March 11, 2022

In an atomic age.

I was going to post some random photos this week, maybe lots of screenshots from Twitter, a few things I'm loving when it comes to products...

But this is more applicable. I'm apprehensive about a lot right now. The list is non-exhaustive, actually. 

I keep coming back to this quote. C.S. Lewis was a great thinker and a gifted writer. He had been an atheist for part of his life and then became one of the most well-known Christian writers and layspeakers. 

Maybe you've seen this floating around the internet lately already. Living in Europe after WWII, Lewis had some thoughts, guys. We can easily relate this to modern times. Specifically, when it comes to coronavirus...if a person is still believing they can outrun a virus they are likely already immune to, if they believe keeping masks on two year olds is the Answer, or if they think Science is equal to Respect is equal to Caring is equal to Being a Good Human..none of that makes sense. If vaccine passports and perma-masking makes you feel safe, how will you continue on? When will it end? 

And just when it comes to the basics of life being plagued with disasters: if you aren't nodding your head in agreement with this piece, you don't actually agree with the sovereignty of God. 

I think about this essay a lot. In fact, I'd like to pass it out on the street. 

"In an atomic age"

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.

It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means.

Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man.



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