Talk:Mere Christianity

Criticism

This page badly needs a criticism section that provides a modern rebuttal to the arguments presented in the book. 208.191.59.55 (talk) 10:47, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Criticism would be highly appropriate on this page. It is common among wikipedia articles to contain criticisms of the ideas/books/people described therein. -- StephanNaro (talk) 18:35, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

One criticism that I am aware of regards his trilemma: there are other options that he does not explore, such as the possibility that Jesus never claimed to the be Son of God (that this was a later legend), and the possibility that Jesus never existed. So, in addition to liar, messiah, and lord, we add myth and legend. Secondly, he argues that we couldn't have a sense of right and wrong unless the concepts of right and wrong existed in some weird metaphysical sense. However, one could respond by discussing evolutionary psychology and the development of moral feelings in social animals. I'm sure there are many other criticisms to be considered. -- Draxacoffilus —Preceding undated comment added 14:23, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Just chiming in, but please realize that in order to add a Criticism section it would need to follow WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. If you find a reliable source criticizing Mere Christianity, please add it.TheWikiJedi (talk) 18:32, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Trilemma

I think it would be useful if someone placed a short description of the reasonable alternatives to the "Trilemma." I don't know them myself, so I would be interested in learning, and I'm sure this is an area that many people are curious about.

That probably wouldn't be helpful in an article like this, which is meant to be a presentation of the ideas rather than a criticism of them. But if you're interested, the obvious rejoinder to Lewis' argument is that the picture of Jesus presented in the Gospels may not be an accurate one in every respect (or, perhaps, in any respect!) and that any claims to divinity attributed to him are spurious. Thus it is perfectly consistent to say that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but he was subsequently regarded as divine by his followers (although note that explicit claims that Jesus was divine are hard to find in the New Testament anyway) and this accounts for the picture presented by the Gospels, especially that of John. In fact this is what most biblical scholars believe anyway, and had Lewis researched modern biblical scholarship he would have seen the need to present a defence of his hidden premise that Jesus really did speak the words attributed to him in the Gospel of John.

On my userpage I extend the trilemma to a quintlemma (adding "nonexistent" and "misunderstood"). It's just a list, no formal criticism, although I believe it covers all possibilities ;) Arch O. La 00:25, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

@Archola "myth" and "legend" are probably better terms, they fit the alliteration of "liar", "messiah" and "lord". Draxacoffilus 14:32:46 —Preceding undated comment added 14:32, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

The trilemma is absurd. Besides assuming that the Bible is true (and therefore being a bit circular), and ignoring the ambiguity of the Bible, it inappropriately assigns the labels. A "lunatic" is more than merely a person who is mentally ill; many of the mentally ill are quite high-functioning (and it is incredibly insulting to the mentally ill to assert that mere mental illness disqulaifies one from the category of "great moral teacher). And not every false statement is a lie (even if it is known to be false by the speaker-- were the parables lies?), and not everyone who states a lie is a "liar".Heqwm 04:20, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

It also needlessly throws the baby out with the bathwater. People have argued that Jesus is a good moral teacher on the merits of the morality he teaches (as displayed in the bible) so even if his claims to divinity are rejected, the point (I think) of arguing that he was a good moral teacher was to not ignore everything coming from Jesus just because one doesn't accept the claims to divinity. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 21:13, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

The is some information on criticism of Mere Christianity, particularly of the Trilemma on the C. S. Lewis page and the Trilemma page.

source of title Mere Christianity

As I recall, in The Narnian, there was discussion of an earlier work titled Mere Christianity that was considered by Lewis and seems to have influenced his thinking. A discussion of this and a link to this would be very interesting.

The term was coined by Richard Baxter, a 17th century Puritian writer.

