"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
A while back I wrote about my friend Jenna and her attempt to join an order of nuns who look after terminal cancer patients. Well, I’ve just heard that, once the money from all the different fund raising efforts has come in, she will be only $269 away from achieving her goa
So, if you’d like to help turn one of these…
…into one of these…
…then go find one of these (preferably your own)….
…and then go here…
The sun sets in muddy spring (18:86)
Semen comes from between backbone & ribs (86:6-7)
Stars are missiles to shoot devils (67:5)
If a fly lands in your drink, one wing has the cure (Bukhari 3320)
A baby’s sex decided by who climaxes first (Bukhari 3329)
1. **Expanding Universe**: The Quran’s vague mention of the heavens being “built with power” or “expanded” (e.g., Quran 51:47) is not a unique or precise prediction of the Big Bang or cosmic expansion, which were discovered through modern astronomy, not religious texts.
2. **Iron’s Origin**: While science confirms iron was formed in stars, this was known to ancient civilizations (e.g., Egyptians and Mesopotamians) through meteorites, predating the Quran. The Quran’s claim (Quran 57:25) doesn’t provide new scientific insight.
3. **Embryology**: The Quran’s descriptions of human development (e.g., Quran 22:5, 23:12-14) are often interpreted post-hoc to match modern embryology. However, they lack detail and accuracy—e.g., describing stages like “alaqa” (clot) doesn’t align with scientific understanding and reflects 7th-century knowledge.
4. **Fingerprints**: The Quran (e.g., Quran 75:4) mentions preserving individual traits but doesn’t specifically predict the uniqueness of fingerprints, a concept developed scientifically in the 19th century by figures like Sir Francis Galton. These “scientific miracles” are often retrofitted interpretations, not precise predictions, and rely on ambiguous language that can be reinterpreted to fit new discoveries. Many pre-Islamic cultures and texts also had similar observations, undermining the claim of divine origin.
I’ve been playing around with the graphics program Canva recently and if you’ve looked at the Restless Pilgrim Facebook page recently, you’ll have seen the fruit of this.
One of the graphics I produced has been particularly popular so I thought I’d share a high resolution version of it here on the blog, together with a printable PDF version. I’ve also made a version for the iPhone “Locked” Screen.
I started this blog a while back now, in June of 2010. Today I thought I’d advertise the blogs of some of my friends who also write here on the Internet.
The first blog I’d like to share (and what prompted this post) is Hannah’s blog Transformed In Christ. I first met Hannah when I lived in Cheltenham back in 2003. She’s a graduate of Cambridge University and now lives in London. She hasn’t been blogging for very long, but she’s a smart cookie, so expect some good stuff here 🙂
Summary
After his interaction with the Hard-Bitten Ghost, Lewis is left sitting on a stone by the river feeling utterly miserable at the thought that the Solid People may, in fact, be malevolent, and he wrestled with the question as to why the Solid People did not do more to help those in the Grey Town. Could it be that they just came down to the plain to mock the ghosts?
He thinks of the punishment of Tantalus in deepest Hades, who is made to stand in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree’s branches, with the fruit always just out of reach and the water receding before he could drink it. He thinks of Revelation 14:11. He thinks of William Cowper who, upon realizing that he is dreaming and is, in fact, doomed to perdition says “These are the sharpest arrows in His quiver”.
The sense of danger he felt upon coming to this land returns with full force. “Terror whispered, ‘This is no place for you'”. He walks away from the river towards a thicket of trees in the hope of some kind of safety.
Thirty minutes later, he comes into “a little clearing with some bushes in the centre”. A Ghost enters, “a well-dressed woman…but its shadows of finery looked ghastly in the morning light”. She tries to hide by pressing herself against the bushes.
One of the Bright People enters and the Ghost squeals at him to go away. The ghost points out that she’s heading in the wrong direction, away from the mountains. He suggests that she could lean on him in the journey to ease the hurt of her feet.
The ghost responds that she can’t go “out there among all those people, like this” and says she’d “never have come at all if I’d known you were all going to be dressed like that”. When asked to explain herself she says “How can I go out like this among a lot of people with real solid bodies? It’s far worse than going out with nothing on would have been
on earth. Have everyone staring through me.”
