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Off-topic: Climbers who believe in Jesus 12-Feb-2011 At 1:43:13 PM dmc

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Just thought I'd share what someone with a great deal more wisdom than me thinks.

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

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

Chronological Snobbery

Chronological snobbery is a logical fallacy coined between friends C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield describing the erroneous argument that the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior when compared to that of the present. Or as Barfield explains it, it is the belief that "intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century."[1] The subject came up between them when Barfield had converted to Christianity and was persuading Lewis (an atheist at that time) to join him. One of Lewis's objections was that the religion was simply outdated, and in Surprised by Joy (chapter 13, p. 207-208) he describes how this was fallacious:

“ Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them. ”