These might be innocent advertising stunts but they illuminate something interesting in the world that the Lord is contesting with the enemy for. Humanism, secularism and atheism are not playing fair, but would you expect them too? As Christians we are often confronted with questions that are hard to answer, and if we find those answers we find the answers either unpleasant or untenable. For example we might be asked why a child has a horrible illness if there is a God? To answer this question on the terms demanded by a secularist, that is without reference to eternal life, God or anything supernatural is impossible and the conclusion of humanism is that there is no God. Lets analyse this, first this does prove that there is no god but it does not prove that there is no God (note the use of capitals). This universe is free from limited gods who are happy to sit by whilst little girls suffer from illness, it is free from gods who don’t provide eternal life and it is free from impersonal forces who capriciously play with human lives. The effect of ruling out the supernatural and then demanding that it proves itself is a paradox of the worst kind. We must ask the question if terrible things happen in the world and we allow the existence of the supernatural does God exist? My first point is that we see unaccountable good in the strangest places which flies in the face of socialisation theory and all psychological knowledge. We see the family of senior Nazi’s rescuing Jews during the holocaust, we see people moved to donate money to victims of natural disaster around the world and we see ordinary people doing extra ordinary things in terrible situations. The question is why? If we are merely animals who have evolved the capacity to use technology and all our actions can be explained by our society, genetic inheritance and our environment why do we show kindness to strangers we have never met and will never meet again, why do people save those who are being persecuted and why do people resist an all mighty state that has them hospitalised if they refuse to not believe in God. If there is no God and we have to analyse this behaviour according to “Science, experience and logic” we come across incipid conclusions, it makes us feel better… Or perverse conclusions such as, I remember reading the report, women who are ‘bimbos’ ensnaring rich men being ‘more inteligent’ than women who try to make it on their own. Starting with the premis that we are evolutionary creatures who are interested in the promotion of our genetics via our children it is logical that a woman who seduces older rich men rather than make her own money is living a better life, but despite the logic it is wrong! A woman who tarts herself out is degrading herself and that is not appropriate. Men and women are not there merely to procreate but rather to love each other and raise families in an atmosphere of love FOR ITS OWN SAKE. Humanists will burn love, the family, society and the virtues on the alter of the godless religion.
Christians live in a world which is dominated by philosophies from which they are alienated. We are called not to think like a Humanist whose logic, premis’ and reasoning rule out God but rather we are called to think like a Christian. This is similar to the way a soldier who is drawn from the civilian population has got to change his mind and think in a different way. As Timothy writes, “No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs—he wants to please his commanding officer.” 2 Timothy 2:4 (New International Version).
So as Christians we need to think like Christians and accept the terrible truth that there is a personal God, with an absolute rule, objective values and, worst of all, he wants us to know him as he knows us. And the cost…he has already paid.

A witch is not, as now portrayed, a human who uses magic but rather a person who has transcended their humanity and is now something less than human.  Which is where we find Jadis, a powerful non-human ruling a frozen Narnia.

Lewis was a man who saw more to the world than the physical and remarked that if he were not a Christian he would have become a magician.  He was kept away from this path by the terrible experiences of his friends who dabbled with magic and had a break down.  Magic and Witchcraft are not understood in the current age and are mistaken for things that they are not.  The word witch is used in modern parlance for any magic user whereas in ancient religion as revealed by the classics that Lewis was immersed a witch was a person who had abandoned their humanity and become something else, in the same way a vampire or a werewolf was originally a person but becomes a supernatural creature the witch, sorcerer or magician is person who is no longer human.  The modern mind also can not understand magic confusing it with parlor tricks, deceitful individuals who seek power over gullible primitives or anachronistic knowledge that is mistaken for magical powers.  Magic permeates the work of Lewis as a powerful force that holds the universe together and is akin to the laws of physics.  Magic users such as the scientific institute in That Hideous Strength and the Witch learn to use the laws of magic and manipulate them to their own advantage, often to their own disadvantage as in the case of Uncle Andrew who has a nervous breakdown.

Since coming to Narnia the Witch travels across the sea, to learn magic from the court of the Emperor, she overthrows the kings and queens of Narnia and then freezes that land with a hundred years of winter.  The White Witch is rather like Jadis in that she is a tragic character, it is obvious that winter will end and spring will come, it has been prophesized, it the natural course of events and Aslan is on the prowl.  The Witch, for all her power, can not prevent her death which is as sure as spring follows winter.

