XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: toomuchspam@spammer.org   
      
   Siwel Naph wrote:   
      
   [cut]   
      
   To clarify the idea of an imaginary Mere Christian world:   
      
   There has been an unbroken line of "Mere Christians" from Christ's time   
   to our own. Some of those MCs have accepted persecution, cruel and   
   unusual punishment for heresy, homosexuality etc, "Kinder, Kirche,   
   Kueche" as women's God-given role, and so on, others have vehemently   
   rejected them. So MC worlds could be filled with St Pauls or C.S. Lewises   
   or medieval Catholics or Southern Baptists or Quakers or gay liberation   
   theologians or... They could also be filled with any *mixture* of those   
   different kinds of MC. The only condition of the world is that everyone   
   who inhabits it is a (sincere) MC.   
      
   Some of these possible MC worlds would be very interesting (in the   
   Chinese curse sense -- imagine 100,000 St Pauls/medieval Catholics   
   "dialoguing" with 100,000 gay liberation theologians). So this is what   
   I'm interested in:   
      
   Why is MC silent on what are (to me) very important things like   
   persecution of other Christians, cruel laws, freedom of conscience, etc   
   but eloquent on (to me) very-but-less important things like doctrine?   
      
   I can understand it if correct doctrine is essential to ensure people get   
   to heaven, as some MCs have believed. But that isn't part of MC: Lewis   
   himself didn't accept that.   
      
   Mere Buddhism too would throw up contradictions, but I don't think   
   they're as glaring, and some Mere X's would be uniformly bad.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)