The Solid Person explains that “we were all a bit ghostly when we first arrived, you know. That’ll wear off. Just come out and try.” The ghost says she’d “rather die”. She says she wish she’d never been born and asks “What are we born for?”, to which the ghost responds “For infinite happiness… You can step out into it at any moment”
The ghost continues to protest, but the Solid Person compares shame to liquids too hot to touch, but not too hot to drink: “Shame is like that. If you will accept it-if you will drink the cup to the bottom-you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”
Although momentarily tempted to trust the Solid Person, but returns to her complaining. The Spirit asks “Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not
yourself?” but to no avail. He therefore blows a horn which results in “A herd of unicorns came thundering through the glades: twenty-seven hands high the smallest of them and white as swans but for the red gleam in eyes and nostrils and the flashing indigo of their horns” The Ghost screams and Lewis says he thinks she makes a bolt towards the Spirit, but he himself fled from the scene.
Questions
Q1. Why is Lewis feeling dejected at the beginning of this chapter? What questions does he have?
Q2. What is the problem with the ghost he sees in this chapter? What is her primary concern?
Q3. What does the Solid Person offer to the ghost? What does he say will happen in time?
Q4. Why does the Solid Person call the unicorns?
Last week at Theology On tap we had Cy Kellett spoke to us on “Voting Your Conscience” and during the Q&A he mentioned Peter Singer, the Professor of Bioethics at Princeton.
I wonder if some people present thought that Cy was exaggerating when he described some of the opinions held by this chap. Well, thanks to Aggie Catholics, I’d invite you to watch the video below without gasping in horror at some of the things said in his interview with Richard Dawkins…
(Unfortunately, this wasn’t the original video I shared – the one before had Dawkins praising Singer for being “the most moral person I know”)
If you watch the uncut version of the interview, Dawkins begins the interview with the accolade “Peter, I think you must be one of the most moral people in the world…”….wow…kyrie eleison.
Summary
Two lions arrive, “playing some solemn romp”. Feeling nervous, Jack leaves. By the river, he finds one of the Bright People, a man named Dick, talking to the Episcopal Ghost Lewis had met earlier.
Dick and the Episcopal Ghost were friends on earth. The ghost reminisces about the conversations they used to have. He comments that his friend “became rather narrow-minded towards the end”, believing in a literal Heaven and Hell, but he assumes that he’s now “broadened out again”. In response to this, Dick asks the ghost if he knows where he thinks he’s been living. The ghost is scandalized when Dick refers to the Grey Town as “Hell” (but if he chooses to never go back, he may call it “Purgatory”). The Episcopal Ghost asks why he was sent to the Town and is told that it was because he was an apostate.
The ghost indignantly asks “Do you really think people are penalised for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken.” He declares that “They were not only honest [opinions] but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.” Dick points out that nothing was risked and the inevitable happened: “popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric”.
Len explains their “opinions were not honestly come by”. They adopted a certain current of ideas because they “seemed modern and successful”. He asks his ghostly friend “When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?” He says that they were “playing with loaded dice… errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”
The Bright One tells him “You have seen Hell: you are in sight of Heaven. Will you, even now, repent and believe?” The ghost affirms that he already believes, saying his “religion is a very real and a very precious thing”.
Dick invites him to the mountains, but the ghost says he will only do so with some assurances: “a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness-and scope for the talents that God has given me – and an atmosphere of free inquiry”. Dick promises him no such thing, “No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.”
The ghost protests that “there is something stifling about the idea of finality… what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?” The Spirit responds “There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them… Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.” Regarding this statement as obscene, the ghost responds saying “that question-and-answer conception of thought only applies to matters of fact. Religious and speculative questions are surely on a different level.”
Dick asks the ghost if he even believes that God exists, to which the ghost asks “What does Existence mean?”
Dick then asks if he still even desires happiness, but while the ghost is dispensing his own wisdom on the subject, he suddenly remembers that he’s later presenting a paper at the Grey Town’s Theological Society, asking what Jesus’ opinions would have been if he hadn’t been tragically killed at such a young age. It is at this point the Spirit leaves him and the ghost returns to the bus humming a hymn to himself.
Lewis tries walking on the river’s hard water and falls flat on his face due to the water’s motion.
Questions
Q1. What do you think is the significance of the lions?
Q2. What do we learn about the background of the ghost and the spirit in this chapter?
Q3. Why is the ghost’s criticism of the spirit’s “narrow” opinions ironic?
Q4. What is the ghost’s sin?
Q5. How do the ghost and the spirit each regard the ghost’s beliefs?
Q6. What are the ghost’s demands for Heaven?
Q7. What would you regard as the ghost’s essential resistance to the spirit and to Heaven?
Q8. Why do you think the chapter ends in the way it does?