The first session of my Mere Christianity Book Club takes place next Tuesday night, January 31, at 7:00pm. We'll be discussion our observations, questions, and reactions to the material in the first two sections. If you live in the Twin Cities, you're welcome to join us.Incidentally, I just discovered the entire book for free online. The entire text is there, downloadable as a pdf, and available as audio. Wow! CLICK HERE.
From Book Two, What Christians Believe, Chapter 2, "The Invasion"--
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match-all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go farther from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies-these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simpler either.
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