Quote: On facing up to and persisting against temptation
I know about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc. don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of his presence.
~ CS Lewis, from Letters of CS Lewis
(HT to Ryft for the reference)… Continue reading ...
Quote: we are too easily pleased
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
CS Lewis, from The Weight of Glory
Contradiction? No. Misunderstanding? Yes.
Lately I have been working my way through CS Lewis’s classic, The Problem of Pain. In it there is one line that I lifted out of its pages and plugged into my Twitter timeline – and after that there started some dialogue with a fellow (we’ll call him Pete) who believed that the statement was contradictory and who subsequently mocked it as such.
Well, either this Pete is a very intelligent man and CS Lewis was an idiotic fool or, quite probably, the quote I twittered was most likely misunderstood.
Speaking on the necessity of God’s love for us and of the characteristic of God’s love for us, Lewis wrote “[that it is because God] already loves us… Continue reading ...
Quote: God doesn’t promise Christians an end to their troubles
When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well … he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along – illness, money troubles, new kinds of temptations – he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing [God] means… Continue reading ...
Responses to 50 reasons why religion sucks, pt.1 of 5
Thoughts out !oud tends to get a fair bit of Google search traffic for the term “religion sucks”. This seems to be in response to a blog post I published a few months back titled: Why Religion Sucks (and will destroy your soul). As a result, I thought I would address one of the search result items that I found when I punched in the same search term: 50 Reasons Why Relgion Sucks. It occurred to me that many people are likely parroting some of these very “reasons” as to why religion sucks, so let’s challenge them a little.
The format is a simple objection / response format. As there are 50 of them, I’ve decided to split up the responses into five separate posts – just to… Continue reading ...
Quote: Prayer is not a pokie machine
The reason that prayer doesn’t always get answered, or that we have a hard time even finding a mechanistic way of treating prayer, is because prayer is not a machine.
CS Lewis, CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
Quote: to love is to be open to hurt
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)… Continue reading ...
Quote: Former atheist speaks on cruelness and injustice
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private… Continue reading ...
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