Mis-Educating our Children

The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace.
Obviously it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer than the dogma to which he is made to submit.
Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But this is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children.
- G K Chesterton, Whats wrong with The World

ill-Liberal Theology

There will be no end to weary debates about liberalizing theology, until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is is justified by reason. The obvious example is that essential freedom which we call free will. It is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we may reasonably say that if a man has a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a supernatural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be free man. But it is absurd to forbid him to be free man and do it in the name of a more free religion. ... Anybody who believes in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow any of any degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self evident that the illiberal power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of the whole people... What the denouncer of dogma means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that it is too good to be true... Dogma gives man too much freedom when he falls... That is what the intelligent skeptics ought to say... We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth... I decline to show any respect for those who... rivet the chains and refuse the freedom... [who] tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn around and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
- G K Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

The Christian Creed

The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism; the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and comers. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it I did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
G. K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

G K Chesterton on Feminism

The basic problem of feminism is the misconception that men and women are equal. It may come as a shock to some people, but there is in fact a difference between men and women. Chesterton says, "The difference between man and woman accounts for almost everything important that has happened. We must realize that when we try to make man and woman alike." He says that of the two sexes, the woman is in the more powerful position. The woman controls the home, that fundamental unit of society. If you control the home, you control society. Chesterton says, "When I think of the power of woman, my knees knock under me." Ironically, the feminists, by giving up their power in the home, gave up all their power. When they moved into the workplace, most women certainly became like most men in that they became wage slaves, but they did not gain anything, and they certainly did not gain power. It was a distinct step downward. "What is called the economic independence of women is the same as what is called the economic wage-slavery of men."Feminists lost the privilege of raising their children to a day-care industry or a public school. Or they did something even worse: they killed their children.
- Dale Ahlquist on G K Chesterton

True Worship

"Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they [conservative church goers, which he believes make up the majority] don't go to be entertained. They go to use the service, or if you prefer, to enact it.
Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best...when, through familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God...
...A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, 'What on earth is he up to now?' will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, 'I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."
C. S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Sin: A Sacrilege

A question at once arises. Is it still God speaking when a liar or a blasphemer speaks? In one sense, almost Yes. Apart from God he could not speak at all; there are no words not derived from the Word; no acts not derived from Him who is Actus purus. And indeed the only way in which I can make real to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us--an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof "God did it" and "I did it" are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature the self-portrait He would pain. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
C.S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm:Chiefly on Prayer

Omnipotence Paradox

Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix them with the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain