There's a thesis I'm very slowly piecing together, and it may seem a ridiculous one, hence I throw it open to any and all critics. It pertains to extremist #Christianity: I believe that modern-day hyperpolitical #Christians have, in fact, embraced the philosophical position known as logical positivism.

There are those who may remember that positivism was one of the philosophical bugabears of #CSLewis, whom of course is regarded by contemporary Christian fanatics as a veritable Apostle—but that's rather my point. Such Christians wallow in such heresies as idolatry with such shameless abandon that they clearly have converged around a new set of values, non-Christian values by the standards of older-fashioned Christian scholarship, but which they are endeavouring to cement in place—with military and police force—as the new definition of Christianity.

This novel form of politicized Christianity, a post-modern Christianity, seems to be obsessed with rooting its morality in the physical world, and it claims that its values are wholly consonant with and indeed continuous with the so-called "laws of nature" determined by empirical science. In truth these post-modern Christians freely reject as much empiricism as necessary to make their cases stick—but what's important here is that such Christian extremists loudly proclaim themselves the true guardians of Western scientific and intellectual authority.

They no longer declare their enemies to be heretical and faithless after the fashion of old-style Christianity. They say that their enemies are illogical, and even insane and thus incapable of logic. Thus have the hyperpolitical Christians of today come to sound almost exactly like the hyperpolitical atheists, who also like to declare their enemies to be insane.

@hobbs @joel

Just finishing it now for the second time. Read it for the first time last decade.

Lovely novel, classic #CSLewis.

The scientific parts, being a 1930s novel, are of course quite humorously wrong at times, but it's still a lovely read.

A quotation from C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer, literary scholar, lay theologian [Clive Staples Lewis]
An Experiment in Criticism, Epilogue (1961)

More about this quote: wist.info/lewis-cs/82426/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #cslewis #books #literature #reading #selfactualization #selfimprovement #transcendence

https://youtu.be/3rpCDOZK-lk

It's healing, listening to something like this. #CSLewis

Revisiting Out of the Silent Planet by #CSLewis. Jack gets his first Christ metaphor in, remarkably early in the fiction:

If [Elwin Ransom] had chosen to look back, which he did not, he could have seen the spire of Much Nadderby, and, seeing it, might have uttered a malediction on the inhospitable little hotel which, though obviously empty, had refused him a bed.

But now that I've finished The War of the Worlds, I realize there are other old #scifi books that have some connection with #CSLewis and Out of the Silent Planet.

Lewis was an early reader of H. G. Wells and had been given a copy of The First Men in the Moon as a Christmas present in 1908.[10] Ransom makes dismissive references to Wells's conceptions in the course of the novel, but Lewis himself prefaced early editions of the novel with the disclaimer that "Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H. G. Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them." Another early work of space fiction which he later acknowledged was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).[11]

But there were other speculative works in answer to which Out of the Silent Planet was written as a decided reaction. In both Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane's Possible Worlds (1927), Lewis detected what he termed Evolutionism, an amoral belief that humanity could perfect from itself a master race that would spread through the universe. Such was the ideology that Weston championed in his debate with Oyarsa, only to have it travestied by Ransom's translation of it into Malacandran.[8]