They didn’t say that eating shellfish is worse than murder
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
“I think he made one law of that kind [sc. one with no obvious reason why obeying it is a good idea] in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? [...] Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you to do something for which His bidding is the only reason? [...]
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.
No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don’t think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it’s unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.
I agree that it’s not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?
Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.
Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.
I’m really not convinced that he would have found “religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it” good evidence for “religion X is wrong”. In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he’s commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it’s in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I’ve forgotten. Another is suggesting it’s with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)
… I couldn’t remember her name because she doesn’t have one. Anyway, there is indeed something of the kind in Perelandra, though I have a feeling there may be something more explicit in one of his other books. But here’s the relevant bit. Context: the protagonist Elwin Ransom is on the planet Venus, also in this series of books called Perelandra. There are exactly two (more or less) human people already living there, corresponding closely to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story. The Adam-figure is somewhere else; Ransom has been talking to the Eve-figure. They have recently been joined by the villain of the story, a scientist (of course!) called Weston who is not only evil but pretty much a devil-worshipper. Where the Genesis story has a prohibition on eating one particular fruit, the First Couple of Perelandra have a prohibition on sleeping on “fixed lands” (CSL’s Venus has a lot of water, and floating rafts of plants on which one can safely live). Weston has suggested that maybe this prohibition was made with the intention that “Eve” should grow up a bit by exercising her independence from God and disobeying it. Ransom, who is generally something of an author mouthpiece, has a different view:
The Eve-figure is delighted with this idea, and the Satan-figure is rather cross at it—further evidence, I think, that Lewis himself endorses the proposal. Further dialogue ensues (there’s a lot of dialogue in this part of the book) and eventually Eve gets bored and goes to sleep.
[EDITED to add: There’s an extended discussion of the Eden story in Lewis’s book “The problem of pain”, which conspicuously doesn’t present any theory along these lines. Perhaps it is after all only in Perelandra that he proposes it.]
Ok, so maybe he wouldn’t have refrained from adopting a religion himself because it contained things like that. But I would be extremely skeptical that he would have any idea of enforcing them on people who do not believe the religion, if he believed that the prohibitions were arbitrary.