Friday, October 14, 2005

chocolate eggs and Jesus risen (C.S. Lewis)

I see that the subject of religion has cropped up, so here is C.S. Lewis on the subject. I can't say that I understand this passage in any deep sense, but I agree with it, and I like it:

There is a stage in a child's life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began 'Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.' This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.

8 comments:

citizen_us said...

The Guardian UK (yeah, i know) had an informative article on some of the possible causes and relationships between religion and evolution.
The url:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1591084,00.html

Nothing on our planet causes more death, destruction, and violence than religion.

However, wars fought in the name of religion are one of the reasons technology has advanced so fast and far.

And then, OT, what would happen to our planet, if our warriors are weeded and bred out and we are challenged with an alien species bent on our destruction?

Eric said...

Well, if one accepts the proposition that Marxist-Lenninism could be described as a religion...

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Knucklehead,

I have no doubt in my mind that there is at least one new secular "religion" out there (and probably several) that is just as religious as the old religions, even though it has officially rejected "God". Communism and Naziism were both religions. It wasn't collectivizing the peasantry that caused a huge boost to Russia's output, it was the belief system that sprang up for a generation before dying out. People in that generation believed they were really building a better world and it really fired their motors up, made them want to work in the morning.

Working to make a better world is far more motivating that working for a mere paycheck.

But I take your point.

truepeers said...

For the young boy, the thing (chocolate) and the sign (easter) at first appear one and the same, in a glorious unity. But he naturally consumes the chocolate and thus discovers that the sign survives the thing in which it was once incarnated. He remembers the sign, easter, once the egg is gone, and so he now faces the choice that Lewis mentions.

Do I focus on eating more chocolate in hopes of returning to that feeling of unity I once had when the chocolate was both sweet and significant? Or do I get religious and try to understand how significance can survive the consumption of the thing; in other words, do I now go looking elsewhere for a divine being that appears to have been only temporarily incarnated in the once sweet and significant egg?

JoeC confuses the desire to consume eggs with the desire to find the divine being that guarantees the significance of easter eggs, a desire and significance that extends, in both cases, beyond mere appetite.

Religion aims to defer our consuming desires. But in doing so it must make eggs significant: not simply tasty but also sacred. This is a big gamble. Religion bets that more of us will seek the significance of the sign/thing than indulge in mindless consumption of sacred things.

Obviously this gamble doesn't always pay off. But it must serve us more often than not, or we wouldn't be here today. Our forebears would have destroyed the human race long ago.

Joe, if not religion, then what do you have to offer? I'm getting hungry and don't like the way you are eyeing that sweet little t-bone over there. Shall we make it sacred, doubling "the stakes" in our rivalry? In other words, shall we remain animals and just fight over a piece of meat, or shall we become human and have the choice of temporarily forgetting the meat and fighting also for a sacred and divine being? Which way will prove evolutionarily more successful in the long run?

truepeers said...

I should add, Joe, that once we agree to make the meat sacred, we can then have a ritual feast where the meat is no longer an all-or-nothing-but-leftovers object of our rivalry, but a sacred thing that we can divide and distribute more or less equally. We can do this because in agreeing to make it sacred in the first place(whether god intervened to show us the way, or whether we discovered it ourselves), we create/are given a model of egalitarian human sharing in a divine being. So have faith, friend.

citizen_us said...

Knucklehead said...

"Authoritarianism, especially the expansionist varieties, is far and away the greatest cause of death, destruction, and violence.

Religion has sometimes provided the impetus for expansionist authoritarianism but such has not always been the case".

I personally feel and believe that anytime people worship a false ideology, you can group it with and under the heading of "religion".

Authoritarianism may be what you choose to call it. Control of people through intimidation, torture, death, indoctrination, whatever "title" you put it under, the core remains the same.

The results are certainly the same.

How was Hitler any different than anyone of the "gods" people worship these days? Stalin? Mao?

Allah and Mohammed, the current devils, are no different than any of the three I named above.

Just longer lived.

Unknown said...

I would say communism has killed more people. And I do not believe we can compare communism and the gulags to the Golden Rule.

The abuse of religion is not the fault of the religion. Communism however, it evil to its very foundation.

citizen_us said...

knucklehead, I understand perfectly the distinction you are making, with words. I appreciate and understand why you do so.

Islam is not a religion. It is an authoritarian manifesto disguised as a religion.

Thanks!