It is a Lewis vision of heaven, hell, earth, and maybe purgatory. "Hell or purgatory" are a somewhat "always nearly dark city" that spreads on to what seems like infinity when you are there, but is really only like a little crack in the "ground" when you are in heaven. You can "get on a bus" and go up to the outskirts of heaven, but in order to enter, you have to accept both sovereignty and grace of God. There is just "no other way" ... without it your soul isn't strong enough exist in the light of ultimate truth.
There are a number of little vignettes when the authors character encounters various souls that are "visiting". One is the classic hard-bitten realist that "has seen it all before" and "knows the score".
"Anyway," said the ghost, "who wants to be rescued? What the hell would there be to DO here?"
"Or there?" said I.
"Quite," said the ghost. "They've got you either way".
"What would you like ot do if you had your choice?" I asked.
"There you go!" said the ghost with a certain trimph. "Asking ME to make a plan. It's up to the Management to find something that doesn't bore us, isn't it? It's theri job. Why should we do it for them? That's just where the parsons and the moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking US to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don't THEY find something to suit their public?".
How well that captures so many. It is always "the folks in charge", "the big shots". They were given the gift of life, but they abdicated the honor of being responsible for living it to some mysterious "them". Few things are sadder, and Lewis captures the sadness of the inability to move to even a positive eternity because of a life lived not wanting to be "anyone's patsy".
This little gem is worth pulling out of context:
"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words; "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven". There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy-that is to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends."
Apparently, he ran into Dawkins making a visit (according to physics, it is possible that everything that happens is happening all the time and always has been).
There were materialistic Ghosts who informed the immortals that they were deluded: there was no life after death, and this whole country was a hallucination."
It is a tiny book, well worth just picking up and reading. Two of the characters that I especially love are the book-ends of one a moralist, who can't enter heaven because a guy that he knew as a drunken murderer is forgiven and there. The other is a liberal minister that just won't accept the ultimate truth and reality of God. He believes that those that "honestly disagree" have to be saved as well.
Were our society just "balanced", rather than a secular cultural wasteland, C. S. Lewis would be one of those names held up very highly. Another name that I realize that Dawkins somehow failed to mention is that of Donald Knuth, who wrote a book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" That oddly enough, I seem to have, and read before I started blogging. Perhaps I need to return to this, and of course such things can always be borrowed. For those of you NOT of exactly the computer scientist persuasion, Donald Knuth is the author of The Art Of Computer Programming which is as close as there is to a "Bible" in computer science.
Somehow Dawkins failed to mention him while denigrating the idea that one could really be "scientist" and believe in God.
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