Today, I received the following email:
1. What thinking is yours with regards to the pre-historic eons of worship of nearly all peoples? (having stood atop multiple 20,000 foot peaks and viewed stone cairns of apparent worship; mummified remains of children sacrificed to appease the gods; studied rituals of flinging one’s self from the summits in obeisance to the gods, etc)?
2. Did I miss your reading of the book by C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity? And your thoughts.
I suspect the author is a Christian, but regardless, I find these questions worth answering. Let me answer the second question first: have I read C.S. Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity? The short answer is yes. I read Mere Christianity years ago, when I was an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) pastor in southeast Ohio in the 80s and 90s. I found Lewis’s book to be shallow, and way too ecumenical for me, at the time.
Adam Lee, who writes for the Daylight Atheism blog, has this to say about Mere Christianity:
Mere Christianity is a revised and expanded version of three radio talks Lewis gave, and was written, as Lewis explains in the preface, to present the “mere” essence of Christianity; that is, to explain and defend the beliefs common to all Christian denominations.
….
Though the preface is only a lead-in to the rest of the book, it contains a very revealing statement. In explaining the purpose of the book, Lewis says that he is only writing to defend “mere” Christianity – the core of the religion, the beliefs common to all denominations – and that therefore this book will offer no help to someone who is already a Christian and is trying to decide between two denominations. Although Lewis admits that he is a member of the Church of England himself, he writes: “You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic” (p.vi).
Lewis says that he will not discuss the differences in doctrine between the various Christian sects for two reasons: the first is that he does not feel qualified to write about the arcane points of theology that separate one denomination from another. But the second reason, he says, is this:
“And secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk about them we are much more likely to deter him from entering any Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son” (p.vi).
This is a very interesting – some would say damning – confession. Lewis claims that the doctrinal disputes between Christian sects are more likely to turn a seeker away than cause him to convert – and that therefore the appropriate response is to hide these disputes from people who are considering Christianity. How could such behavior be called anything other than deceptive?
If a person converts to Christianity because an evangelist has concealed from him some relevant fact that might have deterred him from converting had he known it in advance, then his conversion was made under false pretenses – it came about as the result of a lie. This would be comparable to a person who buys a house because its former owners failed to disclose that it was built on the site of a toxic waste dump. If Lewis is actually recommending that Christian evangelists practice this sort of dishonest behavior, what does this say about his own ethics? Keep this in mind as we consider Lewis’ moral argument for God’s existence, which is presented in the next section.
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C.S. Lewis is plainly a gifted writer. Mere Christianity was a quick and enjoyable read, with an engaging and conversational tone, doubtless recapturing some of the atmosphere that accompanied it when it was first broadcast as a series of radio talks. Its reasoning was easy to follow, and the text was peppered with analogies, many of which are quite clever.
However, while this was a literary strength, logically it was a key weakness. There are places where Lewis’ argument is weak or patently flawed, but rather than trying to shore it up by presenting additional facts, he simply restates it as a metaphor. This does not make his case any stronger. He also fails to address several crucial and obvious counterarguments to his points, and has an unfortunate tendency to attempt to downplay or conceal exceptions that refute his arguments, rather than confronting them honestly and openly. The section in the preface where he recommends concealing from prospective converts information that might change their mind about Christianity is the most glaring example; his casual and incurious dismissal of the stark moral differences between cultures, even though his argument absolutely depends on there being no such differences, is another. This is why I summarized this book as “cotton candy apologetics”: fluffy and easy to consume, but ultimately insubstantial.
I do not mean to suggest that Lewis himself was unintelligent. The sections on Christian morality and theology do show evidence of rational consideration and careful reflection; the problem, as it seems to me, is that although he has clearly put a lot of thought into what it would mean for Christianity to be true, he has not invested comparable intellectual effort into arguing that Christianity is indeed true. Instead, he largely takes this for granted. Even when he explicitly argues in favor of it, his arguments have a hurried, cursory feel, as if he were trying to get this boring business out of the way in order to get to the topics he really wanted to talk about. While Christians may find Mere Christianity informative and may even be stimulated to think about their faith in a different way, I sincerely doubt that such shallow argumentation will ever convert a knowledgeable nonbeliever.
You can read the entirety of Adam’s review here.
