Wandering around the web recently, I found Prisoner of Narnia, an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker from 2005. It's about the life of C.S. Lewis, and the enduring attraction of the Narnia books.

The link to the article came from Daylight Atheism, where they liked this bit:

A startling thing in Lewis's letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes — the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn't really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.

It's that belief in belief thing again. This has also come up in my sporadic discussion with apdraper2000, where he's asking why I spend so much time blogging about theism. If you want to know what my motivation is, you can read the thread.

Of course, any Christian worth their salt would be able to you that the reason it's so hard to keep believing in the existence of God as compared to say, believing in the existence of atoms, is because the world is currently a hostile place, where the believer is a footsoldier in a cosmic battle, facing the flaming arrows of Original Sin, Satan, Dust, the BBC's blatant bias, the Patriarchy, the Illuminati, New Labour, Zionists, and Communists. Let us waste no more time on the naive idea that if you keep having to shore up your belief in something, it just might be because you're wrong.

Rather, it's the article's insight into Lewis's psyche which is interesting. Gopnik portrays Lewis as a mystic who saw Christianity as a way to keep the magic, the joy of life, real. I was reminded of Jesus in John's gospel, promising life in all its fullness.

Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It sounds like Lewis might have agreed with my contention that scriptural religion is lived fan-fiction, although, of course, he'd have said it was fan-truth.

Gopnik says that the believer and unbeliever can agree on the importance of imagination and stories as a way to reach the parts that both institutional Christianity and a narrow materialism do not reach. The final couple of paragraphs are particularly good, and we learn a lot about Lewis and Tolkien along they way. Definitely worth a read.

Edited: I changed "it just might be because it's bollocks" to "it just might be because you're wrong" after a Christian found the former form offensive. I'm recording that here so it doesn't look like I'm hiding something.

I recall reading the description of CUWoCS in the Freshers' Handbook a decade or so ago. Like many religions, they said, we believe that our god will return and condemn people to horrible torture; unlike other religions, however, we don't claim that this somehow means our god is good.

I mention this partly because there's a bit more discussion on C.S. Lewis and Timothy Keller's view on Hell in a thread on my last posting.

However, I mention Great Cthulhu because of a vision that has been given to, no, vouchsafed unto, me, of the time when the Stars are Right and He returns. You can see the full horror over on Facebook. This is a stark reminder of the choice we all face: who will be eaten first?

Thanks to scribb1e, the D&Ders, and the Cthulhu Crochet blog.

Beards are important. As any evangelical will know, the words of C.S. Lewis are god-breathed and useful for teaching and training in righteousness. Hear what St Jack says:

“It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual ‘taste’. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females — and there is more in that than you might suppose….”
—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

This chap elaborates.

More importantly (from my point of view), scribb1e likes them too.

Links courtesy of andrewducker and robhu.

Metafilter had a posting on the ideas behind His Dark Materials a while back. It contains links to the video of a documentary where Melvyn Bragg interviews Pullman, as well as to articles discussing his literary influences, from Blake and Milton to Arthur Ransome.

The Plot

This set me to reading the books again. I enjoyed them. Pullman's a craftsman, and the books show off both his skill in writing and his imagination. I still found the ending, the final separation of Lyra and Will, rather forced. Nick Lowe wrote The Well Tempered Plot Device, which partly deals with authorial insertions, not of a character who stands for the author, but of an object which stands for the Plot, so that, for example, we can say that "Darth Vader has turned to the Dark Side of the Plot" (this is also the essay which introduced "Clench Racing", a sport for as many players as you have Stephen Donaldson books). scribb1e riffed on this, explaining that at the end of His Dark Materials "there can only be one hole in the Plot", the one which leads out of the land of the dead.

Pullman's stories are satisfying because they borrow from the greats: the Bible, Milton, Book of Common Prayer (where else does anyone learn the word "oblation"?) and the the English hymnal ("frail children of dust"). I doubt the Bible's or the BCP's authors would approve of His Dark Materials, but, as lisekit says, great art is characterised by its ability to sustain more than one interpretation.

The authors

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that God doesn't exist, and that evangelicalism is like fandom (the latter wasn't entirely an original idea of mine: livredor defines midrash as Biblical fan fiction). All these people who claim to be in a relationship with God obviously aren't, so what are they doing? I think they're not writing fan fiction but living it, creating their own stories in a world they see as belonging to the divine Author, stories which occur after their canon has ended.

In fandom, inserting yourself into the world you're writing fan fiction about is seen as passé by the experts. There's a disparaging term for characters who are obviously authorial self-insertions, Mary Sue. In religion, it's not quite the same. You can and should insert yourself into the story, but you'd better not get too far above yourself if you do, unless you're very convincing (this isn't that dissimilar to fandom, since the real objection to Mary Sues is that they're too perfect). C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that Christians do not know whether they will be given bit parts or starring roles, but their job is to play them as best they can.

