*A Text Response from Gog when asked if he could imagine comparing C.S. Lewis to Wittgenstein. (Can you tell he's a fan of Wittgenstein?)
"Comparing CS Lewis to Wittgenstein is like comparing Flavor Flav to Einstein. One
revolutionized philosophical thinking and almost single handedly
ushered in the linguistic turn. The other made shoddy and lazy arguments
filled with false choices and fallacies. What was is? Jesus was a liar,
a devil, or the son of God?... I looked it up. It's: lunatic, devil, or God himself. Ugh. Stupidity! To formulate that "trilemma", I'd say either you're dishonest, lazy, or brain-dead."
I read a new theolatte blog today that mentions C.S. Lewis written by Dan D. (who I've previously mentioned in past blogs). Dan really loves and respects C.S. Lewis. He teaches a course at his Bible College he is currently also the dean of. I am not a fan of C. S. Lewis. I have pointed this out before to him. Gog explains exactly my sentiment why. The more one delves into the world of philosophy you realize what a really bad philosopher C. S. Lewis was compared to so many great philosophers. He just did bad philosophy. I'm sure he was a nice enough man and a fine storyteller but some of his arguments he presents fall apart with the slightest examination. His trilemma thing is laughably easy to tear apart and many of his concepts were riddled with logical fallacies. A lot of these things make sense within the brackets of "A Christian Worldview" .. well, guess what.. as I've said before.. there is more to the world than these brackets. There is secular philosophy and most philosophers are atheists, like most scientists, by the way. hmm.
I loved The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" when I was a kid. I read that book many times and pretended Naria was in my closet. I loved it for the non-Christian imagery part of it. I loved it because it was a fun imaginary world I could transport myself to. C. S. Lewis' character Aslan the lion in the children's book is representative of Jesus who dies in the place of one of the children. Peter I think? I forget. This whole scapegoat thing was boring and not as magical as the magical world of Narnia. A place a kid could escape to and dream about with witches, a goat-legged leprechaun-looking guy, and yummy turkish delight (always pictured that tasting like Chick fil A, but less homophobic.)
THAT was the best part of that book! In a way it's telling of Christianity ... making up magical places that we all wish we could escape too... hmm.
Like heaven! and of course hell. I've discussed hell enough in my previous blogs. It is difficult to get my New Christian friends that I have to talk to me (an atheist) about hell. It's awkward and they usual glaze over it.. for obvious reasons. But heaven, this place is a magical made up fantasy afterlife destination! Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that heaven sounded like another hell.. like a celestial North Korea.. where all we do is praise, bow, and worship all day long our celestial dictator. Fucking horrifying!
I once joked with Gog about how we should make a short film that is like a complete rip off of David Lynch-style horror film where we see someone die.. a good faithful Christian (like that white kid from God's Not Dead for example) and he goes to heaven and it's not what he expects! It's full of these still-born babies and aborted fetuses and destroyed bodies from car wrecks all dismembered and worshiping and singing creepy praise songs with a fucked up sounding organ played by a dirty rastafarian man. lol like in Muholland Drive. jk. but Jesus!.. (literally) The chills! I can picture it now.. a choir of tiny aborted zygotes all bloody singing praise songs with their non-developed vocal chords so it's even creepier! Fuck!
But let me try to switch gears here... that was terrifying!
Heaven, like "The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" used to be such a wonderful place in my little mind. I was a young child when I used to dream of heaven. In fact the reason I wrote this blog is I had a weird memory flashback. You've had them before with searing clarity, right? You can almost taste, and smell, and visualize everything and it brings that wonderful warm childhood comforting feeling. It's great. My vivid memory flashback was of my imagination of what I thought heaven was going to look like when I died - I could see the wonderful white cloudy fog, the gold everywhere (like Trump's house I guess), the mansions we all lived in after we died and arrived. It was beautiful. I remember picturing everyone enjoying food like bowls of fruit and oh the laughter .. all the laughter and joy one could imagine. Peaceful and glorious.
The best part though was seeing family members again, like my great grandma and grandpa, that had already passed away. I missed my family very much and I always pictured running up to them .. and hugging them. It was a glorious reunion of those that were stripped of the ones they loved. This memory of what I thought heaven was like when I was a child even now as a godless atheist heathen makes me feel really good. But I no longer fall for such childish things. It's a trick. It's not real... and we should grow up and know better. We invented these stories of afterlives that have been passed down generation after generation to deal with the curse of consciousness that as far as we know we are the only species of animal that has this- self awareness. We birthed cognitive dissonance and we told stories and we believed them for so long. But we know better now. We are smarter.
But unlike the "The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" I thought heaven was a real place because as a small child all the way through adulthood my parents who of course I trusted told me it was, because my school told me it was, because Sunday School teachers told me it was, because the pastor told me it was. But it was all cherry-picked, and extrapolated upon from the Bible. It's all guess work and imagination based on a few random verses from one stupid book. I often wonder why it's so hard for my New Christian friends to take that step out of deluding themselves over these things and to step into the world without make believe.
It isn't scary because we're all in this together... this journey of being conscious! It's a fucking weird subjective journey we are all separately taking together and fun to try and follow the academic literature and look at good philosophy and science for answers based in logical soundness and/or empirical evidence. There are a lot of people in the non-believer camp now and we are doing really well. In fact some of the polls recently show that some of the most "moral" people (in various factors polled) are those that consider themselves non-religious. We don't need the added "theory of God" to be good, to live a life filled with deep meaning and purpose while simultaneously understanding the cosmos is meaningless and purposeless from a "cosmic perspective" (so far as we can tell). We don't need you to add more to the human story. We'll take what we know and start with that.
I'm currently listening via audiobook to the Old Testament and I'm utterly disgusted by the immorality of this particular god. I'm also just embarrassed for people that seriously think that this book has any relevance on life (especially morality!) in the 21st century. It's honestly mind-boggling to me how people can still be religious in the information age. Many of you that are reading this are non-religious but some that are reading this could be religious... All I want to say to you is be more skeptical of your beliefs and your confirmation biases. Couldn't you be wrong? Can you entertain this possibility? Turn the scrutiny away from Planned Parenthood or gay marriage and turn it around on yourself. You are fooling yourself with these ancient stories, these bad philosophers, these made up afterlife destinations and just like my parents, teachers, principal, pastor, etc did with me growing up you are spreading this to your children.
Please stop.
Stop making "theories" (involving the supernatural and magic) about the real world in which you have zero evidence of except that you accept as profound that tingle in your heart, that still soft voice you think you are hearing in your head (yikes!), the delusion that prayers are productive and cause outcomes in reality, and a lifetime of confirmation bias. It's not real. Get the fuck out of Narnia... step back through the wardrobe into the real world. You are an adult not a child. Please.. Or else you may end up like Glenn Beck.
Go here:
Glen Beck right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ni9SmSmJAc
New Theolatte blog on C. S. Lewis:
http://www.theolatte.com/2015/08/c-s-lewis-a-discussion-with-colin-duriez-n-d-wilson-and-lyle-dorsett/
Religion Doesn't Make People More Moral: Study Finds.:
http://www.livescience.com/47799-morality-religion-political-beliefs.html
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