» Defense is something to be abhorred?
We are half hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
-C.S.Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Really? So finding pleasure in something is wrong? Why find pleasure in this when you could find pleasure in that? Also, what’s wrong with ambition? I shouldn’t aspire to be a doctor? I just…I’m sorry I just do not understand this. I’ve also never understood why sex is a sin. Seriously. If God created it, and he obviously created us to take pleasure in it (if you believe that), then why oh why is it always so taboo?
Also, just because people “fool about with drink and sex” doesn’t mean those are the only things that bring them pleasure. C.S. Lewis, surely, is speaking about their short term pleasures (which, in any sense, is mostly true), it’s not impossible to find infinite joy without religion. If that’s the way you find joy, excellent. I’m happy for you, because you should be happy. No one can take that away from you. But I hate this fucking high horse mentality that acts like anyone who drinks or has sex is a fool.
(P.S. sorry flyingfarther, I love you, and hope you understand why I had to say these things.)Actually, you did not need to say any of these things. If you are truly satisfied with your life and have found true joy, you would not feel the need to defend your way of life. You would be blissful in how you live and would not see the need to rudely degrade others for expressing their own beliefs. You are so ready to attack anyone who references the “fucking high horse mentality that acts like anyone who drinks or has sex is a fool” that you blatantly misinterpret the quote. “We are HALF-HEARTED creatures.” We live in a way that does not utilize our full capacity as humans to love and rejoice. C.S. Lewis is not saying that drinking and sex are sinful or not pleasurable. In fact, he states clearly that we derive pleasure from both. But he is also saying that we settle for something mediocre, a temporary and fleeting joy, when we are offered the world, a lifetime of love and happiness through a God who gifts us with a way of living beyond only pleasuring ourselves. People who do not see this are ignorant, and yes, I am saying you are ignorant. The fact that you immediately choose to be offended instead of even attempting to understand the quote is evidence enough of that. I accept people for the way they want to live. I’m not going to force my faith on you. But if I have to choose between sitting in a ditch making mud pies or building glorious sand castles on a beautiful beach, you are damn right I will choose the beach, again and again and again. I choose to live joyously with my ENTIRE heart. I choose not to deny myself a full and rich life, lived with a full and rich heart. I’m not saying you need God, or religion, to live this way. You don’t. I’m not saying drinking, sex and ambition are bad. They’re not. But there is so much more to live for, and if you are blind to that, then you are living a half-hearted life.
I’m trying to come up with a calm response to this, but I can’t right now. If you want to talk to me later, fine, do it. I’ve already talked to her. I freely admit that I am ignorant of God, because I am not religious. But understand that this was not an attack on the reblogee or what have you, but on C.S. Lewis. I have EVERY right to question anything said by ANYONE. Anyway, I will deal with this later.
REALLY? First, think of the way she regards life. The way she regards expression. It is finite. Defined only in the things she chooses to say, do, think, feel. Why wouldn’t she defend her thinking, her feeling? She gets one chance to feel and think; you cast her down as being morally objectionable while passing your interpretation as “open and accepting.”
Second, the quote from C.S. Lewis DOES define humanism as an ugly and short-sighted opinion that ignores the “beauty” of some ill-defined presence that we should accept. Lewis insults our intuitions, observations, insights and feelings, comparing them to the thinking of mud-people who can imagine no greater life than building illogical structures from the poor materials given to them, rather than some divine architecture offered to us, ultimately, by an institution organized and orchestrated by humankind.
This is high-horse mentality in its most dangerous form, posing as some open, freely-defined logic that humanity is supposed to accept because it absorbs the differences between people. But here we are, being told to swallow the same unenlightened bullshit that’s been forced down people’s throats for centuries. Proselytizing to the logical just because it seems to elevate humanity to a plane of thinking that exceeds nihilism or sorrow. Trying to tell the mud-people there is something more than mud while the current of time washes away their exceptionalism.
I admire those mud-people, for trying to make something out of what C.S. Lewis views as inferior. At least they feast at a banquet of their own making, rather than some scraps handed down from an unproven and, somehow, benevolent divine force.
Kudos to the challengers; the people who refuse to accept what is handed down to them from supposed “gods.”
(Source: emmmmmmmmily, via dirtyalbino-deactivated20111213)
