Path: ultra.sonic.net!jupiter.dnai.com!vncnews!HSNX.wco.com!usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!aslan.demon.co.uk!andrew From: Andrew Rilstone Newsgroups: alt.books.cs-lewis Subject: Evangelism (was Best Non-Narnia CS Lewis) (LONG) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 22:00:15 +0100 Organization: The Small Carrot Shop Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <6278.2161.uupcb@lunatic.com> <33ED2B46.61D5@sprynet.com> <33F13740.77B1@sprynet.com> <33F1D43B.7100@sprynet.com> Reply-To: This@Left.Blank.To.Discourage.Junk.Mail NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: aslan.demon.co.uk [158.152.30.126] MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Newsreader: Turnpike Version 3.03 <3aYeJUWAsGS1FwPCwFgLAUIQiZ> Lines: 216 Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.books.cs-lewis:8585 In article , Sam Dodsworth writes > > I am of the opinion that most people, despite the best efforts >of evangelists, are not Christians, Of course, this would depend on how you defined terms like "most people", "Christians", and "not". If you do surveys asking people what they believe in, surprisingly high numbers express strong belief in God, in Life After Death, and even in Angels and the Devil. I am, of course, very far from claiming that strong belief in God, Heaven, Angels and the Devil constitute Christianity. (The same surveys get disappointingly high numbers of people defining Christianity as "living a good life" and saying that Jesus as "a good moral teacher.) But there seems to be an interim state. We might call it Broard Christianity, to distinguish it from Mere Christianity. (Snippy snappy. Then: "Fundementalist churches have massive congregations...") > Very true, but not (I would argue) strictly relevant, since I'm >not suggesting that the problem with the evangelical material I've >encountered is that it's over-simplified, but rather that it that it's >based on wrong assumptions about what its targets need to be persuaded >of. My rather tentative but not strictly relevant point is that churches which know what they believe in and say so very simply and very frequently are often very well attended, which MAY suggest that the "informing people what we believe in" type of evangelism has met with success. >> > Something distinguishes a committed Marxist and a committed >atheist and a committed Zoroastrian from a fanatical supporter of >Tottenham Hotspur whose relation to the previous three can be summed up >by the phrases "human nature", "science can't explain everything", "not >so much God as a sort of force", and "this is boring - I've got to go >home now or I'll miss the Late Show." My contention is that it is useful >to treat a subset of these distinguishing qualities as if they were >aspects of one particular thing. So the question is "what do the Marxist, the Atheist and the Zoroastrian have in common which the football fan does not?" And back comes the answer "they are all strongly and consistently committed to a set of statments about what the world is for and how it works". This would give us a definition "Relgion = Strong and consistent committment to an ideology." Your statment "Most people are not interested in religion" would therefore equate, not to "Most people do not seek supernatural answers to the universe" but "Most people do not have strong or consistent beliefs -- about anything at all." Which I would be prepared, for the sake of argument, to agree with. (Snippy snippy snip snip snip. Then I say: "Most people are interested in question about why are we here, what is the purpose of life, how should I live.") > Well, this is exactly the assumption that I was questioning. In >my own, highly subjective, experience most people are interested in >these questions only in that they will sometimes listen politely to your >suggested answers and say "that's interesting" when you're finished. It >is my contention that if most people were strongly interested in these >questions then the majority of the population would be committed >believers in religions-or-other-similar-ideologies - something which I >do not believe to be the case. I don't think this is true. I think that people have their answers to the "why are we here" questions and that they believe in them very strongly. They just happen not to be very consistent, or very sensible. Read any newspaper. "The Sun" (ghastly tabloid) is accutely interested in the answer to the question "What happens when we die". It gives different answers in consecutive paragraphs of the same story. The beliefs could be summarised as follows: 1: Belief in ghosts, or unquiet spirits, or some post-death suffering which is exacebated if you are not buried in a graveyard or if your grave is interfered with. ("My children were murdered, but why can't they be laid to rest?") 2: Belief in some sort of vestigial consciousness attached to corpses, so that the dead continue to suffer even when they are buried on holy ground. ("Think of those children in a cold dark graveyard while the murderer is still free to live in the lap of luxury in a ten foot square room with no toilet.") 3: Belief in a continued existence of the dead soul in heaven, entrance to which is automatic for all those who die in a state of innocence, e.g children, dumb animals, the Queen Mother. ("God must have loved those children very much since he wanted them with him in heaven".) Often attached to a belief that the dead are transmogrified into angels. ("The little angels of Dunblane") Note that the belief in the universal innocence of children exists alongside a belief in an innate state called "evil" ("evil from the day he was born") which is the only explanation for criminal behaviour. 