B. U. G. S.

I think every reader is just like me. If I try to find a quote in a book it disappears.

So I remember a quote from C.S. Lewis’s little book, “The Screwtape Letters,” that I am going to use here without being able to find the exact words.

“The Screwtape Letters” is a set of letters from Screwtape, a Senior Demon in Hell, a retired Tempter, to his nephew Wormwood, a new Tempter, about how to persuade a person go to Hell. It is a great book for ANYBODY to read, not just Christians.

When I was in alcohol and drug rehabilitation, I sponsored a lot of people.

I would give “The Screwtape Letters” to my sponsorees to read. The same advice on the plausible excuses the Devil gives people to sin are exactly the same ones a drug addict can give himself for going back to using drugs.

Drug rehabilitation is not the only place the advice in that little book is useful.

If you’re in politics, “The Screwtape Letters” is a warning against all the exuses you give yourself for misusing power. It reminds you that you are not the genius you think you are. The excuse you thought you came up with is as old as Adam.

Anyway, back to the book.

In “The Screwtape Letters” God is the Enemy.

In one case Screwtape says to Wormwood, “You and I have never been human (Ah, that great advantage of the Enemy).”

God had been human in the form of Jesus.

But what Screwtape was saying was that God had LEARNED something by being human.

I do not know of a single Christian denomination that would not consider that statement to be heresy. According to all Christian dogma, Jesus already knew everything anyone could ever know about human beings. He could learn nothing.

I think about Lot, when he persuaded Jehovah to go down from a hundred righteous men to a single righteous man. I think of Moses when he tried to persuade Jehovah to have mercy on his people despite their lapse into sin.

A human being like Moses or Lot understands how much easier it is for a man to understand the weakness of humanity than it is for an All Powerful Entity to understand it. Try to imagine the Old Testamment Jehovah being whipped and condemned to the cross and then crying out, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

I am now twice the age Jesus was when he died on the cross. I cannot hate anybody, though I am capable of doing things to bad people that would make a normal person tremble. If someone is doing evil things, I will do absolutely anything to stop him.

But not because I hate him.

At my age I cannot see anybody making a mistake that I have not made over and over and over in some other way.

In fact I cannot see anybody doing something wrong that I WILL not do in the future.

I am not only fallible, I am incurably fallible.

Buddhists have written endlessly to prove that Buddha was never in the womb, which they consider dirty. Confuscius, to whom it never occurred that he was ever anything but a philosopher, is now worshipped as a god.

Everybody tries to make the founder of their faith into a perfect being.

So every denomination says Jesus was The Perfect Man. He could learn nothing by being a man.

To me, The Perfect Man is not human like me.

I hope Jesus wasn’t perfect. I want him to judge me the way he would judge himself. But that’s heresy.

Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus, The Perfect Man, learned NOTHING by being human.

Lot and Moses may have persuaded Jehovah to be a bit merciful. But Jesus, who suffered the ultimate agony, was persuaded of nothing because he was perfect already.

So C.S. Lewis slipped into a very common heresy, condemned by every Christian denomination, in saying that Jesus LEARNED by being human.

It may be the wisdom of my Odinist ancestors. I cannot believe in a god who never learns.