I concur with Adam’s conclusions about Lewis and Mere Christianity. While diehard Christians might find his arguments compelling, for those of us who have “been-there-done-that” and have spent years battling and debating Evangelical apologists, Lewis’s claims come off as less than persuasive. Maybe there’s a former atheist somewhere who converted to Christianity after reading Mere Christianity, but I don’t know of any.
Now to the first question: What thinking is yours with regards to the pre-historic eons of worship of nearly all peoples?
Without question, humans have throughout their history generally worshiped deities of some sort. According to Wikipedia:
- 2.5 billion people worship the Christian God
- 2 billion people worship the Muslim God
- 1.2 billion people worship the Hindu deities
- Another billion or so people worship other forms of deities or practice animist, pagan religions
While these statistics can be manipulated in any number of ways and make no distinction between actual worship and nominal/cultural religion, it is clear that most people believe in the existence of deities. That said, the article also says that upwards of 2 billion people could be atheists (again, depending on how adherents are counted and classified). We do know that here in the United States, atheist and agnostic numbers are rapidly increasing. Add to these numbers those who self-identify as “nones” — people who are indifferent towards religion or do not identify with any religion — it is clear that Americans are increasingly saying “no thank you” or “fuck off” to sectarian religion. That’s why we see an increasing number of religious freedom laws. Christianity, in particular, is dying on the vine and losing its grip on our culture. The only way to maintain control over our government and society is for laws to be passed that codify everyone’s right to worship God — wink, wink, the Christian God. (Imagine what would happen if Muslims tried to pass similar laws protecting Allah and his prophet Mohammed.)
We now live in the age of science and technology. The Internet is the primary reason religion, particularly Christianity, is under assault on all sides. Before the Internet (and previously, the printing press), sects, churches, and clerics were safe and secure in their religious bubbles. Not any longer.
When we look at past human beliefs, how best do we explain the worship of deities? A God gene? Or as Christians are fond of saying, their God has given every human being a conscience — a moral compass — that provides evidence of his existence (a terrible argument, by the way)?
I would argue that humans are inquisitive beings, seeking answers to existential questions. Thus, humans created gods and religions to answer these questions. It is clear, at least to me, that humans created God, not the other way around. God didn’t write the Bible, humans did. Take a comparative religion class, and what do you learn? That all religions are of human origin. Will God worship remain going forward? In the short term, yes. The short term being hundreds of years. However, if we survive global climate change (and I seriously doubt we will) and don’t nuke ourselves to death, I suspect humans will increasingly lose their need for religion. Is that not what we see in many European countries? While many citizens self-identify with one of the world’s major religions, church attendance is at an all-time low. Take Belgium. Sixty-five percent of people claim to be Christians, yet only thirty-seven percent of them believe in the existence of God, and only five percent of them attend church. This same statistical analysis to numerous other Western countries. While it is true that Christianity is on the rise in Africa and Latin America, I suspect increased affluence, materialism, scientific advancement, and technology will, in time, reverse this trend. God is no match for modernity and the Internet. Perhaps God needs to start a website or a blog: “Hot Takes From Jesus.” Or maybe, “Babes for Jesus” would be better.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I, too, read “Mere Christianity” when I was an Evangelical. From what I remember of it, I don’t think I could have read it any other time in my life. As you say, he’s an engaging writer (“The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” was an enjoyable read, as I recall) but he assumes and presumes too much. And, in the end, he is–ironically–Macchiavellian: He will do what it takes (e.g;, concealing differences between sects and churches) to bring people into the fold. Then agian, maybe it’s not so ironic: Plenty of other Christians, most of whom have not read Macchiavelli, have an “end justifies the means” philosophy about propogating their purported faith.
In regards to all the divisions/denominations in the church, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard preaching on how the church needs to be persecuted, that the church has it too easy. Fair enough it’s true under real persecution the church in acts really pulled together. No time to fight over which seat you normally sit at or petty personality and doctrinal disputes. Sometimes I think evangelical preachers… some of them intentionally manufacture conflict because they need an antagonist to get everyone right into it … the games not as much fun without an adversary kind of like the adversary the Sa-tan (emphasized for pronunciation).