All evil comes to an end and if you are suffering under domination, if your soul has been frozen and you ache to be free know this, the warm blood of Christ can melt the harshest winter and your salvation is something that he has died for.  All evil comes to an end just like spring follows winter.

The highwater mark of Charns magic was the “Deplorable word” a magic super weapon that once said would kill all living things except for the person who used it.  Realising the terror of this weapon the ancient Kings and Queens made the knowledge secret but it was discovered years later by Jadis, the last Queen of Charn.

In the last throws of a civil war when she is about to lose to her sister Jadis uses the word and kills the world, then awaiting the intervention of explorers from another world she hibernates amongst the statues of her ancestors.

She is awoken from this sleep by Digory and Polly and is an unwelcome guest on their further adventures.  Causing problems in London and then travelling with them to the birth of Narnia.  After throwing an iron bar at Aslan she flees to the north to escape.

Despite her power, her magic and her strength and despite her evil, pride and selfishness she is a tragic character, as worthy of our sympathy as any character from “The Great Divorce”.  She is, if you look closely, a lonely woman who uses her feminine wiles to both get attention, her dress being off her shoulder, and to gain influence by imperiously flirting with men.  She is a frightened woman who seeks independent power over her family, those who awaken her and even Aslan himself whom she recognises as a power much stronger than her.  The true extent of her fear is clear when she is in the wood beyond the worlds when she is stripped of her power and when she faces Aslan.

The tragedy is that she, like so many of the ghosts in “The Great Divorce” do not fall into love with Aslan but rather hold onto their fear, desires and dreams.  In 1919 Lewis published a poem with a section about a witch in which he describes her as, “Too deeply damned to feel her shame” a line that could apply to Jadis.

After fleeing from Aslan she makes her way North and into a garden with a tree whose fruit is the fruit of life.  Shes steals a golden apples achieving immortality and whilst hiding in the wildlands of the north transmutes into the White Witch.  She goes from bad to worse, as Lewis said we are “all eggs which must either hatch or go off”, Jadis had the potential to be a great and powerful and good sourceress, akin to Galadriel, but unlike that fair lady Jadis would not have handed the ring back to Frodo.

Ginger is a large tom cat in the prime of his life.   Like other antagonists in Lewis’ work, has corrupted his gifts and succumbed to his weaknesses.  His laziness and quick feline intelligence has led him into an apostate theology. Confident, intelligent and ruthless he makes the mistake of calling on a God in whom he does not believe.

The story of the Last Battle starts with a monkey called Shift who dresses a donkey as a lion to imitate Aslan.  Intending to gain power, to make Narnia into a better place, better place being defined a place that suits his specific needs – oranges and bananas rolling in – but is soon out of his depth in dealing with the Calormen.

Ginger watches and intelligence allows him to realise and understand the deception as well as come to terms with the leader of the Calormen, Rishda Tarkaan, who like Ginger does not believe in his own God but seeks a materialist reward from the deception unlike Shrift who actually believes in Aslan, but is confident that he would not ‘turn up’.

Ginger and Rishda debate over the heads of the talking beasts agreeing that Tash is no more or no less than Aslan.  The funny thing about this is that Rishda is debating theology with a cat.  Think about it because if Aslan is not real how can there be talking cats?  If there are talking animals, very different from the animals in his own country who can not talk then there must, logically, be a reason for this and that reason is clearly Aslan.  But the funniest thing is that the advocate of the argument there is no Aslan is the talking cat.  Using intelligence and a voice is not usual for a cat, it is supernatural and a small supernatural phenomenon like a cat can only be derived from a larger supernatural creature.

After becoming a Christian Lewis agued that the strongest evidence for the existence of the supernatural is the human mind which is in nature but clearly is not part of nature and, very importantly, can not be shown to come from nature.  So Lewis uses this to mock very clever men at Cambridge and Oxford were arguing that there was no supernatural world and used reason to prove this.  The paradox of a cat using intelligence to disprove Aslan sends up all the clever rhetoric that proves there is no God.

Shifts foolish deception was bad enough but Gingers, his enlightened friends and the Calormen are worse.  They foresee a future of slavery, colonisation and exploitation for Narnia.  They want to terrify the Narnians for their own materialistic purposes.

