Insufficient Christianity 31.1

Holey smokes, after a week-long hiatus from our refutation of C.S. Lewis (so near the end of his book, too) we're finally back. For those of you not in the know, Flimsy and I have been training our skeptical eye on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, a book heralded by many Christians as a great example of Christian apologetics. If you'd like to read our previous chapters, click on the "C.S. Lewis" label at the bottom of the page.

This is chapter 31 of Mere Christianity, in which Lewis writes about how when you become a Christian, the Christian god will help you become a better person. According to Lewis, god does say that he will not help you unless you're perfect – he will help you all right, and by helping you he will bring you closer to perfection. The Christian god only intends to help you become perfect and he will help you with nothing else.

Because of this, Lewis says his god is like a dentist – fixing all of your mouth when you've only got a toothache in one tooth:

Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.

So, god gives you the "full treatment" for things like masturbation, and as such you cannot be expected to get away with any bad things – even if you think you're getting away with it, god intends to fix you. Because of this Christianity is really difficult and also has the associated cost of letting god "get this job through". God does not care what kind of suffering you have in life – the goal is perfection in heaven, and so if you let him, god will do everything he can even if it makes your life miserable at times.

What bothers me about this is that life in this case ends up not being particularly important for life's sake – life is important because your behaviors during life will result in eternal glory or eternal punishment. This reminds me of all the educational opportunities denied to Flimsy when he was a child for the goal of hiding him from reality to increase his chances of remaining "saved".

I know I have a lot of Christians who read this blog, so let me put it this way: You're not a Muslim. In many Muslim societies, women are treated like chattel and forced to cover almost their entire bodies in order to keep them pure. To a Muslim, eternal life is more important than being able to freely dress and converse with men with whom you are not related. Should women be denied these rights in favor of the "life" after death? If the answer is some variation of, "no", then you understand how I feel when children are denied any opportunity at knowledge, intellectual pursuit or ethical freedom.

The rest of this chapter is about how god will be pleased with your feeble attempts at perfection and so the goal of perfection should not discourage you. God, however, wants us to desire to be like saints, because even if we cannot actually achieve that goal, the desire can help motivate us to behave. No particular arguments are given, rather we're simply told that whenever illness, money troubles, or new types of temptation come along, it is because god is disappointed with us and wants to "force us up to a higher level". If we don't understand why god is doing this to us, it is our fault for not understanding things:

That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.

In the end, if we really let him, God will make us awesome:

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

This last paragraph reminds me of that movie and social movement The Secret. If a Christian sees someone having illness or money troubles, can't they conclude that their troubles are not due to circumstance but due to god being angry at them? Is this why my friends who use wheelchairs have all had the experience where a Christian approached them and told them that if they just believed hard enough, prayed the right ways, or acted in a way that pleased god/Jesus, they would be able to walk again? Are there people who walk around and think that those who are unfortunate are unfortunate due to their own sinfulness and immorality?

Lest you think I am jumping to conclusions where no conclusions are warranted, here is a quote from a very famous Youtube Christian, VenomFangX:

"Many people have been bringing to my attention, they feel somehow considered by amputees. You're gonna run into a lot of these, and you gotta be aware of them, and you gotta be able to call it for what it is. So if you don't recognize them as amputees, they could probably throw you for a loop. But when you recognize them for what they are, they're just like, 'Are you joking?' Okay, let me show you an example. I can grab a box: I don't deserve to die. You've been separated from your arm in the first place. You deserve death and the loss of your arms. Amputees don't deserve their arms, they deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Why should God heal amputees? He's the one who allowed you to lose your arm in the first place! So here's the real question: Why do people lose their arms? I'm just gonna take a stab at it and see what I can do. Now, I cut off my arm. So why doesn't God heal amputees? 'Cause they don't deserve their arms. They deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Sorry if you don't like that! Jesus said if you're even angry with someone, you're a murderer in your heart!"

Now, obviously many theists do not believe that people who are ill or having troubles in their life are having those troubles because they deserve them. But, this kind of thinking presented by Lewis can easily cause people to excuse human injustice or other negative situations under the rationalization that those situations are in place because god is disappointed. Think hurricane Katrina.

Mere Christianity online