This forum was closed on October 1st, 2010. However, the archives are open to the public and filled with vast amounts of good reading and information for you to enjoy. If you wish to meet some Wardrobians, please visit the Into the Wardrobe Facebook group.

Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Comprising most of Lewis' writings.
Forum rules
Please keep all discussion on topic and in line with our code of conduct.

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby cyranorox » July 9th, 2010, 4:32 pm

-tiny quibble: Origen, Greek for 'mountain-born', not Origin.
Good point on Athanasius.
RE: noblest- I agree that the content is not a given, and not to be assumed based on the ambient. It requires some thought and attention to tradition, variant views, and revelation. While every such issue skirts close to circular reasoning, some valid synthesis can be approached: Passion, greed, grasping and jealousy are ignoble.

Our modern variant imho is the realization that punishment is not a good; that any time the end can be served without it, it should be dropped. The idea that the wrongdoer ought to be hurt - whether or not he is improved by it - is less and less plausible, for whatever reason. His pain really satisfies nothing of worth- not justice, rightly seen, although I don't expect general agreement with this proposition. His repudiation of wrong is the goal, and punishment the means; therefore, we are less likely to be tied to literal readings where punishment is mentioned in the Bible.
Apocatastasis Now!
cyranorox
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 283
Joined: Dec 2007
Location: a garret over a moonlit street

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » July 10th, 2010, 6:17 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby cyranorox » July 13th, 2010, 6:24 pm

"the anger of [a] God should not be like that of a man"
Euripides, The Bacchae
It must mean something, but it cannot be anger as we know it. What is anger but desire to hurt? or feeling mulcted, neglected, or imposed upon? - or felt on behalf of another. It is one of the passions, from which God is free. In His kenotic humility He has accepted to feel pain, and even passions such as hunger or sleep [yes these are passions in the sense of what-is-suffered]. But anger as a virtue? the therapist works with a psyche unable to fully see itself, so the analogy does not seem strong to me. The therapist has no argument against the wrongness of anger; he only claims that men are liable to repress what they believe to be wrong, but cannot avoid.

CSL and I differ here: anger, even dressed up as 'wrath', is no virtue for a man; a forteriori, not of God. Therefore the statements that attribute it to Him must be images referring to something other and better than anger, but somehow best shown to us in this figure.
Apocatastasis Now!
cyranorox
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 283
Joined: Dec 2007
Location: a garret over a moonlit street

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby archenland_knight » July 14th, 2010, 5:57 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
User avatar
archenland_knight
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 774
Joined: Aug 2008
Location: Obviously at a computer keyboard

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby cyranorox » July 14th, 2010, 6:46 pm

@AK- i think the language about passions is somewhat obscure to you. We can perceive a wrong, and intend to act upon it, with or without anger. But 'do something' is often a mistake. If the action needed is merciful, the proper motive is pity. If justice is to be attempted, the proper motive is love of justice. Even that is not necessarily connected to anger. You don't need anger to right wrongs; you don't need to be motivated by it, but to decide. That is from a different aspect of the mind. Any such motivation is a work-around or crutch - of course many of us need it - but that's consistent with my premise that anger is ignoble. Part of the distinction is that anger is a passion, ie, something suffered, something of which we are passive recipients, but pity or love are something we do, active virtues.

Your psychologist is downstream of the conversation; he has accepted as literal the idea of God's anger, but the conversation, or at least my part of it, was involved in questioning that position.

The quote from Euripides is a famous climax, demanding nobility and disinterest from the god who has acted in a way beneath the justice of man
Apocatastasis Now!
cyranorox
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 283
Joined: Dec 2007
Location: a garret over a moonlit street

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » July 14th, 2010, 7:37 pm

I'm with Knight. He's said a lot of what I'd want to say better than I could have said it and at greater length. I think the approach to motivation in your reply makes people sound very cold and calculating. There are plenty of examples of Jesus in the gospels getting angry and the anger does seem to motivate him, albeit along with other things. I think the other problem here is that we have a description of God in mythical or picture language and Cyranorox, you seem to be trying to get behind that and get a glimpse of what God is really like. I don't think we can do that. I don't see that God's other attributes such as love must be taken literally whereas anger must not. We can take them all literally or we can see them all as pointers towards something we can never really grasp.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby cyranorox » July 14th, 2010, 10:20 pm

I am giving an argument derived fromthe concept of apatheia, an ideal state for humans of passionlessness, but not coldness; a state of charity and virtue, warmth and activity. As explained [and I have not achieved it!] it's hard to distinguish from coldness; when it has been seen there is no question.

Love and anger may both be metaphors; but Love will refer to something greater and similar to our 'love'; I am sure anger will refer to something greater and other than our 'anger'.