The disagreements within religions which are based on the same book are similar to the disagreements within Harry Potter fandom before the final book came out, about whether Ginny or Hermione should end up with Harry. The bitterest disagreements are always about sex, as illustrated by the perpetually imminent division (Rilstone wrote that in 2004) of Anglicanism into the ones who believe God hates shrimp and the ones who don't believe in God.

Unlike Potter fandom, in Bible fandom there's no-one who can produce the universally recognised Word of God, settling the matter with a final book (if you want to remain within the canons of your religion, that is: the Mormons and the Baha'i have taken the approach of adding a new book, as Christianity itself did to Judaism), so people end up grouping themselves into communities which more-or-less share a view on the One True Pairing, and the ideas of each community become fanon to those within it. The Bible is rich soil for this sort of thing because it is great art and so admits multiple interpretations.

The Story

What's the point of living this way? To be in a story with meaning. lumpley speaks of the fun of roleplaying games as coming from three possible sources: one, wish-fulfilment; two, strategy and tactics; and three, "the fun of facing challenging moral, ethical, or socially informative situations". He splits up games into two approaches:

Approach one: "made up journalism." The conceit is, the characters and events of the game are real. The lives of the characters don't have meaning, the same way that our real lives don't have meaning. Approach two: fiction. Fiction, unlike life, is all meaning all the time. I prefer approach two. In particular, it's very difficult to take approach one and yet get fun type three.

What does he mean by "our real lives don't have meaning"? That shit (notably death) just happens. Wash's I'm a leaf on the wind/I'm a leaf on a rake death scene in Serenity is shocking, and Anyone Can Die is a rare trope in fiction (except if you're watching something by Joss Whedon), because we expect fiction to give us meanings for significant events.

So then, God is the Plot, in Lowe's sense of the word, and if you believe, the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. If you die, it's what the Plot wanted. Your community knows they're reading the canon the right way, that Harry really loves Hermione, that God disapproves of gay sex, or whatever, and everyone else has misunderstood the Plot. Of course, it's not just about reading the book: you have the spirit of a dragonGod in you, however odd that sounds.

The reason Lowe can mock the Plot is that bad fiction leans on it so hard that it becomes ridiculous. The reader becomes too aware that they're reading fiction and loses their suspension of disbelief. Why lose it? Because all readers know deep down that reality doesn't come invested with meaning in that way.

I recently finished Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: the Enigma. The book is a definitive account of Turing's life and work. In some places I found the level of detail overwhelming, but in others I admired the way Hodges uses his obviously extensive research to evoke the places and people in Turing's life. The book is well worth reading for the perspective it gives on Turing, something which is absent from other, purely technical, accounts of his work.

Hodges portrays Turing as a man ahead of time, conceiving of the Turing machine as a thought experiment before the invention of the general purpose electronic computer, and inventing the Turing test when computing was in its infancy. Turing's naivete was reflected in his refusal to accept what other people said could be done, but also in a lack of interest in the politics of his post-war work on computers and of his own homosexuality. A proto-geek, Turing was prickly, odd, and seemed to expect that the facts alone, when shown to people, would lead them to the same conclusions as he found.

Turing's suicide is placed in the context of a move from regarding homosexuality as criminal to regarding it as a medical problem, and an increasing suspicion of homosexuals in classified government work. Hodges seems to conclude that Turing felt he had nowhere else to go.

You can't help but wonder what else Turing might have accomplished had he not committed suicide. Greg Egan's short, Oracle, is an entertaining what-if story, which also features a character very obviously based on C.S. Lewis. What if Turing had received help from a friend? It's a pity that in reality there was no-one to lead him out of his cage.

Premier Christian Radio have put up the audio of the Unbelievable discussion programme I was on. You can go to the programme's page and play the stream, or if you can't do Windows Media, you can download the mp3 from Rob's site.

Here's my director's commentary track (except I wasn't a director, but you get the idea).

The first phone-in question from Steven Carr is a hard one for Christians. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus talks of God being like a shepherd who seeks each lost sheep. Steven said "a good shepherd is not one who says 'I have given the lost sheep enough evidence to find its way home'", provoking laughter in the studio because we all realised how Steven had struck home, I think. Some people (St Paul, for example) seem to get dramatic experiences, whereas some don't. This is inconsistent with a God who we're told seeks out everyone. The usual Christian defence is to say that God cannot over-ride our free-will and make us believe (C.S. Lewis says "he cannot rape; he must woo"). But God wasn't so concerned with St Paul's free-will and autonomy that he could not knock him off his horse on the way to Damascus, yet St Paul's sort of experience is rare.

