posttodave, I have never actually seen "schoolgirls" so-called paddling a gentleman on the bare breech in any of them.

And just to reassure anybody who doesn't know England, most pubs are pretty respectable places. If you go into a pub, you are extremely unlikely to be greeted by Fairy Hardcastke in full leathers wielding a bullwhip.

[larry gilman]

But TV is truth, and truth TV; that is all ye know, or need to know.

[postodave]

I was about to write something - then I thought but who will read it now. Hey! Sobs!