4: Belief in a hell, usually concieved of in terms of annihilation, kept exclusively for those who would have been subject to capital punishment under English law up until 1960. ("Killer burns in hell.") 5: Belief that the beloved dead can communicate with the living, especially by phoning an 0898 premium cost "ouija" phone number. 6: Belief that all of the above are in some way related to Traditional Christian Moral Values, thought of as the antithesis of Communism and Islam. If religion requires consistent ideological belief, then I concede that by your definition, these answers do not constitute a "religion". I think that they show that many people are interested in hearing answers to the sorts of questions that Christianity addresses. I think that the Christian answers are better, myself, but then I'm biassed. >>When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing: >>they believe in everything. >> > I'd say that they always did, but that changing fashions have >left most Britons nominally-agnostic with a belief in UFOs where they >used to be nominally-Christian with a belief in spirits. I think we need to define "nominally" a little better. I think that the old fashioned Englishman who believed in Christianity + Spritis had a strong religious belief -- but that it was a belief in something which I would not call Christianity. Consider the following people: Prossor Herbert Wagstaff who has read Catholic theology at the the Vatican university, and dedicated his life to writing books about the subject. Brother Fulchrimus O'Herring, an illiterate Southern Irish potato herder, who had a powerful and vivid experience of God at the age of 15, and has spent the last 50 years in a monastary devoting himself to contemplation. Hilda Braithwait, married with three children, secretery of the Chipping Sodbury line dancing club, who recites her rosary, goes to confession and prays to the Virgin to help her when she gets impatient with her children. Megan O'Loony, who believes that touching her statue of the Virgin will bring her good luck in the lottery, and who think that a phial of holy water from Lourdes will ward off sun stroke. She uses a ouija board to talk to her dead relatives and the Archangel Michael, and thinks that Elvis Presley may have been the second coming. On paper, these four people are all members of the same religion; indeed, the same branch of the same religion. Brother O'Herring is probably too busy having spritual experiences in his cell to care very much about theology, or ideology, or doctrine: he practices the presence of God in his own simple way. So, of course does the saintly Hilda Braithwait, who lives, on the surface, a much less religious life. She would probably sooner talk to you about Eastenders or her kids teething problems than about Consistent Ideology: yet her faith is very real. Wagstaff has the consistent ideology and the understanding, although some would say that his religion, being more cerebral, was less authentic. Certainly, he rarely gets the ecstacies that the mystic monk experiences, nor the warm glow that sustains the pious housewife. Finally, Megan O'Loony is just as strongly committed to her beliefs as Hilda: it just so happens that -- although they have the same colours and use the same language -- she beleives a completely different set of things. So, which of these are "nominal" and which are -- er -- antinominal? > Clearly, Lewis can't mean this literally since the young men in >question would have had Divinity lessons (of a Christian, rather than >"broadly Christian" character) in school. Precisely my point. They had had "divinity" lessons, but what they had been taught, on Lewis's view, on my own, and on that of the author of the book, was not Christianity. What they had been taught was probably the puritanical British folk religion which Lewis lampoons so wonderfully in the opening chapters of the Pilgrims Regress". God loves you and and will send you to hell. Christians are the only moral people in the world. Good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell. All dead people are in heaven. They didn't have an ideology free void: they had a set of beliefs that were different from what Lewis and I would call Christianity. >>My own experience is >>that two schools worth of compulsery religious education of a broardly >>Christian character and a childhood of Sundays in a Methodist church >>left me *entirely* ignorant of the content of Christianity until I met >>up with some evangelicals at college. But I may be another exceptional >>case. >> > You were, after all, looking for something that the majority of >your compatriots weren't. I don't know if that's true. But if so, the point was that the Church, the Sunday School and the state sanctioned religious indoctrination didn't give it to me. I genunely didn't know what the Christian teaching about the crucifixion was until someone handed me a tract. (I thought the tract very silly, and rejected the doctrine until it was explained to me, better and more clearly, in a book called "Mere Christianity" by some author the name of whom temporarily escapes me.) -- Andrew Rilstone andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/ *************************************************************************** "Why can't I be a non-conformist like everybody else?" ***************************************************************************