Screwtape Letters

[Uncle Screwtape]

[Sloppy Zhang]

Hmm, that's interesting. I've heard a lot about the Screwtape Letters but never got around to reading them. That one was an interesting read.

 

Also, don't bother about your forum name, I don't really care about someone's forum name, as it's just an identifier. It points to the person speaking, and doesn't necessarily represent them totally.

 

As for the subject matter, it's incredibly ironic, because in my experience using logic (argument) actually DOESN'T work in favor of Christians. As soon as you start pointing out things that aren't logical, things that contradict other things, and such inconsistencies, Christians get all up in arms and suddenly the conversation goes right out the window. And, if your argument is especially strong, and you are able to support your side of the argument with quotations from the Bible, they get REALLY angry and accuse you of twisting the words of the Bible for your own fiendish purposes.

 

So, I must disagree with C.S. Lewis. The fastest way to turn someone off of Christianity is to use logic, to use argument, because the vast majority of Christians (not ALL Christians, I've met some very good, and very nice, Christian apologists) can't even defend their faith.

 

And, as a disclaimer, I'm not anti-Christian. I really like Christianity, there's a lot of good stuff. What I am against is people who follow dogma blindly, and they can subscribe to any faith (or lack thereof). If you have truly done study and self reflection and come to your answer, great, fine and dandy, but if you're just along for the ride, and WORSE, bugging people because of THEIR faith, when you yourself have no strong basis in your own faith..... just not cool.

Edited July 7, 2009 by Sloppy Zhang

[Uncle Screwtape]

Yeah, I don't agree with much of what Lewis says in the book, but I did find him very thought provoking. I was nineteen at the time, and it opened up a whole new world for me to explore. Fifteen years later, here I am.

 

The last paragraph of the above letter I found the most interesting from a Taoist point of view.

 

Richard

Edited July 7, 2009 by Uncle Screwtape

[Creation]

This is incredibly ironic because I started re-reading The Screwtape Letters last night. C.S. Lewis is one of my all time favorite authors. On a whim I flipped open my copy of The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics to the end of letter 27 where Screwtape talks about the Divine viewpoint and agency in hearing and answering prayers, and preventing people from gaining wisdom from old books by convincing people that the way to approach them is the historical point of view:

 

"You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy [God], like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that the Enemy does not see things that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the Enemy's mode of perception--he doesn't really think (though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are! If you tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the innumerable coordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself--so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given 'from the word go'. What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely an appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy's nonsense about 'Love'. How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it"

[Much of this will no doubt sound very familiar to a Taoist, even though Lewis expresses his Spiritual Philosophy in Theistic terms.]

"It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out. But in the intellectual climate which we have at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn't bother about that. Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, an how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the leaned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible course of knowledge--to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour--this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut ever generation off from all others, for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors fo one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father [the Devil] and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk',

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE"

 

Upon reading this I immediately thought, "I have to read this whole thing again". And this is just after I finished reading his Surprised By Joy (one of my all time favorite books) a fifth time.

 

Zhang: Remember that Lewis was writing to Englishmen in 1941. He wasn't exactly dealing with modern Bible-Belt fundamentalists. In fact, part of his point was that how to get at someone changes over time and place because of cultural circumstances. I have found that as Lewis was very intelligent, well read, and honest, if he says something that seems to be blatantly untrue, it is because the reader is missing something of his point or context.

[Uncle Screwtape]

Creation,

 

How's that for a piece of synchronicity? I'll look forward to your thoughts when you finish the whole thing again. I really ought to read it again, too: it will be interesting to see how it reads to me fifteen years after the first time.

 

Richard

[Sloppy Zhang]

I was nineteen at the time, and it opened up a whole new world for me to explore. Fifteen years later, here I am.

 

The last paragraph of the above letter I found the most interesting from a Taoist point of view.

 

Richard

 

 

Creation,

How's that for a piece of synchronicity?

Richard

 

You want some more synchronicity?

 

I'm nineteen right now

[Creation]

You want some more synchronicity?

 

I'm nineteen right now

Me too.

[Uncle Screwtape]

Okay people, we're through the looking glass.

 

Richard

[goldisheavy]

I like this a lot too. I was a little surprised. I'm looking forward to more, if more is coming.

 

It's still a little hairy because Lewis splits God from man, or at least, discusses God as a separate entity. One should then ask, if God is separated from men, what then allows the prayer to cross from man to God, and if such medium exists, wouldn't it be ontologically superior to both man and God, and to pre-exist both? Etc. In other words, all kinds of philosophical problems would arise from separating God and man. I wonder if Lewis recognized this or not.

[enouch]

I like this a lot too. I was a little surprised. I'm looking forward to more, if more is coming.

 

It's still a little hairy because Lewis splits God from man, or at least, discusses God as a separate entity. One should then ask, if God is separated from men, what then allows the prayer to cross from man to God, and if such medium exists, wouldn't it be ontologically superior to both man and God, and to pre-exist both? Etc. In other words, all kinds of philosophical problems would arise from separating God and man. I wonder if Lewis recognized this or not.

 

 

if God is separated from men, what then allows the prayer to cross from man to God, and if such medium exists, wouldn't it be ontologically superior to both man and God, and to pre-exist both

 

 

Could you please explain your reasoning with more examples?

[enouch]

[Uncle Screwtape]

It raises again the question of how free are we? Determinism,karma,fate,demons,bateria,GOD, all seem to play a role in our unfolding.Is free will ultimately an illusion?

 

Determinism belongs to the lower three realms of people, events and things: the physical world where something happening causes something else to happen. But in the upper three realms of time, space and the universe (more accurately no-time and no-space) there is no this and that; no before and after; no indefatigable march of events. The Ta Chuan refers to this as the realm in which the spirit resides where it is bound to no one place [in time and space].

 

The latter is the Creative realm and the former is the Receptive realm: the receptive completes the Creative. But we do not live only in one or the other: our feet are rooted to the ground in the lower three realms but our spirit exists in the upper three of ultimate creative freedom; and it is through our spirit that we can exercise our free will. The I Ching unites us with that creative spirit but that is just one way of doing so.

 

I think a lot of things in Taoism only really make sense when viewed from the perspective of the realm it belongs to. The Tao Te Ching, especially, makes so much more sense in this way.

 

Richard

Edited July 8, 2009 by Uncle Screwtape

[Marblehead]

Hi Screwtape,

 

... and it is through our spirit that we can exercise our free will.

 

I totally agree with this and I suggest that we do have total free will in the spiritual (wu) state. But I will suggest that we have limited free will in the manifest (yo) state as well. True, the limits are tighter for some folks than they are for others but still.

 

Be well!

[Uncle Screwtape]

I totally agree with this and I suggest that we do have total free will in the spiritual (wu) state. But I will suggest that we have limited free will in the manifest (yo) state as well. True, the limits are tighter for some folks than they are for others but still.

 

I agree actually. I was too lazy to make the point and I wondered if anyone else would pick up on it.

 

Richard