Mere Christianity.

I review C.S Lewis's interesting book

In my last newsletter, I explored Might is Right. In this newsletter, I'll be talking about a totally opposite book, Mere Christianity by C.S Lewis. Mere Christianity is as opposite of Might is Right as possible, so the contrast is quite interesting to me.

The person who recommended this book to me said it would give me a rational justification for Christianity. This is something I believe is sorely lacking in Christendom today. If a Christian tries to preach to you, they often begin by quoting the Bible. Of course, that never works. An atheist doesn't believe in the Bible, so quoting it to him is about as useful as quoting a random romance novel.

To be fair to Lewis, he doesn't quote the Bible at all. Unfortunately, this only marginally improves the quality of his argument. It's still really bad. Asides from that his thoughts on Christian morality are quite sensible, and the way he theorizes what Christianity is is astounding. As my friend says, he's an extraordinary sophist. In the rest of this newsletter I'll be going into particulars of why and how I disagree with Mere Christianity.

Universal Moral Law

Before reading Mere Christianity I'd read the problem of pain by Lewis. In that book he tries his hardest to answer the question of pain, but his answer required taking too many unjustified liberties. First, one had to assume that the world — and the pain we feel in it — is irrelevant because of our eternal soul. Secondly, one had to assume that pain was inevitable, and was a necessary property of having freewill. One also had to assume that as a rule God can only perform a few miracles, hence pain must abound. Thirdly, one had to assume that even children born with holes in their hearts had to be born that way because of human sin. Fourthly, we also had to assume that pain was necessary to the Christian journey, and Christians couldn't exist in any other way. These assumptions, without justifications, seemed unlikely to be true.

When I told this to the person who recommended the book to me, she told me that Lewis justified these assumptions — which essentially means a belief in Christ — in Mere Christianity. That's the main reason why I picked up the book. Thankfully, Lewis got to the business of why Christianity in the first few chapters.

One interesting thing about Lewis is that he's a former atheist, so he's well acquainted with atheist arguments. Which is more than I can say for most preachers in Nigeria. Therefore, his rationalization for Christianity does seem logical in its face.

Lewis starts with something he calls universal moral law. He says despite every society in the world having different moral standards, they are all directed by a universal moral law. Here's an excerpt;

But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

But that's the point isn't it? The NAZIs weren't anymore right than the allies. The allies won because they could win, not because they were right. If the Nazis had won, they would also become right and would indoctrinate all of us into believing their ideas. (As all human beings are indoctrinated into believing social conventions one way or the other).

Values are what make morality. Someone who doesn't value the sanctity of life wouldn't be bothered about 6 million Jews dying. And why should they? You can say human lives are important to you, and that's well and good, but no rule says they must be equally important to another person. You may argue that such a value system makes such a person bad or evil, but those are mere value judgements that have no universal weight. After all, we generally don't care about vegans who call us evil for killing millions of animals anyway. Why would someone who doesn't have a value for human lives listen to us?

Today, we can argue against the NAZIs and proclaim, with a century of Allied reasoning and moral conventions behind us, that they are wrong, but it takes some humility to understand that If the NAZIs had won, we'd also have a century of NAZI reasoning and moral conventions behind us. And with that, we'd argue (indeed, if we could), that they were right.

It reminds me of this popular Norm MacDonald joke; wow, it says here in this history book that the good guys have always won. Isn't that just a neat coincidence?

This is no less outrageous than understanding that the Aztecs and the Binis and the Ijebus who sacrificed people to their gods believed earnestly that they were right. In fact, the only reason why we can look upon them as savages is because we hold different axioms that we hope are true — for one, we don't believe in Gods and we believe in the sanctity of human life. But even these beliefs, we hold SUBJECTIVELY. There's no objective law that says one human life is important, or that gods don't exist.

Humans may have similar moralities, but this is largely due to the fact that they are evolutionarily similar, not because of an objective law of nature. If all of the world agreed on a subjective interpretation of something, that still doesn't stop it from being subjective.

Lewis here seems to be arguing that the NAZIs knew, deep down, that they were wrong. And if they didn't, then the second world war was merely more than an indifferent test of might. But he says this like it's some fantastic notion, and not the actual truth. The NAZIs believed they were right, much like the serial killer believes he's right in killing people. When NAZIs and serial killers repent, they merely do so because they've lost or have been caught. They don't do so because of an inner realization that they were wrong. If Britain had been defeated in World War II, Lewis would also have had to admit, one way or the other, that Britain was wrong. Perhaps he might not have — but isn't that true with NAZIs too? Aren't there many NAZIs who went to their death, even in old age, convinced that they were ultimately right, and the allies were ultimately wrong? Aren't there NAZIs TODAY we believe this same thing?

