ChristopherWhite.info

Yesterday I found myself scribbling about the discrepancy between what those of a religious bent actually believe and what is written in their “holy” books, using CS Lewis as a fairly lighthearted example. (You’ll read it in good time, I’m sure.)

He’s a good choice, between the all-too-obvious Christian supposition in the Chronicles of Narnia and his trinity of apologetics, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. Christopher Hitchens describes him in God Is Not Great as “the most popular Christian apologist” and “the main chosen propaganda vehicle for Christianity in our time”.

Odd, then, that — as has just occurred to me — he might, in the strict sense, not have actually Believed, but taken Pascal’s wager.

In The Silver Chair, the sixth and penultimate book of the Chronicles series, the three adventurers — Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle — are held captive in an underground realm, along with the lost prince Rilian. Its Queen attempts to persuade them - with the help of a bit of magic, naturally - that the Sun, Aslan the Lion and Narnia are dreams or fabrications. Regaining his “senses”, Puddleglum responds:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Wish-thinking, pure and simple.

And in the final book of the series, The Last Battle — a Narnian apocalypse tale — Aslan is picking people worthy of entering Narnia 2.0, the paradise version. Among the saved is a soldier from Calormen, Narnia’s enemy to the south, who makes it to paradise despite worshiping a different god.

Given the above, one could read that as Lewis wrestling with his own doubts, reassuring himself that Unbelievers can still make it into heaven despite the biblical claim the only route to “salvation” is through Jesus — letting himself off for his own wavering.

Wish-thinking piled on wish-thinking.

(And all the more credible since Lewis was “rescued” from atheism by his devoutly Catholic friend Tolkien.)

Quite what I’m getting at, I have no idea. But the possibility that the most notorious Christian propagandist of our age was so doubtful is intriguing nonetheless.

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I’ve held myself back a couple of times this week from blogging about appalling misuse of words, mainly “tragic death”[1]. But then I came across this on Wikipedia:

“An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet beyond the Solar System.”

What with “extrasolar” meaning “beyond the solar system”, I’m pretty sure we could’ve figured that one out, thanks.

But it reminded me of what something one of my classmates wrote back in those halycon[2] days of A-level physics. His essay on wedge-shaped films (don’t ask me… [3]) read as follows:

“Wedge-shaped films are films that are wedge-shaped. A film that is wedge-shaped is a wedge-shaped film. If a film were wedge-shaped, a wedge-film it would be.”

Look at that! Not only does it contain absolutely no information, the third sentence is exactly the same as the second but starting in the future conditional tense. That’s truly excellent slacking.

It’s almost as vacuous a statement as anything David “Dave” Cameron has ever said.

UPDATE: “Chris” points out in the comments that the third sentence is [imperfect] subjunctive, not future conditional. I am a ‘tard.
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[1] Incorrect use on two counts:

1. It’s (nearly) a pleonasm - As the word “tragic” is used to emphasise the sadness of the death, it’s an un-necessary word. One can assume deaths to be sad, unless, as Gary frequently points out, it’s Margaret Thatcher.
2. It just isn’t tragic. Hamlet Prince of Denmark’s death was tragic. King Lear’s. Not every youngster who comes a-cropper. As writer and tragoedian Michael Bywater says, “Tragedy implies an ineluctable movement, brought about by the victim’s own hubris, towards inevitable downfall”. Used, as it is so often in the press, to denote any death that could have been easily avoided, most recently Exeter student Gavin Britton, is the opposite.

[2] Crap, actually.

[3] Curiously, if you search for “wedge-shaped films” on Wikipedia, one of the resulting articles is Critical reception of Brokeback Mountain.

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Or a Muslim. Whatever.

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I was going to write about Free Will.

I was going to quote Shakespeare’s Richard III: “I am determinèd to prove a villain…”, and question whether that meant ‘predetermined’, as in Richard was destined to be a usurping fratricide. (Does it? I don’t know.)

I was going to refer to Stephen Hawking’s essay Is Everything Determined? in which he answered his question affirmatively.

Then he changed his mind. Latest research suggest the present affects the past.

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I quite like The Da Vinci Code.

I don’t like the fact that people find it convincing, and actually start to believe the conspiracy theory.

I hope that the inevitable success of its transition to film will result in a film also being made of its predecessor, Angels and Demons, simply because there’s some spectacularly bad science in the book. Bad science being an easier thing to rubbish, it might wake up some people to how ludicrous the conspiracy theory in the Da Vinci Code is. (And ideally Christianity itself, but I think that would be asking too much.)

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Jonathan Freedland has a novel out. Freedland claimed in a post on Comment is Free that there are a lot of parallels between writing a novel and reporting the news. It’ll be interesting to see how his own worldview comes through in the story, particularly given that a novel could probably easily contain about a year’s worth of column material. When Richard Littlejohn tried his hand at fiction, it was quite simplistic: the baddies were asylum seekers.

More often than not, the protaganist simply stands in for the author. Bearing in mind the previous post, how does this work in comedy? Chris Morris claims to be an antipolemicist, only making a point if it’s funny, when talking about Brass Eye, but Nathan Barley exists purely as a damning indictment of “media twats”, with the weary Dan Ashcroft representing Morris’s point of view.

Freud reckoned that jokes stood alongside dreams and slips of the tongue in revealing the subconcious. Freud talked a lot of rubbish.

But look at this, from series four of Auf Wiedersehen Pet:

Government official type: “This is a sensitive post so we will be carrying out extensive background checks.”
Several members of the team look at Oz, expecting him to reveal his spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Oz: “I’ll tell you this now, as it would’ve come out anyway. I’ve got a son what’s a poof.”

That isn’t a joke - not from the perspective of the character. But it is funny - to the audience.

So…

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