Marvin's call was interesting, and all of us in the studio regretted that we didn't get the chance to discuss all his points. His first point was that to accept the existence of evil one has to accept the existence of God who creates good and evil. I didn't really follow that argument. The existence of evil seems to be merely a matter of people doing stuff I consider bad, and I don't need to suppose that God made them do it. It's possible he was arguing that without God we have no moral basis to call something evil, something which I've touched on before.

Marvin mentioned Anselm's Ontological Argument, but Paul Clarke agreed that he'd concede that one.

Marvin's second point was that we accept the truth of other classical writings, so why not the Bible? This argument fails because we're not asked to live according to the teaching of those other classical writings. Something which we're told to base our lives on should be held to a higher standard. But there are already many excellent arguments against Biblical inerrancy, so I'm not going to rehearse them all again here, but I will talk about the specific example I mentioned.

I don't think that Paul Clarke's response to my killer argument against inerrancy holds up. To say that the "we" of St Paul's "we who are still alive" in 1 Thess 4 could encompass later Christians presupposes that St Paul knew he was writing to such people. My understanding of inerrancy was always that it did not and should not require such an assumption. At the Square Church they taught that the beginning of biblical interpretation was to work out what a passage meant to those who originally heard it (in this case, the people in Thessalonica, as is clear from 1 Thess 5:27). The method of interpretation where you read something like an epistle as if it's personally addressed to you was right out, in fact.

Secondly, Paul Clarke's defence of the inerrancy of 1 Corinthians 7 relies on some ambiguity about what the "present crisis" (verse 26) is. Paul Clarke suggested its a some local trouble affecting the Corinthian Christians. But St Paul himself spells this out in verses 29-31, ending with "for this world in its present form is passing away". Something more than local trouble is being spoken of.

As I said to triphicus, it's perfectly acceptable to concede the point (as she sort of does) but then look for what a Christian might take from that passage anyway (in this case, that the glories of this world are fleeting, and that Jesus could be back at any time so Christians should look busy). But to maintain that this sort of interpretation is what Paul actually meant to say in the first place, as Paul Clarke seemed to, seems like making work for yourself. It's only the extra-Biblical assumption of inerrancy that requires evangelicals to go through these contortions when faced with texts like these. Removing that assumption cuts the knot. I'm reminded of the Washington Post's description of Bart Erhman's tortured paper defending some passage in Mark, and of the revelation Ehrman had when his tutor wrote a note in the margin saying "Maybe Mark just made a mistake".

I stumbled a bit when I mentioned Occam's Razor because Paul Clarke rightly jumped on the fact that in some sense God's miraculous healing of someone's fibroids is a simpler explanation than them getting better naturally by some unknown mechanism. scribb1e points out that this doesn't address those people who pray and don't get better. She also says that unexpected stuff does happen in medicine but it's not proof of anything very much more than the ignorance of doctors. If a Christian gets ill they will almost certainly pray about it, and some of the people who pray will get better (along with some of those who don't). You can't say it wasn't God's doing, but you have to wonder about his inconsistency. Edited to add: scribb1e elaborates in this comment.

nlj21 kindly batted off a question to both the Paul's in the studio. Paul Clarke was right in saying that the fact that some people leave Christianity doesn't prove it's wrong, but it does make you wonder about CICCU and similar organisations, doesn't it? cathedral_life's comments on this discussion (where she signs herself as "AR") seem apposite.

I hope I gave a reasonable answer to nlj21's question to me, although I'm sure he'll be along to disagree.

I loved the question about "a god that suits your lifestyle", because lifestyle is a Christian code-word for "having sex in a way we don't like".

I was expecting someone to try the No True Scotsman argument about me leaving Christianity ("no True Christian leaves Christianity") so Narna came up trumps and I delivered my prepared answer. Go me.

I found Paul Clarke's summing up quite affecting, because it was clear that he genuinely was concerned about my welfare. In the end, though, as I said, you can only follow the truth as best you can.

There's been some interesting stuff out there on the Intarweb over the past week or so.

Andrew Rilstone writes about whether C. S. Lewis was against his character Susan becoming sexually mature, as is often alleged by Philip Pullman. I don't quite agree with Rilstone, for the reasons that some other people mention in the comments to his posting: at the very least, Lewis choice of the particular obsession which keeps Susan from Heaven shows that he had some odd attitudes to women. Abigail Nussbaum (whose blog I'd recommend) has some more thoughts on Susan. Meanwhile, atreic once again examines the God Hates Hair question in the light of Screwtape's odd statement that the Devil wants beards to be unfashionable.

Metafilter had a piece on Howard Bloom, speaking about Jesus, Yahweh, whether the phrase "Judeo-Christian" is meaningful. I'm still meaning to listen to and read the linked material.

There was a brief but interesting discussion on mr_ricarno's journal about Christians and courtship. He later clarifies the intent of the original posting.

( Cut for discussion of the recent posts about rape )