Letters to the Editor
Michael Huggins
Published Letters: 32 Editor's Choice: 6
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No one complains more about the law than a pickpocket
[Read the article: Life: The disorder]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you for publishing Amsden's article. It is a bit slender on research, and I did have to look twice to make sure I was reading "Salon" and not "National Review." But the whining in most of the other letters about this article suggest that Amsden was on to something. Somehow, I just can't imagine Lincoln or John Quincy Adams taking pen and parchment to moan that they and their distressed families just couldn't make it without the nostrums from the apothecary's cabinet. We have become a culture where one of the few things not regarded as a disorder is self-pity.
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Seems, Madam? Nay, it is.
[Read the article: The Jesus symbol, the witch and the wardrobe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the best articles Salon ever posted was Laura Miller's delightful critique, "The Da Vinci Crock" about a year ago. There is no question that Miller has a keen eye for nonsense and a willingness to debunk it wherever it is found. I am hoping, then, that she is merely being droll when she pretends to find the views of Goldthwaite worth taking seriously.
Miller asks if The Chronicles of Narnia are truly Christian and admits that the question may seem absurd, to which the proper reply is (as Miller surely knows already) "Seems, madam? Nay, it is."
The Chronicles can't possibly be taken to be anything other than Christian. Goldthwaite's critique comes only because he doesn't understand what Christianity is, in the first place. His ideas are absurd, and he is merely perverse. He is one of a strange breed of Christian fellow traveler who has paid just enough attention to the faith to misconstrue it and, when confronted with the genuine article, takes refuge in the label "Manichaeism." He simply has no idea what he is talking about.
The Chronicles of Narnia are not Manichaean. If Goldthwaite thinks they are, he has (as is obvious), misunderstood Christianity and Manichaeism equally. Nowhere does Lewis put forth a creation that is bad in itself or in which evil is posited as a power independent of, or equal to, the authority of a benevolent Creator. If Goldthwaite thinks this is the case, he should read the books when he is sober.
It is true that Christianity describes creation, as originally completed by the Deity, as good in itself. It also says that through man's misuse of free will, all creation had fallen and come under a curse. This does not mean, of course, that turtles and oak trees were "committing sins" but that they lived in a world as surely blighted by evil influence as by a corrosive gas.
Narnia is the same. The world the children discover when they go through the wardrobe is under perpetual winter--but it has been so only since the white witch rebelled. She is not an independent being who was "created evil," and Goldthwaite could lip-read the books word for word before he ever discovered a single hint of any such thing in the entire series. Jadis is as much a part of creation as anything else (even though, as it turns out in another book, she came from a different created world with a dying sun), and there was nothing inevitable about her rebellion. She misused her free will as surely as Adam and Eve, with the same result. Even she, if she wished, could turn from this evil, but chooses not to. These ideas are not exclusive to Christianity but are certainly an integral part of it, and nothing in the books can be taken to suggest otherwise.
Goldthwaite has books to sell; what other rational purpose he may have is not at all clear. He does not know what historic Christianity says, and he does not understand what Lewis meant. But Miller is better than that. Lewis's own faults are well enough known and have been amply documented, but Goldthwaite's misunderstanding of Lewis and the Bible is simply inane.
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Pusillanimousness masquerading as wisdom
[Read the article: A man's right to choose, take four]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Poor granddad needs a bit more starch in his backbone and a refresher course in logic. "Conception is not pregnancy any more than a first sentence is a novel," he writes. So? The stamp on the envelope is not the letter inside. The key in the igntion is not the trip to the office. A seed is not the fully grown plant, but the plant doesn't happen without it. It may be news to granddad, but many notable things begin from small causes. Size and duration have no intrinsic connection with usefulness and significance. The seed is indispensable and its source unique. The rights of the source cannot be denied--only stolen by those who, like granddad, are more than a little confused or, worse, don't want to face facts.
"By its very nature," granddad asserts, "pregnancy is the exclusive and private domain of women." It will become that when women are able to become pregant without sperm. Never before. Misguided wafflers like poor granddad can hem and haw their way around the question all they want. They can't change the facts of biology.