Clive Staples Lewis - a name we in the dyslexic community often confuse with Lewis Wonderland "I might be a repressed pedophile but I'm not stoned" Carroll. Lewis Carroll's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Clive Staples Lewis had this idea of home. It stemmed from his understanding that a society built around morality that was based on changing whims gets itself into trouble and always has. He argued that through the course of the past couple centuries of the enlightenment our species had changed a bit.
And why did he think this? A number of reasons, one of which can be summed this way : we more modern people, having mastered nature, were now constantly searching and will never be happy, almost, it was as though we came from somewhere else and were trying to go home.
His point, drifting around on whims does not help us to get settled into our lives, it had nothing to do with aliens it had everything to do with progress.
CS Lewis, in his respect for morality, leaned muchly on what's called "The Golden Rule." I don't mean to be trite or disrespectful but the golden rule is just a feeble excuse to whitewash humanity with unsupported impressions bolstered by thoughts and prayers.
The golden rule has three classroom ways of expressing itself to the Front Row. Mathew 7:12 - Do unto others what you'd have them do unto you. The Eastern Version - Do not treat others in ways you'd not want to be treated. The Sleeping Cat Leaping Leopard Position - What you wish upon others you wish upon yourself.
Lewis divided us people into three parts. The Head was where rational thinking was found. The Chest was where trained, I'll repeat trained, emotions, honor, courage and moral instincts were found. The Belly is where biological appetites and other base unthinking instincts have their jolly liver damaging and increasingly pointless existence.
Amongst other things, Lewis was an Anglican lay theologian, he wasn't ordained or trained by a seminary he was just fond of pontificating on pretty much everything, including religion.
His brilliant suggestion that Jesus, the Christian savior, was either "liar, lunatic or lord" might equally well be applied to any one of thousands of Cult Leaders, including the current you know what. And again his point was that old excuse Kant also clung to, a "look at that sunset, so sublime, there must be something more out there," is not a Creed, an "I believe" final decision.
Lewis was a front line soldier in the final year of the First World War. He was in the Oxford Home Guard in the Second World War. He was 64 when, like Bernard Shaw and Emily Dickinson, he died of kidney failure in 1963, seven days before his 65th birthday.
Dodgson - Alice in Wonderland - died of pneumonia following flu in the January of 1898 about nine months before CS Lewis was born. So we got that to think about.
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