I enjoyed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid without getting any of the Christian stuff from it. (It wasn't one of my favorites, though -- the kids don't do anything! Stuff just happens to them.) I only started reading the others in the past year or two. (I got a paperback set of the whole series for my birthday from one of my friends when I was about 10 or so. It had TLTWATW as the first one, and The Magician's Nephew somewhere around the fourth. But now I can't find all of them, so I'm buying a few of the missing ones, and trying to figure out the right order is confusing.)

There is a quote somewhere where he basically says, "this isn't a metaphor, its an alternate reality".

Wikipedia to the rescue:

"What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all."

Wikipedia from me too:

Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". This is similar to what we would now call fictional parallel universes. As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs Hook in December of 1958:

“If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality, however, he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all” (Martindale & Root 1990).

I just want to say, I'm really sorry if what I said last night offended or insulted anyone. That totally wasn't my intention.

I dunno, Hil, you're sort of an instigating bitch and we all know that by now.

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.

Huh. Which number in the series was it for you when you were wee? 'Cause it was Book 1 in the editions I was reading as a kid, I'm pretty sure (ah, Narnia! My first ever fandom, back before I knew what fandom was).

Voyage of the Dawn Treader! God, I remember my Mum walking into a room and finding me sobbing my heart out, just weeping and weeping, heartbroken, and she was all "OMG! What what what?" And I was all "....heroic mouse!....self-sacrifice!....Reepicheep!" And when she eventually grasped that her 7 year old was in this state over the fate of a fictional mouse... well, my Mum has never really grokked that side of my personality.

vw, I loved The Golden Compass. Loved loved loved. And I didn't find it antithetical to theism either, actually. The direction he takes the subsequent books is more agressively atheist, but at least initially I thought that he was going for agnosticism. YMMV. (As to not letting one's kids read them lest they be OMG corrupted by atheism - I confess, this makes me want to shake people until their teeth rattle. Not least because (a) I adored the Narnia books as a child and knew them inside out and back to front - and, look, Ma, still not Christian; and (b) after reading His Dark Materials I realised that, yes, I was more of an agnostic than an atheist. I found the final book spiritually barren, and had not been expecting it to be.)

On a slightly related note, I'm re-reading (well, Audiobooking) Ender's Game and its sequels at the moment, and I'm finding all the religious stuff absolutely fascinating.

GF has been un-laid off. That place is weird, but at least this is good weird. I guess her boss went to bat for her.

Which number in the series was it for you when you were wee?

Six. The version that was being published in America when I first read it circa 1980 was TLTWATW, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader, Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician's Nephew, Last Battle. Which I think is publication order.

GOOD NEWS, GC! So happy for you both.

That sounds like the same order as the set I had, Susan. Circa 1990 or so. So far, I've read (in this order) TLTWATW, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader, Magician's Nephew. I think that Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Last Battle seems like a reasonable order for the rest. Except that that only one I can find right now is Horse and His Boy.