The first question is actually more interesting to me, because I have a background in anthropology and I’ve actually looked at what we know of the eons of religions from pre-historic (and historic!) peoples all over the world. And from that perspective, I have two basic observations:
Human beings do, indeed, seem to have a sort of built-in predisposition towards religion. However, and this is important, that’s true only if you’re using the word “religion” in the very loose sense of “some belief in the unseen powers that control our lives”. This is not even remotely the same thing as a built-in predisposition towards any form of Christian belief, and in fact frequently manifests in fundamentally different ways.
You can trace the development and spread of Christianity from its origins in a very limited part of the world to its current dominance, and if you do it seems fairly apparent that a great deal of that development hinged on local politics of the time. You have early Judaism which appears to have been polytheistic (which was pretty common), and which later became monolatrous (“other gods exist but we only worship this one because He’s the best”) and from there gradually more monotheistic (“our god is the only god”). Then you have the Roman occupation, during which one group starts telling the story of how God seduced a mortal woman and had a son (which seems, perhaps coincidentally, more like sort of trick Zeus or one of that crowd would pull — prior to this, most of God’s interactions with humans involved sending prophets around to tell people to shape up or punishing them with misfortunes, rather than indulging in hanky-panky with newly-engaged maidens). This belief catches on and breaks away from Judaism proper, and then a couple of centuries later Constantine converts to it — and in the process converts the whole Roman empire. From there, it becomes ubiquitous. –The point here being that there’s nothing in this history that looks particularly supernatural or even inspired; these are exactly the sorts of ways that beliefs develop, spread, and split apart. Christianity is more unusual for claiming to be monotheistic than for how it got to be so widespread.
(I say “claiming” to be monotheistic, because even if you accept the Doctrine of the Trinity and the idea that Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are all different masks for the same being — a view which makes several sections of scripture read very oddly — you still have the matter of Satan — an entirely separate divine being, even if he’s not as strong as God Himself.)
SURE…They’ll carry on about how the church needs to be ‘persecuted’ until someone, or some group actually comes at them with what they see as ‘persecution’. Oftentimes, this can simply be pointing out inconsistencies in the bible, or asking a difficult question that may set up a troublesome moral dilemma. When they have no answer, and/ or the point is pressed to far,, they usually get angry, and a variety of self-righteous, judgemental, nasty little temper tantrums ensue. Potential ‘converts’ walk away thinking- ‘Life is hard enough as it is, why on earth would I want to be converted to THAT’?
It’s been pointed out to me by different people that we humans, and our mid-late Cenozoic ancestors, survived as species because our imaginations see things that aren’t necessarily there. When the tall grass rustled and the breeze was intermittent, the folks who survived to pass on their genes gave it a wide berth, and the folks who didn’t do that got eaten some of the time. Not all of the time, to be sure, but enough that this inclination became more common with evolutionary time.
As an intensely social species of physically rather unimpressive individuals, we made the social part work for us by being able to take direction so that we could operate as a group. Taking direction means being willing to let someone else think for you, at least for the task at hand. Lots of people find it easy to extend that willingness across their lives.
Combine the imagination with the proclivity toward letting someone else think for us, and we become easily led into religious beliefs. Evidence not required.
I always thought the title “Mere Christianity” was meant to describe Christianity as something greater than it first appears: perhaps C.S. Lewis would have been better off with the title “Core Christianity”. I actually agree with the premise of writing the book this way, if someone was interested in trying out different religions, they could read the book and see if it was for them. The differences in denominations would not be of any practical consideration, and most differences are rather bizarre trivialities such as the 7th day Adventists going to church on Saturday rather than Sunday.
I suspect the book is less of a brochure for seekers and more of a digestible text book for Sunday school or confirmation. Either way I had no desire to read it when I was younger nor do I now.
I read Mere Christianity when I was a Christian and felt that it did much to justify my beliefs. Remembering this when I was starting my process of deconversion and desperately wanting my faith to return, I reread this book, expecting it would address my doubts and renew my faith. Instead I found it shallow and trite and completely unconvincing. I deconverted not long after this.
I never read ” Mere Christianity ” but will out of curiosity when I get a chance. Also, another book ” A Severe Mercy “( not C.S.L.) I’ll find the author’s name later. ” Mercy” is a rather creepy book about the author’s jealousy regarding his wife’s relationship with Jesus, and how she died soon after from leukemia or a similar disease. His ordeal was described in that book.