C.S. Lewis
Quotes From
Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
- The meaning in any given composition is in inverse ratio to the author’s belief in his own literalness.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)
A Grief Observed (1961)
- Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I’ll suspect you don’t understand.#
- If [the love of God] is consistent with hurting us, then he may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.#
- Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous.#
- A perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a cosmic sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.#
- In real life – thats one way it differs from novels – [a man’s] words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about.#
- Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.#
Posts About
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Worry About Piety Contests, Not 'Virtue Signaling'
To accuse someone of virtue signaling usually means something like, “you don’t actually believe this, you’re just posturing”. There are real and troubling aspects of moral posturing, but “virtue signaling” is a misnomer. Instead, by exploring how the process of internalizing genuine virtue can go wrong, I’d like to suggest . . . -
Bootstrapping Social Cooperation
Social cooperation is the major thing to be explained in both sociobiology and economics. From the perspective of the former, most species never achieve it at all. From the perspective of the latter, most societies never get very far along compared to the advanced Western societies of the modern world. One . . . -
Nationalism Is Weird
There are two basic moral frameworks people can adopt when thinking about how to treat others: localist and globalist. The basic difference is the size of the moral community. Localism is the default human morality. Human sociality is adapted for life in a close-knit moral community. There's an in-group whom we . . . -
Deep Beauty: An Epistemological Journey to the Center of the Universe
When a person forces too many events into a neat narrative, we call him paranoid. Is mankind’s sense of beauty merely a convenient paranoia to sustain the rational faculty through the inhospitality of a cold world? Here, perhaps unexpectedly, we find an evolutionary answer. Could the rational faculties have had . . . -
Atheism and Reward Morality
“If you’re doing what you’re doing for reward and punishment, it’s not really morality.” I’ve seen this trope more than once in Atheist circles, that traditional religious morality is somehow less moral for being reward-oriented. Atheists, it is contended, are more moral for doing the right thing – not for . . .