But Lewis isn't yet done with his explanation. He continues here;

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.

That's because societies where people run away from battle do not survive. What you're noticing is simple evolution, dear Lewis! Even in cannibal states, people only resort to it as a last ditch effort road avoid starvation. Even in states of human sacrifice, it's usually done in times of farmins to cull overpopulation, or otherwise done to one's enemies who exist OUTSIDE of their society.

Importantly, even if someone agrees with this law of nature, it's obvious that it's at odds with most of Christianity's slave morality which uplifts the humble and meek, not the proud and strong.

Here's one more example of what Lewis means when he talks about universal moral law.

Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

Yes, Lewis, because their fathers would kill you. They don't make this exception for foreign nations or slaves.

Soon, Lewis comes after people like me who say moral realism is false.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson.

This is true, but only serves to measure the hypocrisy of the human species. Importantly, a man may hold certain rights and wrong to be true subjectively, but that doesn't mean he believes that they are objectively true. If someone tries to rob me, I would refuse them and argue that it's not fair, but that's because I don't want to be robbed and I feel it's not proper to rob me. I can hold this belief while understanding that no natural law bars the robber from taking what he wants.

Look at it this way. I may consider walking naked to be primitive, and I would consider a tribe of people who did that primitive, but that doesn't mean that my opinion of them isn't subjective. It wouldn't mean that waking naked is inherently primitive. It would merely mean it's primitive to me.

Let's return to my robbery analogy. The only reason I would argue that the robber is breaking some sort of moral convention when he steals from me is because I assume that since we live in the same society, we hold the same set of subjective beliefs. Of course that may be true — the thief may truly believe what he's doing is wrong, and as such does it only because he has no choice — but it also may be false. The thief may be the sort of person who lacks empathy and believes that whatever he can take through whatever means is right for him. In that case my appeal to some social convention we share would be null and void, since he has opted out of that convention.

Lewis buttresses his argument, but it still falls flat to me.

But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

Again, we can agree on moral conventions while understanding that the conventions are subjective and are only valid because we agree on them. Like my friend says, one can agree and know that money in itself is worthless while agreeing with the social convention that they carry value.

Also, the social conventions around what's fair or not differ substantially anyway. In the oldest of days, or the state of nature, the social convention nakedly proclaimed that might maketh right. It does still today, but not as nakedly. If any of the unfair things Lewis proclaims today suddenly turned on their heads and guaranteed long life, prosperity and leisure for man, our instincts towards them would nominally change and we would suddenly find them worthwhile.

If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try (not to)

Because we are social animals. Social conventions does this to us. But that doesn't mean they aren't subjective. If humans didn't have social conventions, we wouldn't have been able to build human society.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

There's no certain way, and what looks like a certain way or similarities of a certain way only exist because of human similar evolution. The second is yes, people feel bad when they break social conventions. It's evolutionary psychology (and in fact many don't feel bad about it at all!).

I'm afraid this line of argument may start to bore you, but Lewis is very thorough (up until a point), and it's important to refute his arguments thoroughly because that's why they deserve. In the chapter after this one, he explains that what he means by universal moral law isn't what is known as herd instinct. In this long passage, he explains why.

some people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?” Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

This makes no sense. First of all, not everyone feels this instinct. In fact, depending on the graveness of the situation, there are people who don't feel the instinct to help at all. I would know, because I've been in at least three dire situations where my life was horribly at stake. Secondly, if one does feel this third thing, it merely manifests as a stronger impulse to help. It's not a third thing. Additionally, what says Lewis to people who feel a stronger impulse to run away in the gravest situations? Is that an aberration of natural law or what?

Another interesting argument that Lewis makes is that having preferences between moral rules means that we understand that a universal moral law exists. For example, if I say it's better for a society not to murder women for being witches, I'm saying there's a moral standard in which it's not okay to murder women because they are witches. Here's the passage;

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from the things it measures.

This may be true; I'm indeed against murdering women for being witches (but curiously for taking away their privileges for being Chelsea fans), but that doesn't mean I'm following some objective standard. The standard I'm following here is the subjective standard of what's psychologically palatable to me and my happiness. I'm interpreting these moral standards with my own values and unique psychological framework.