Review

There's a review on Mere Christianity at the Official Time-Waster's Guide here. It actually contains a great deal of descriptive material, so may be helpful for this article. The Jade Knight 08:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Joy

Does the discussion of joy belong in a section titled "Arguments for a Moral Law"?Heqwm 04:14, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I think so, but it could probably do with some clarification or elaboration. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 21:15, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Dead Link

Just a heads-up, the book description link seems to be dead. 154.20.151.249 (talk) 01:06, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. I found it on http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cslewisclassics.com/books/mere_christianity-desc.html. ;-) Will update, i only hope i'll get it right. Also, i noticed that another link, the first reference, is said to have moved to http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.EditionsServlet?oclcnum=23033258... Should it be updated, even though the current link (http://worldcat.org/oclc/23033258&tab=editions) is much smaller and "tidier"? -- Jokes Free4Me (talk) 20:25, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Note: there still are some other cslclassics pages on this book, such as http://cslewisclassics.com/bookdetail.aspx?ISBN13=9780060572631. They even include the possibility to "browse inside". Should this be put in the article instead of the wayback version? -- Jokes Free4Me (talk) 20:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Promotional/commercial link repeatedly inserted into External Links

A blatantly promotional/commercial link (this) has been repeatedly inserted (here, here and here). That page is expressly designed to sell a book, and the language is thus heavily non-neutral. I think it pretty clear based on our external links policies that this link is totally inappropriate. (In addition, sometimes the article annotations about the link are decidedly non-neutral as well.) Rather than edit war (I already removed the link twice) I would like some more eyes on this to keep such spam off of the project. Baccyak4H (Yak!) 18:45, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

public domain

Has the text of this book passed into the public domain? -ErinHowarth (talk) 21:38, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

The radio broadcasts were in the 1940s and the book was published in the 1950s, so its entry into the public domain is a ways away. Harej (talk) 05:04, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Lewis died in 1963, so the book is in the Public Domain in Life + 50 years countries, hence the Canada link. Similarly in Australia... Thomas Peardew (talk) 08:24, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

World War II or Second World War

I know that in the United States, "World War II" is the preference. I know that "Second World War" is preferred in Canada. I have seen some British sources that support the former while an anon from the U.S. claims that the latter is preferred. If that's the case, then we should be using it. Any comments? Walter Görlitz (talk) 08:46, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

One should not make assumptions based off IP addresses, not that country location matters in the slightest in a discussion on language. As the article is already written using British-English, the argument is simply (and has become overblown because of reverts and unhelpful edit summaries) that such a small change be made without it being a big deal based off:

• The UK Government has used "Second World War", since 1940, for its official histories (a move that the then Dominions followed, for example see Australia, Canada, and New Zealand).
• Other official publications, such as this example
• Every single British regimental, divisional, and corps history for the period uses the term. Some random examples of titles: example 1, example 2, example 3. There are not just works published by historians, they are the official publications of the various units generally compiled by the unit's staff (in some cases, on the initiative of individuals who later became historians).
• Numerous war memorials that use the term, when they do not just use dates. Granted, some more recent works in London have used the American term for the war.165.166.215.220 (talk) 09:04, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

So no direct sources from the UK while https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II and http://www.theweek.co.uk/60237/how-and-why-did-world-war-2-start, which I provided to you and are from the UK support World War II. There's no question that Canada prefers "Second World War" and it appears that's the case in Australia and New Zealand as well. And I don't think naval-military-press.com is from the UK or it would likely be naval-military-press.co.uk. Walter Görlitz (talk) 09:13, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Although the latter does redirect to the former, and the prices are in Pounds. Yet there it is: World War II. Walter Görlitz (talk) 09:14, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

NMP may be a British based publishing house, but they deliver world wide and have an assortment of books from authors across the globe; in effect catering for an international audience. Yet, on www.canada.ca I found 18k hits for "World War II" as compared to the 14k for "Second World War". Neither of which informs us further about preferences, merly shows that each term is not used exclusively..165.166.215.220 (talk) 09:22, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Tangential discussion: www.canada.ca is a press site. They tend to have American feeds such as AP. Also, they are not known as being a bastion of Canadian spelling, etc. I would not use them as an example of anything. However, we were speaking of the UK. Walter Görlitz (talk) 09:46, 2 January 2017 (UTC)