The witch as Satan

Valkyrie said:
Yes, I am aware of that. Although, he studied every religion throughout his life. Maybe he just had a cultural interest. I think some of you are extremely desperate for him to be christian, as you couldn't fathom him being anything but. Like I said, I don't believe he was Christian but if he was it wouldn't be the end of the world for me. It sounds like if it ever came out that he wasn't, most of you would burn his books.

:rolleyes:

Remember, I practically lived with a false catholic grandmother. All her friends were extremist catholics (as all of lewis' friends were extreme christians), so she couldn't go on being herself. He only "believed" in jesus after the lord of the rings author talked it into him. Didn't you ever agree with a friend to shut them up? Like a gay man hitting on women in front of his straight friends and pretending to like football, couldn't lewis had pretended too? he really has nobody to know the true him who would be alive, even his step son is an extreme christian who I think has pushed the symbolism much of the way. he never meant for his books to have that symbolism, it was just supposed to be a child's story. I see alot of my grandmother in what I know of Lewis' actions, trying to fit in with his friends and society. I wouldn't be surprised if that truth came out one day.
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Pretended? It would really be hard to be CS Lewis and 'pretend' to be Christian. Have you ever read MERE CHRISTIANITY or THE NARNIAN, a biography about CS Lewis?

There are some people who enjoy CS Lewis are atheists and non Christians...heck, I was, before I came here to this forum. I wasn't even aware of most of the Christian parallels in the Narnia stories. But when you have faith or refind your faith, his stories and his life have even more special meaning. You are aware that Lewis WAS also a die hard atheist before he refound his faith and God, and also explored realms of the occult as well? It would be very hard for me to even fathom that Lewis was a pretender if he went through those stages, just as some of us have.
 
I already said i do not care if lewis was truely Christian, I just do not believe he is. In fact I thought he was Christian until I finished the books and read more about him including the fact that his friends were extreme christians and he didn't believe in jesus until Tolkien convinced him so (which is in one of the biography I have read of him). Again, I had (nor have) any problem with him being Christian. I'm just highly suspicious of him actually being so. It's not walk like a duck talk like a duck, it's the fact that I have known religious pretenders within my life and it's not totally impossible.

Also, i read he was atheist after the death of his mother but eventually changed before becoming christian like his best friends. I believe he was respected as a christian and felt publically comfortable posing as such. Therefore he was in his public image, writing narnia well towards the end of his life could have been a way to expose his true self in a subtle way.

I am not the one being desparate of him not being christian, I am not pointing out things and saying "this represents this" as some of you are. I'm all for interpreting things as you want and believe, but some of you act to be so positive that blank means blank but Lewis never said what he meant by his writings but he didn't mean it to be a christian book.

It is like the rock band evanescence. They had one line in a song that said, "Don't close your eyes, god knows what lies behind them". Suddenly extreme christians everywhere were labeling them a "christian band". They had to go on MTV and publically announce that they were the farthest from christian and just because a person says "god" it doesn't mean they are talking about god.

I feel like this is happening here, people are trying to find symbolisms to the bible in everything. There's a book Finding god in narnia and now one called Finding god in lord of the rings. What's next? Finding god in sesame street?
 
I'm not desperate to "prove" anything, I'm just stating what I believe. The extreme christians are the ones pushing their religion down everyone's throat by turning EVERY SINGLE OBJECT within the books into something in the bible.

Case in point, you dingos are pushing the aslan=jesus thing to the point of breakage. Whereas in a quote from a letter written by C.S. lewis to a friend (a Mrs. Hook) in december of 1958 he states:

"Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as is said he has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all."

In other words, Aslan is not supposed to be jesus at all. Aslan is supposed to be a "jesus-like" figure which means any figure which you could compare to "jesus". This could be the "jesus" of any religion, a son of any god or simply a god. Aslan is just supposed to represent a higher being. Extreme christians are the one's who have turned him into jesus and absolutely INSIST that it is because THEY want to believe so. My point is that Lewis clearly wanted the stories to represent whatever the reader wanted it to represent, he never meant for it to be a christian story and I'm sure he didn't want christian readers to claim the books for their own and down other religions in the process. he appreciated all religions, which is clear in the chronicles.

Christians are just too self-absorbed to think that any other religion could be true and to think of us as folly. Well, i think of you foolish to believe every story in the bible. It was clearly written by men, every story has the woman doing wrong and ruining everything (no mention that we are the smarter gender, or the creators of life). Adam and eve were not the first beings on earth, science proved that. And the world did not flood, for we would be all decended from Noah and we would all be white. Gee, i guess all the other nationalities of the world were able to swim. is that how they survived?

:rolleyes:

EDIT: I joined 2 months BEFORE you. How do you have 7,307 posts and I only 70? Someone needs to get out more.
 
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The quote from Lewis you use quite obviously means the reverse of what you stated. Aslan is not merely a Christ like figure but Christ himself, in another form. This is made glaringly obvious at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

If, as you claim the Narnia books were an attempt by Lewis to blow his Christian cover and implicitly declare himself a pagan, all I can say is that he was horrendously unsuccessful. The Chronicles scream "Christianity" in almost every page
 
Mr. Lewis most certainly did NOT believe in everything he put into Narnia. He definitely did NOT, for instance, really believe that there was such a person as the Greek god Bacchus, but he put Bacchus into "Prince Caspian."

The reason becomes clearer if you (1) find out what Lewis really believed, which you can see from his book "Mere CHRISTIANITY"--and (2) read "The Magician's Nephew," in which Aslan is seen creating persons who correspond to Greek myths but who obviously were only coming into being right then. Lewis was imagining that Aslan, BEING AWARE OF the myths humanity had accumulated, chose to create real live beings who would duplicate some of the myths, and who would be recognized by Earth-born humans as matching those myths. It was a little bit like the old Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise found a "resort planet" which created live embodiments of the things which visitors thought about.

To our pagan friend I would say: I don't blame you for your ignorance. You are a VICTIM of the postmodern attitude in society, which tells young people that they don't need any actual INFORMATION--just feelings.
 
The use of themes and mythological characters from paganism is by no means unique to Lewis. It has been used by Christian writers since the Middle Ages, Dante is a notable example.

I always find that scene from PC, where Lucy and Susan say they would not have felt safe with Bacchus without Aslan significant. The old pagan myths and stories still have value, but they are only "safe" if we have Christ with us, if these things are looked at through the lens of Christ so to speak.

Christmas for example was originally the ancient pagan feast of midwinter, but the church has given it new meaning by adopting it as the feast of Christ's Birth
 
It's cute in this thread that Valkyrie decided CS Lewis wasn't a Christian (that is: did not believe Jesus is the Son of God whose sacrificial death and resurrection provided a way for humans to be cleansed of sin and reunited with God) based on the idea that he wrote fantasy stories and therefore could not be a Christian because there were pagan archetypes in the stories.

She discounts his deep theological works (which are based on the idea that Jesus is the Son of God whose sacrificial death and resurrection provided a way for humans to be cleansed of sin and reunited with God) as desperate attempts to "fit in" with his Christian friends!

I have never heard that explanation for Narnia before, but it is certainly a novel one.
:)
 
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