Behind enemy lines.

My ‘LOL’ moment with CS Lewis and his book – Mere Christianity.

After my first stroke I found that I needed some light entertainment in the evening as I just didn’t have enough concentration to spend much time on my writing project : I turned to YouTube and the educating series – I think the series started with Manchester but I may be wrong. Anyway, in one of them there is a scene shot in the classroom where teacher asks the question “capital of so and so country and it starts with N ?”. One teenage girl pipes up with the answer “Narnia !”….I have a feeling that it might have been in the Educating Essex series, whatever, it was a priceless LOL moment.

The link to my post today is that of Narnia’s author, CS Lewis, who’s well known book ‘Mere Christianity‘ I have just finished reading while on holiday and that too gave me an unexpected LOL moment although i’m sure not one that Lewis intended. I don’t remember having read anything by CS Lewis earlier in my life, I think I was aware of Narnia, knew something about the Screwtape Letters but may have dismissed Mere Christianity as being so much religious jaw as the author says in the actual book. Anyway, as I say it gave me a real LOL moment and I thought for a while that Lewis could have been writing about the current year rather than the years in which he gave radio broadcast talks to explain Christianity,

My first LOL moment came when I read Lewis’s take on tyrants or despots – he says that when compared to saints the tyrants all seem the same. Given that he was most likely writing about the periods he had lived through, the first and second world wars, and had therefore seen and experienced the horrors of both extreme right wing and just as extreme left wing (politically and socially) then surely he would have seen Hitler and his minions, and Stalin plus his minions, as being radically different in their forms of tyranny. I of course was thinking about the modern tyrants and they all seem depressingly mediocre and copy book similar : they all use the same tired and useless words and all seem to sing off the same Marxist hymn list.

My second Lewis inspired LOL came when I read what he had to say about useless or meaningless words, I immediately thought of Keir Starmer and his continuous use of far right and clearly racist – both utterly meaningless now when someone somewhere will tag anything that they dislike as far right, racist, misogynistic and so and and so forth. In Mere Christianity uses a different example – he uses the word and term gentleman and gentlemanlike as once having a useful and functional fact behind it, that a gentleman was a man who had a coat of arms and didn’t have to perform manual work, but now the term gentleman was more akin to ‘someone whose conduct I approve of , ie gentlemanly. What Keir Starmer seems to do all the time is not so much tell us something useful – I don’t think there is such a thing as an active far right in the UK and racist is a term much more applicable to the far left – unlike an invisible far right there really are had left or far left groups such as Antifa, BLM, Hope not hate and so on and so forth……

,Where it gets serious with CS Lewis, in my view, is where I stopped reading everything he said with the new Labour government in mind as an immediate example of anti Christian language and conduct and coming up against his words about cnnsidering that we are living behind enemy lines, the wartime analogy seems very apposite when the British police are kicking down doors at 0500 for inflammatory tweets misinformation and thoughtcrime ; ok so those ideas are more Orwellian than Lewisian but I hope you get the idea as George Orwell was warning us about characters like Starmer and his hard left cronies and more chillingly the kind of society that they ultimately lead to.

I finished with CS Lewis, at least temporarily, when he asks us where we stand, his hope being that it would be with the Christian resistance and I for one had to go and have a really good think about that one : thankfully I was sat in the excellent Coffee One outlet in Weymouth at that moment so a fresh mug of coffee was the first call…..

So, we come to it – in Lewis’s question to us ‘where do I stand’, well I wrote about that recently although I didn’t confront the central question although I have done since. I stand with the resistance although at the moment i’m more of a fellow traveler and more honestly agnostic (don’t know) than what I used to be – I used to pride myself on being rationally atheistic but now i’m not so sure. Two years ago I had so many questions that I was moved to go and talk to the local RC parish priest and that winter I sat through his RCIA class although ultimately fruitlessly as firstly they rejected me (irregular sexual relationship ie long term partner but happily unmarried) and I still had major problems with one of the major Catholic beliefs – transubtantiation – which I can accept as a deeply symbolic act but not an actual/physical one. Maybe I should have shopped around just as CS Lewis describes finding a form of communion and congregation that somehow fits although that seems to me to be what I see as the core C of E problem – which is to choose the bits we can swallow and reject the more uncomfortable parts. The local bunch seem to be uncomfortably down the woke side as many followers are……just be nice eh ?

I’d like to finish today’s piece with an accidental few words I heard in a song by Floor Jansen (Nightwish). It’s hard to light a candle , easy to curse the darkness instead

The first few moments of this video should chill us all….this is Brett Weinstein talking about the current state of the world as he sees it.