C.S. Lewis

I came across these quotes on the internet the other day and thought I'd share them with you.
I just copied and pasted the document so it keeps repeating"CS Lewis" sorry. This guy just blows my mind.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. C. S. Lewis
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. C. S. Lewis
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason. C. S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. C. S. Lewis
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. C. S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. C. S. Lewis
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. C. S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind. C. S. Lewis
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. C. S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. C. S. Lewis
I gave in, and admitted that God was God. C. S. Lewis
I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy. C. S. Lewis
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 without meaning. C. S. Lewis
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. C. S. Lewis
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. C. S. Lewis
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. C. S. Lewis
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. Lewis
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one. C. S. Lewis
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. C. S. Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time. C. S. Lewis
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. C. S. Lewis
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature. C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. C. S. Lewis
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. C. S. Lewis
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ. C. S. Lewis
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest. C. S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. C. S. Lewis
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil. C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. C. S. Lewis
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. C. S. Lewis
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." C. S. Lewis
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. C. S. Lewis
Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. C. S. Lewis
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. C. S. Lewis
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are. C. S. Lewis What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. C. S. Lewis What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
C. S. Lewis You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. C. S. Lewis
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me. C. S. Lewis
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. C. S. Lewis

"Modern" Thought, get your own dirt.

I saw a dude on television the other day talking about some controversial topic. I can't even remember what the topic was, but the thing he was saying really stuck in my mind because it is a very common philosophy. The thing he said went something like this:

'It's fine if people want to believe in something, but until people accept that there is no god and that we are responsible for things that happen we won't make any real gains. Hundreds of years ago people accepted the idea of an all supreme being because there were things that they couldn't readily explain.' (not a direct quote)

Oh yea, now I remember what the debate was about. It was a show on showtime called Flock of Dodo's. The point of the show was saying that Creationism was religion and Evolution is science. It was actually the most non-biased show I had seen in a while. The message went on:

'If we allow the idea that god exists in the gaps of science, then every scientific discovery makes god smaller. We are not here to destroy religion, we are here to make progress in science. If we come up against something we can't explain and we believe in Creationism we simply say 'Well, God did it' and make no advance. Creationism is detrimental to scientific advancement.' (also not a direct quote, but very close)

While I do appreciate the guy's comment about not wanting to destroy religion, I still disagree with the mentality. These thoughts of wanting to be free from the confines of God are not a modern thought at all. King David came up against people like this somewhere in the vicinity of 1037 BC - 967 BC. In Psalm 2:3 he wrote, "Let us Break their chains," they cry, "and free ourselves from slavery to God" I think the mentality of the fellow on TV comes partly from the idea that since we can explain, and reproduce it, that it rules out God's intervention. I do admit that my knowledge of science is very limited to say the least. But what I do know and what i have been taught about science has never made my God any smaller than He is. Every phenomenon that has been explained to me by science has only given me more wonder and amazement to how God made something work, and thankfulness for sharing the knowledge to do the same. I would say that scientists who don't investigate a phenomenon not only go against science, but also go against the christian faith. A few verses to support this are Ecclesiastes 9:10 (Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, [a] where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.) and Colossians 3:23 (Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,)
I would assert that the more we discover, the more we discover how big God really is.

A Scientist Was talking to the image of god he had in his head and said "Look God, people say that you created the whole world and gave us life, breath, and everything else. But, I don't think that's all that amazing, I challenge you to a life-making duel." The image of god in the scientists head said, "I accept." So God made a man out of the dirt and breathed into his nose the breath of life and the man became alive. Even though the scientist had seen the result before, he was still mildly impressed. "Wow", said the scientist to the idea of god he had in his head "It's gonna take me a little longer than that, but I can still do it." The scientist got together all his machines, wires, test tubes, beakers, burners and forceps, and then said he was ready to begin. But, as he bent down to get a handful of dirt, God said,"HEY WAIT!" The scientist stopped. "What?" he asked. To which God replied, "GET YOUR OWN DIRT!"

I still like the lyric I wrote, so I made more.

The one thing I'm trying to do is to miss
any thought that comes flying through that I can resist
of the times that we tried but we just couldn't get quite through this.
Get me through this.

I wanna swim. I wanna dive. I wanna know there's more to life,
than you and I, and compromised devotion.
I wanna live. I wanna fly. I wanna fight for something right,
where you and I can compromise for something more.

Now , we all know emotion rhymes with ocean,
but I'm stuck out in the desert and I've got no notion
what I'm supposed to do because I know God led me here.
You brought me here.

I wanna swim. I wanna dive. I wanna know there's more to life,
than you and I, and compromised devotion.
I wanna live. I wanna fly. I wanna fight for something right,
where you and I can compromise for something more.

When you're drowning in the desert the ocean is the shore.