YAY for good phone calls!

I haven't had a chance to read in here for a few days--Sean, I'm sorry they have been so rough for you and S. Let me know if there is anything I can do this weekend, if you are still here.

Yay Suzi!

Anyone up for a little resume review???

I can't prove there's a God, and the kind of Christianity I was raised to believe just doesn't hold up under my own scrutiny anymore...but I want to believe, and there's still plenty out there that convinces me that there very well might be a God. So I'm sort of an agnostic Christian. Or, as I sometimes explain it, I have the faith of puddleglum --I try to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there is no Narnia, and I'm on Aslan's side even if there is no Aslan to lead it.

The way this was expressed by Lewis originally did give me a great many problems, though I understand you don't mean it exactly the way he did.

In the "Silver Chair", the Witch was trying to hypnotize Eustace and the rest into believing that there was no such thing as the sun, that it was a made up idealization of the gas lamp, and no such thing as a Lion, it was based on the an idealization of housecats, and that the whole surface was a fairy tale based on the underground they were trapped in and so forth.

And the point of that metaphor of how impoverished the view of the world is without God and Heavan. A world without Christ is to a world with Christ as a sputtering gas lamp is to the sun. A world without God is to a world with god as a dingy cave is to a green paradise, as a housecat is to a Lion.

And of course it is making an emotional argument without even seeing the countervailing emotional argument. That to someone who appreciates the wonder of universe this lovely that happened as a result of a confluence of natural laws, it is adding a great puppeteer, that seems empty and hollow. If the Tyger and the Lamb came about as the result of natural laws and a great deal of luck, that is more, not less, wonderful that if there was a great clock maker sticking gears and winding them up.

And what I'm angry and Lewis for is not that he expressed his own emotional truth here, but that he never saw that an atheist can have an opposite emotional truth just as joyous and rich.

That you don't need to be on "Aslan's side" , to be on the side of --- well to be simple minded -- good, that in fact good is still good even if you don't drop one "O".

I'm willing to understand that for Lewis, without Christ and God , and heaven, life would have been as empty as dreary as his metaphor; but there is just such a contempt in Lewis for any possibility of the opposite emotional truth -- not only in Narnia but in any of his writing. He could barely understand atheism as a great sorry, as a sad truth people reluctantly faced (not that he thought it true); he could never understand that it could be emotionally a joyful thing, a liberation, an expansion rather than contraction of the universe.

That's great news, Suzi!

I haven't read The Silver Chair yet (I'm getting through the Narnia books pretty slowly, and that's the next one up), but now I'm really interested to read it. (I was rolling my eyes at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Aslan said something like, "Of course I exist in your world. It was just better for you to meet me here first, where you could get to know me in this form, before you got older and went back to your world and got to know me there." I expect subtext to be slightly more sub than than.)

Typo, FWIW, I'm aware of both the context of my Puddleglum quote, and of the degree to which my own appropriation of it departs from the original intent.

The Silver Chair is my favorite of the series now, though when I first read it as a child it was my second-to-least favorite of the lot. The Magician's Nephew has always been my least favorite, and I hate that they've changed the series packaging so that TMN rather than TLTWATW is the first book. It's just not anything like as good an introduction to the series, IMHO.

Anyway. When I was a kid I didn't much like TSC because so much of it seemed dark and dreary. Now that's what resonates with me--the idea of living out a commitment, and a faith, when life seems dark and dreary, and nothing is what you expected it to be.

Which makes it sound like I find adulthood depressing, which isn't true at all. I'm actually happier than I ever was as a child, but I've been through my share of horrid situations and dark nights of the soul to get to where I am now.

The Magician's Nephew has always been my least favorite, and I hate that they've changed the series packaging so that TMN rather than TLTWATW is the first book. It's just not anything like as good an introduction to the series, IMHO.

I think that was one of my very favorites, actually. I have only faint memories of the series at this point, but that was the one where there were all these pools and rings that would take you to different worlds, right? That was cool.

I was completely oblivious to the Christian thing when I read the books. I've wanted to read them again to get a better sense of them.

I was rolling my eyes at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Aslan said something like, "Of course I exist in your world. It was just better for you to meet me here first, where you could get to know me in this form, before you got older and went back to your world and got to know me there." I expect subtext to be slightly more sub than than that

I don't think he intends it as sub, does he? There is a quote somewhere where he basically says, "this isn't a metaphor, its an alternate reality".

And MUCH easier to get if a big lion is breathing all over you and filling you with strength and peace and the like.