Besides, some people believe it's perfectly okay to murder women for being witches. Or maybe that's a bad example. Some people believe that billionaires are evil and their very existence in any society is a moral failing, and others believe they aren't. If we are all measuring societies via some universal moral standard, why would we have such different interpretations of what a moral society could be? The only reasonable explanation is that we have different ideals for what society should look like because we have different expectations of what sort of society we would be happy in.

In the end, the existence of psychopathy rends this argument asunder, since psychopaths don't even have the mechanisms of feeling any of these moral instincts. (Thankfully, Lewis explains psychopathy later).

Why Christianity

Now that I've broken down Lewis's conception of a universal moral law, it's time to get to the meat of his justification for his Christian faith. Before I begin, here are some of my thoughts.

This portion of the book is the worst, by far. Lewis is an excellent storyteller and world builder. These are valuable tools for someone theorizing about religion (which Lewis does fantastically), but it's quite bad when making a rational case for choosing Christianity out of a thousand other religions. Some arguments he makes are just outright laughable. Of course I see how they may convince people already inclined to believe in Christianity (or someone who may have experienced some spiritual epiphany), but I doubt that this argument would seriously convince any atheist who doesn't have soft spot for Christianity already.

Lewis start on a very weird footing.

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: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

What? If the universe had no meaning, we would be able to find that out perfectly. The same way we are are to find out a child's babbling has no meaning — or that a child's scribbles are rubbish actually. The second analogy is somewhat difficult, but fails on the same account. Importantly, the entire analogy fails because it doesn't address the claims of atheism.

Subjective meaning is still meaning. Atheists may say that the entire universe was an happy accident, but that doesn't mean they say it's impossible to find meaning in the happy accident, or that the accident is meaningless to them. Crucially, saying something is too simple ought never be a reason why it is false. But as you'll see, Lewis does this internationally to put Christianity on a surer footing.

His next argument is the funniest part of the book. Even the best Christian must admit that it's a laughable argument.

That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

C'mon, Lewis.

Anyway, Lewis makes his foundation thus; atheism is too simple, and Christianity is just the sort of thing you could not have guessed, and so it must be true.

Once his foundation is done, Lewis sets off on his rational adventure.

He says that we must start our appreciation of the world from the fact that the world is both good and bad. We exist, that's good. But bad things also exists. There are two probable answers to that question, he says. The first is dualism, which says there are two opposite and powers behind good and evil. The second explanation is Christianity, which says that there's a bad inferior power corrupting the good power. This isn't a strawman.

Before I continue, it's worth critiquing this point. Christianity isn't the only religion that believes that some inferior evil power is corrupting a superior moral one. First of all, that's the central tent of Abrahamic religions. But Lewis conveniently forgets them.

To continue, he says that dualism is obviously false because evil cannot exist on its own — while good can. Again, this isn't a strawman. He makes it clear here;

But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they are sadists, that, is because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.

Hence, dualism must be false. Ergo, Christianity is the one true religion. I feel like I no longer have to critique this argument because I've written plenty. So I won't. I'm sure you can come up with even more creative critiques on your own. I am also going to leave this argument because Lewis goes on to make an even worse argument (yes, if you can imagine it).

Another reason why Lewis believes in the Christian God is because of the queerness of Jesus Christ, as it were. He says that Jesus must be right because if he weren't he would have been a mad man. My friends didn't believe this part when I told them, and I suppose you wouldn't either. But here it is.

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 a 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.

Or you could really not care about him at all. This particular argument is bad because examples of people saying even more incredible things than Jesus said abound — we don't fall on our faces and worship these deluded men as the son of God. Take, for example, a man named Guru Maraji who lives on the side of the Ibadan expressway. He literally calls himself God. No one is trying to worship him.

And that's it. That's his justification for Christianity. That's why he believe Christianity is true. Now that the worst part of the book is over, let's see some parts that do make some sense to me.

Lewis Answers Your Most Pressing Christian Questions

Lewis doesn't quote the Bible at all in Mere Christianity. Perhaps that's why I like the book so much. He tries his very best to provide as honest and as reasonable an answer to Christian questions as he can without appealing to the authority of the Bible. You may disagree (and I do), but you cannot say that the logic, outside of its empty foundation, isn't sound. If one simply assumed that Christ was lord and existed, the book would be a masterpiece of Christian theory. But one simply cannot do that. Too bad.

About what happens to people who didn't hear the gospel before they died, Lewis has this to say.

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

This is as sensible an answer as you're going to get from anyone on this issue. Perhaps Jesus may save the African tribesman in the bush without the tribesman knowing him. Who knows? Our God works in mysterious ways.