I agree that you have to mythologize; but advisedly, and not reducing all the images to the same plane - I have no sense that you do that generally, but here you seem to.
Apocatastasis Now!
cyranorox
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 283
Joined: Dec 2007
Location: a garret over a moonlit street

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » July 17th, 2010, 9:42 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby archenland_knight » August 12th, 2010, 6:31 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
User avatar
archenland_knight
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 774
Joined: Aug 2008
Location: Obviously at a computer keyboard

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » August 15th, 2010, 6:57 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby archenland_knight » August 16th, 2010, 3:54 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
User avatar
archenland_knight
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 774
Joined: Aug 2008
Location: Obviously at a computer keyboard

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » August 28th, 2010, 8:27 am

Well, it feels right, almost obvious to me. Protestants have always felt it was okay to criticise the Fathers in this way and the main problem is a feeling that one is not worthy. Is it possible to recognize their moral superiority, their utter dedication to what they did believe, but also to question whether that morality is always right. It is after all possible that they are right and we, I mean I specifically, are so far down the moral ladder that we miss that. Like reading a parody of an argument and responding as if it were a straight argument or criticising a disharmonious passage in a piece of music that has it's significance in a structure one has not grasped. Maybe that is what I am doing here but there are reasons for thinking this is not so or at least not the whole story.

The question it seems to me is how early Christian thinking and Greek thinking relate. Is it that Christianity is polluted by ideas that are culturally alien to it (and this claim has been made in several ways with different ideas about the original nature of Christianity) is it that Christianity uses Greek terminology but remains distinctive, or is it that Christianity transforms the Greek world view and suffuses it with something new. Perhaps all three in different respects. I think Lewis is important in this discussion because he is so at home in both the Classical and Christian worlds.

I wish Cyranorox would rejoin this discussion she was making such interesting contributions.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby rusmeister » August 29th, 2010, 6:06 pm

I'm actually logging in (having periodically lurked for some time now)...
I'd participate, but I feel that this forum was gutted last year, and has become what Stanley predicted: "Into the Daycare Center". This is not a personal comment on you, AK, you've always been a bit above that, but it's just why I don't post any more. Why bother? Debate is forbidden (and is often not useful unless people actually want to dig to truth), but this site lost something that made it a forum that practically doesn't discuss what Lewis thought important at all. The weight loss and "what do you look like?" threads predominate, and the question of truth - that this thread alludes to - has been made of no import.

So while this is not a final goodbye for me, it might as well be. I have no more motivation to post here - just a sadness at what this place has become. I see that a place alive with discussions Lewis would have fed on (and some that he would have shunned - there were some wrongs - primarily discourtesy and a failure to prevent it) has become an insipid place with only a few topics even coming close to touching on the issue of truth (this thread being one of them). A few people got what they want, I suppose. But it is no longer a Socratic Club - and members like Stanley are greatly missed. I see a huge disparity between what Lewis thought worth discussing and what is actually discussed here now.
"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
Bill "The Blizzard" Hingest - That Hideous Strength
User avatar
rusmeister
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 1795
Joined: Dec 2005
Location: Russia

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby Nerd42 » August 29th, 2010, 11:43 pm

Well my point about pagan ideas influencing Christian ideas was only meant to refer to the realm of religion. It's not a problem if we inherit any philosophical or political wisdom coming out of Socrates and Aristotle. But we have a holiday named, "Easter," after a pagan fertility god. That's not a philosophical influence, that's a cultural and ultimately religious influence. Pagan feasts become christian feasts and demigods became saints. Alot of the same religious ideas remained sometimes even though the flag over the fort happened to be a different color. I don't think that's how things ought to have worked.

I don't have to agree with Lewis about EVERYTHING, do I?
Nerd42
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 160
Joined: Jul 2009

Re: Lewis' thoughts on other major religions?

Postby postodave » August 30th, 2010, 10:55 am

Hi Rus

The thought police don't seem to notice what's going on down here in the catacombs - or maybe they don't mind as long as we're not disturbing the peace. At the end of the day John's in charge as he set up the site but it has lost some of it's charm since the great purge.

Hi Nerd

I'm not sure where your comments are picking up from. I'm intrigued by your idea that there is a realm of religion and its implication that there are other realms such as philosophy and politics that are non-religious. Are you advocating something like Gould's Non-overlapping magisteria or are you being more subtle than that? I should point out that even Gould sees religion as being concerned with ethics and therefore surely with both politics and philosophy. I suppose the big question is what is religion; what is it that makes a particular belief or practice religious? And what is it about religion which according to you would exclude politics and philosophy?

As a reminder of Lewis's view: You have nature, the cycle of the year which is transformed by the pagans into the idea of death in winter and resurrection in Spring, or death in the seed resurrection in the fruit and so on. Then the same God who created nature sends his Son to die and rise again and so enacts once and for all the truth inherent in nature - As Martin Luther says not only does scripture teach resurrection but every new bud of Spring - Thereafter if some old pagan ideas get taken back into Christianity and transformed this is all to the good. That was Cyranorox point about Christmas and with all due respect for the Puritans I'm inclined to agree with her really. So I don't think the pagan origins of the word Easter or the choice of spring for the celebration is a problem. The saints taking over from the gods might be more of an issue
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
postodave
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 848
Joined: Oct 2004

PreviousNext

Return to Apologetics & Other Works

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered members and 11 guests