Augie on Expectations & Process

I have eliminated that word from my vocabulary. Expectations are a false reality that have nothing to do with goalsetting or learning; they're just momentary comments given as a result of a thought that somebody wants, not about the process. In the process, there is no fear. And the results is where all of the fear is, because we can't control it.

On Christian Growth

The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. 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.

From Mere Christianity

In the City of the Decadents

In the City of the Decadents

Control & Power of Secularization

Process of Secularization: 

Process by which religious ideas, institutions, and interpretations have lost their social significance. 

They are biased, we are objective. 

How does one answer the distinction and fundamental differences of an art gallery with nudes and pornography?

Exploitation and provoking of imaginations. Shame eroded. 

Naturalism cannot distinguish between what nature has given for life and that which is refuse. 

Men without a sense of shame are, perhaps, the most deadly of weapons. 

Pluralization 

Competing WV's where no one WV is dominant. It does compel individuals to know what and why they believe. 

It breeds philosophical relativism. "All truth is relative". Does this statement exclude itself? 

All major religions have non-negotiables that have an epistemological basis. 

Lewis on Arguments against God

The Presence in Which You Have Always Stood

If you want an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some unsatisfactory Christian and say "so there is your boasted new man! Give me the old kind." But, if once you've begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only a evading the issue. 

What can you ever really know of other people's souls – their situations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.

If there is a God, you are in a sense, alone with him. You cannot put him off with speculations about your next-door neighbor or memories of what you have read in books or how you were hurt in church. What will all that chatter and hearsay count when the anesthetic fog which we call "nature" or "The real world" fades away and the presence in which you have always stood become is palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

C.S. Lewis

Stubbornness of Man

For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. 

That trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. 

In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwillingly) to begin practising it here on earth. 

It is good of Him to force us: but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time....

- The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

The Real Self

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. 

He made them all. He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. 

In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 

In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. 

I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

From Mere Christianity