C.S. Lewis writings have accompanied me through many unpleasant days. He was and still is my soul mate (intellectually) in writing. He will remain so till I exhale my last breath. This book strips away all the unnecessary Religion facades and deals nakedly and intricately with MERE CHRISTIANITY as the Bible presents IT.
Some books are worth rereading; some aren't. So far, his books belong to the former.
"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
I once heard a genuine truth seeker asked a Christian apologetist at a Q&A session, "If the lost of meaning is the problem, then what should be the meaning?"
"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?"
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
"Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable."
"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."
"You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."
"There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails...If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."
"The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe." "[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."
"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ."
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