Ginger does not benefit for long as he is called upon to prove that Aslan is in the stable.  Thinking that he would have a chance to show off and sure in the knowledge that the stable only contained a Calorman he is confronted by Tash who is as real as Aslan..  The result, as promised in “The Magicians Nephew” is that he loses his gifts and returns to being a dumb animal.  But the allegory here is keen because what Lewis is saying is that if we abandon God we lose our gift and stop being human, merely the trousered ape from “The Abolition of Man”.

Since I wrote this a nice Lady indicated that she thought that Ginger the cat and Ed have a lot in common.  I had to have a little think about this because my first impression was that I wanted to avoid political wrangling, despite being a tory and a hater of socialism etc, I wanted the blog to be more religious and philosophical than political.

However, I agree that Ed is very much like Ginger.  Ginger loses his ability to talk, think and be sentient because he undermines his own basis for being a person.  Ed is the leader of a socialist party who has rejected socialism.  By abandoning his values he has no basis for talking, no basis for thinking and no basis for being.  He is a candle in a storm.

This is important not just for politicians of socialist parties but also politicians of all parties.  Terry Pratchet writes in one of his Discworld novels that to be the best you have to focus on being the best.  Likewise to be a politician you need to be a politician and to be a leader of a philosophical movement you have to subscribe totally to that movement.  Our politicians are becoming mundane because they are all interested in power and use their thinking as a cloak for this rather than following their beliefs.
If you like these ideas can I recommend “the abolition of man” by CS Lewis to you.  In this he discusses the need for people to have values, standards and beliefs.

But can you tell me who is missing from my short version of the story?

Namaan heard about Elisha from a Jewish slave girl who belonged to him.  If she had not suggested to him that he might be healed by Elisha he would not have ever considered travelling to Israel, why should he when everything in the world was in Persia.

So the whole story hinges on the enduring faith of a girl whose name is not even mentioned in the biblical text.  Lets consider her.  We know that she was a maid who had been captured by Syrian freebooters (mercenaries, irregular soldiers) and sold into slavery.  Lets be honest life had not treated her well.  It is not impossible that she had not been raped, it is not impossible that as a slave she was not sexually pursued by the men of the house.  She was forcibly relocated to a foreign land away from her family who had probably been murdered.  I personally sometimes feel that losing my keys is a challenge to my faith (“Why me Lord, you know where they are!…Owwl”) but despite all these horrible things that happened to his little girl, she retained faithful to the Lord.  She probably did not even have access to anyone of the same religion let alone a priest AND YET she not only retained her faith SHE WITNESSED to one of the most POWERFUL men in the world.

As a historian I am fascinated by the movement of ideas around the world.  One of the most interesting is the change amongst the Vikings from the Nihilistic pre-Christian Odinism to the glory of Christianity.  You have to wonder how many Nuns, Monks and Priests, how many treasures taken by the Vikings from Churches, Monasteries and Nunneries back to Norway and Sweden retained their faith and infected the Vikings with Christianity until the 11^th century when the glorious William the Conqueror built some of the Churches that are still worshiped in today.

Albert Einstein – Permalink

This Quote has been sourced from the Richard Dawkins Foundation website.  If you want to read more and see more of Dawkins please follow the link above.

The concept of a soul is a tricky one, important to theists and important to atheists alike, but not for the same reason.  The theist would argue that the existence of the soul proves the existence of the supernatural, and ipso facto god.  Likewise the atheist would argue that there is no soul, supernatural and therefore God.  It becomes therefore a fault line, a battleline even.

The debate settles upon what it is that looks out of your eyes?  What is the voice inside your head?  Does that thing survive the death of the human creature or does it stop when the human creature’s body stops being medically alive?  Does it in fact survive sleep or comas?  And is a human ‘soul’ the same as an animal ‘soul’ or are the they different warranting different levels of respect?  When does the ‘soul’ start and when does it finish?  All important questions with important applications to the social and philosophical questions of our age.

In this quote Albert Einstein is applying a scientific approach to the soul and vivisects the soul from the mystery by describing the process as “reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions”.  This is a very poor way to describe how our brains work, how we understand the world and how we perceive our “inner experience”.  Clearly there is far more to this whole question than a reductionism of the soul to a movement of electrons and grey matter and to draw the conclusion that there is no survival after death is clearly unsupportable.

