Being kind, though not nice

@Birdbox1986 You do know who C.S. Lewis was, I hope?

@val70 I don’t know sorry, I thought he was the guy who
Lead Scientology

@Birdbox1986 No, you're wrong. It was founded in the fifties by a chap called Hubbard.

@SunshineGirl I'm sure that your laws will be much better. Go with flow indeed.

@val70 They are keeping children and the most vulnerable in society safer, which is all that matters.

@SunshineGirl Innate laws were there before anything else. I'm sure that abolishing slavery whilst children were working in factories had indeed a sense of the modernism about it. When one turns ones back to what one could call the human endeavor to be kind and centre on love one risks becoming what Lewis rightly called out mere vessels where others can pour their own crooked views of the world into. Thus free child care is called communism in the United States, and there's the current president in the White House. Society begets its leaders that it desires. The desire to be like Trump trumped any human morality.

@Rabscuttle G.K. Chesterton famously quipped that if a man lives long enough, he will choose between absolute skepticism and the Roman Catholic Church. In the context of C.S. Lewis, Chesterton "got it wrong" because Lewis converted to generic, "mere" Christianity and remained an Anglican until his death, defying Chesterton's binary prediction.

Historic Christian creeds like the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed state that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. The creeds emphasize his actual physical death, the separation of his soul from his body, and his descent to the realm of the dead before rising on the third day.

Christian doctrine teaches thus that God's justice requires a penalty for human rebellion, and Christ willingly took that penalty in humanity's place. His death and descent broke the grip and fear of death, liberating those held captive by sin. The cross serves as the ultimate proof of divine solidarity, showing that God chose to absorb human suffering rather than remain distant from it.

Lewis, shaped by his Ulster Protestant upbringing and his deep love for medieval English literature, believed in "mere Christianity"—the core doctrines shared by all major Christian traditions without the single specific authority. He valued the liturgy of the Anglican Church, its intellectual breadth (via figures like Richard Hooker), and its via media approach, which satisfied his theological conscience.

He faced criticism for logical gaps in his apologetics, oversimplified moral frameworks, and dated cultural biases embedded in his popular writings. Putting the use of Trilemma Oversimplification aside, I find the critique of the Universal Morality as yet another example of the self-defeating features within today's intellectual thinking. Moreover, philosophers argue that Lewis's framing of evil as a mere "parasite" or absence of good fails to resolve the logical tension regarding how an all-powerful deity coexists with active, destructive force.

Michael Ramsey frequently highlighted that defending the faith required an incarnational approach of entering human doubts with loving sympathy, a philosophy that deeply mirrors Lewis's own apologetic method in works like Mere Christianity. In his book The Lion's World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Rowan Williams also defends C.S. Lewis. He shows that Lewis cannot be neatly be boxed into modern "right" or "left" political camps. His themes challenge self-righteousness across the cultural spectrum.

Williams argues that Lewis's imaginative fiction captures classical orthodox theology more deeply than his formal apologetics. He defends Lewis against modern cultural labels and critics, portraying his work as an invitation to radical grace, joy, and human openness. He acknowledges artistic or cultural limitations in Lewis's work without dismissing his core spiritual and literary contributions.

@Magenta I'm presonally sick and tired of noticing people the claim that society or lets say civilization is somehow unsafe. And as individuals we're now better than in the past and anyone else living on this planet. We're not. There's something dramatic going on. Somehow the codex of laws isn't going to protect one's own homestead any more. We're experiencing extreme fright from that, but not that this present generation of children is somehow going to be less intelligent than its successors.

What is a common reaction to my postings on here? Either I get the complaint that it's AI or that it's too way complicated. I find the fright not in the influx of people that are different than me, but in the overall desire to be indeed that one man. It trumps after more than a decade now again and again the morality that was evident before as a direct consequence of the Second World War. The mass success of Billy Graham's large-scale evangelical revival events was an example of that.

Lets take now that one big success from the past. It dates from the same period as most of the writings of C.S. Lewis. Graham was combining a truly positive message of personal forgiveness with the early adoption of mass media, modern cooperative crusade planning, and a polished, approachable image that matched post-war America's search for spiritual security. That Tolkien wrote his The Return of the King about the same time is also evident of that projection of hope.