What about the matter of freewill? Lewis has this to say;

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying.

In this passage he's saying that although freewill has caused tremendous pain in the world, God still granted it to us. Now, this throws a huge spanner in the works. If humans have freewill, and it's such an important part of our existence, will God remove it in heaven? Because if he doesn't, who's to say that the same incident that happened with Satan wouldn't repeat itself with human beings? Who's to say heaven won't be empty after a century or so of humans exercising their freewill? Since God is perfectly willing to put momentarily rehabilitated sinners in heaven (the repentant thief), who's to say that they won't turn heaven upside down and start off another great drama?

Asides from that, freewill ensures two things. The first is that it makes us certain that God himself doesn't know the future. Hence, the prediction of an heavenly triumph over the devil is merely that; a prediction. Who knows? Satan may eventually win. This may sound ludicrous, but that's precisely what it means.

Secondly, it also means that God himself doesn't know what he will do in the future either. That's a scary proposition, but it's what a world of freewill leaves us with.

Interestingly, Lewis doesn't think Christians shouldn't drink. He thinks it's quite okay for Christians to drink as long as they don't get drunk. But even here he confuses me somewhat when he says this;

It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way.

This is one of the only places where he mentions Islam, despite the glaring truth that his justification for Christianity could also be applied to Islam (after all, Mohammed also said some pretty incredible things!).

Lewis believes our sexual instinct has been perverted by the devil. He says that it's perverted for men to make sex the only interest of their lives. He has no idea just how right he is here.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

Here is what he has to say about sexual failure.

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

Lewis On Gender Equality

Lewis doesn't think men and women are equal in marriage. Strangely (despite the fact that I defend Inequality as a rule), that's what I disagree. I think in a marriage between two reasonable and emotionally mature individuals, the matter of who's the head and who's not ought to be irrelevant.

However, Lewis has some insights that make me rethink this.

If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say “Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine.

No matter what you think about the reason why, there can be no doubt that this is the ordinary state of things. Women tend to despise men they have control over, while the opposite is the same for men. A man may beam and smile when he says he has a stay at home wife whose entire needs he provides for. It's difficult to imagine a woman beaming and smiling while expressing the same sentiment. So perhaps Christ was right in setting the standard that makes man the head of his wife.

Lewis on Psychopathy

Lewis's entire argument rests on a universal moral law driven by a universal moral instinct provided by a universal moral lawgiver. However, the existence of psychopathy throws a spanner in that. Psychopaths (not just criminals, because some criminals go against a natural instinct to not commit crime) have abnormal moral instincts. Would it be just for one to expect them to obey moral laws when they don't have the instinct to do so?

To Lewis's credit, he honestly grapples with this question. He admits that some people like that may exist, and says that God wouldn't judge them on their outward acts, but instead on the efforts they put into following moral law — even when it isn't instinctive to them.

When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

He goes further.

Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with his raw material.

Lewis's central argument is that men like this may exist, but that is merely due to biological happenstance. When they die, their bodies, which may have impeded them, would fall off and they would be left with the effort they put into picking the moral choice.

Most of the man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: 73 when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.

What this means is that Hitler could be in heaven. Perhaps he had restrained himself from killin as many Jews as his nature told him to. Perhaps that makes him as moral as you and I. Who knows? God works in mysterious ways.

What I Think of Mere Christianity

Mere christianity is a good read, even if you don't agree with Lewis. It's an even better read if you're a Christian, and it's a refreshing departure from the unintelligent arguments that dominates most of the Nigerian Christian scene. Like one writer called it, Nigerian Christians practice Ugabuga superstition, not Christianity.

It's also a great repertoire of simply astounding bangers such as this.

One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

And here.

People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole 66 body of practising Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians—those who happen to have the right talents—should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting “Do as you would be done by” into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly.

And this.

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no “swank” or “side,” no putting on airs.

These are passages that may impress me if I were inclined to agree with Lewis, but I'm not. Please note that there are so many themes and ideas in the book that I left out. I only wrote about things that jumped at me and I had a fundamental grouse with.

In the end, Mere Christianity is a decent read that I ultimately disagree with. Lewis tries his hands at Christian apologetics without the aid of the Bible, and stumbles a lot. His argument would probably not be convincing to anyone but people inclined to believe him in the first instance. However, it's a great example of Christian theorizing as Lewis goes to great extent to provide rationalization for Christian morality (and he excels at this, I would say). That's really all I can say about it.

The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

C.s Lewis