The soul is a trixy thing that has defied philosophic investigation and scientific investigation.  Clearly there is something going on inside both your head as you read this and in my head as I write it that does not go on when this document is analysed by a computer.  Quite what it is remains beyond scientific understanding and beyond a concrete modelling of philosophers and often beyond our own understanding.  My scientific friends might say that just because it is not understood does not mean that it belongs to religion but might it be that some things can not be understood by science.  Poetry is not a suitable subject of study for science, maybe there are others.

Further to this atheists and theists alike are largely confused about the Christian concept of the soul…and I am not going to add to that confusion until I have read more.

it is not much of a God that can not give you a new body and not much of a God who can not create a universe in seven days.  if that is all that is on offer and my God is in my imagination I would rather play with my imaginary God.

Enlightened self interest is a fascinating concept because it is completely and utterly wrong in every respect.  Although it is a theory that brings out the best in a random group it is impractical, self centred and dependant upon people actually getting a reward.  The ESI candidate will always have one eye on his personal balance sheet to ensure that his good works are feeding back to him.

Christianity is very different to ESI and in fact Jesus pointed out ESI as something entirely different to the morality that he was proposing.  Jesus said that his followers should throw parties and invite people who could not afford to return the faviour, give gifts to people without expecting anything back in stark contrast to the Pagans (people who did not believe in God) who did the opposite.

ESI philosophy is of the Gradgrind variety which demands to see reward for action, balanced and economical.  ESI clearly falls into this model but how Christian morality does, only last year President Obama suggested the US military would not be able survive a week it if applied the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.  Homer Simpson puts it more clearly.  He says, when asked by Bart what his religion is “you know the one with all the rules that don’t work out in real life”.  To an extent this is true because modern philosophy is dominated by Humanist thought which rules out God and the supernatural.  Christian philosophy depends upon the Devine so it fighting uphill against the humanist in this and other matters.

The Humanist often plays the “there is no God” gambit which if followed up with the “prove it” can be devastating to a Christian who has little experience of playing with these kinds of snakes.  We are brought up in a humanist scientist paradigm where all the odds are stacked against us.  We must follow the advice of Jerimiah 35 vs 3.  The evidence for God comes clear when you obey, against all reason, his requests (not demands, requests) because it is not the subject of your kindness who will reward you but your loving father in heaven, and that is the strongest evidence you will ever have for the Lord.

In “The Great Divorce” Lewis states that “demons are not made out of bad mice and fleas but rather bad archangels. The stronger angel becomes the fiercer demon” which is a very strange way to introduce a character described throughout the series as “dear Mr. Tumnus”.

Mr Tumnus is a fawn, different and distinct from the party loving Satyrs and with a very different role in ancient Greek mythology. The role of the Fawn was to protect travellers in the wood, particularly from wolves whom they would chase away.

This is why Tumnus carries a umbrella, to protect himself and others from the inclement weather which augments an image of protection and care so obvious to a classical scholar such as Lewis. But Tumnus has a very dark secret, one that we overlook but is very important, he has perverted his role as the protector of the travellers in the woodland to become a Kidnapper, the thing he exists to prevent. Even more damning is that he is in the service of the White Witch who polices the woodland with wolves.

Meeting Lucy in the Lantern waste he is courteous, kind and uses his charm to gain her trust and bring her back to his house so that he can hand her over to the murderous White Witch. He uses his gifts in the service of evil.

But Mr Tumnus is even more complicated than we initially imagine. On his shelf are books such as “Is Man a myth?” or “Men Monks and Gamekeepers; A study in Popular Legend” which mirror books that might have graced Lewis’ own shelf in years the approaching his conversion. He is a practicing kidnapper whilst at the same time looking for redemption. As part of his scheme he feeds Lucy a meal and then tells her stories about Narnia, the he starts to play his flute to make her fall asleep. Little does his know that whilst the evil White Witch might have Narnia under her tyranny but good is far more insidious and prevasive. By telling stories about Narnia before the White Witch, by playing his music and by meeting Lucy the half dead kindness, goodness and Narnian qualities are given a fresh breath of air and the real world, from beyond the icebound now, comes crashing in on Mr Tumnus and he ensures that Lucy can escape.

By facing the ugly truth of what Tumnus has become we can truly understand and appreciate the message that Lewis is trying to present to us. Again referring to the Great Divorce a clergyman who fell into intellectual sin demands that if he goes to heaven it should be a place, “where I can use my god given skills” the redeamed soul with whom he is having a conversation replies that “there will be no scope for intellectual skills, only forgiveness for perverting them” Which is what Mr Tumnus found, forgiveness for perverting his gifts.