It got me thinking. Well, it continued me thinking on something I've been thinking about for quite some time, and started thinking more about as I watched "A Christmas Carol" last night. It came back to me when I read this:
“You are already too old for fairy tales, but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
It was apparently in the dedication of one of Lewis' books, to a young lady named Lucy, who was 15 at the time.
It dovetails into another of my favorite quotes -- which was brought to mind as I watched the Ghost of Christmas Present show Scrooge what was going on all across the world at Christmas Time. What happened when he sprinkled Christmas Spirit on people as he came across them, wherever they were. And how that translates into real life. I have seen it, and I have felt it. And it is a Good Thing.
Which dovetails with things such as believing in Santa Claus. And why I want my grandson to believe in Santa Claus, if only for a few years. It is good to have believed in magic at one point in your life, if only to go back to for comfort and for strength later on.
The quote is from Hub in "Second Hand Lions".
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
And that is an answer I've struggled with over the years, I will admit out loud, right here. Is Santa Claus worth believing in? Oh, yes, he is. Is God worth believing in? Yes. Yes indeed. And for lots of reasons.
The biggest of which is, "you ain't the center of the Universe". Yup, there's something bigger and better than you out there. Something you can't be no matter how hard you try, but something that trying to live up to will make you a better person. Something that, if at worst it isn't true at all, is the accumulation of thousands of years of human experience, how to produce as healthy societies as you can, and that Jim Bob has no right to tell you how to live your life because he's bigger, and that Aristotle can't tell you how to live your life because he's smarter. From which springs the idea that all men are created equal -- not by other men, but by something bigger -- and are endowed by that something bigger with basic rights to their lives, liberty to live them to the extent that they begin to bump into other people's liberty, and to their property. Because mere men aren't the top of the morality chain.
And therefore other men have no right to take what was given by that something bigger away from you. Not for your own good. Or for anyone else's.
That something bigger is important, whether you can put your finger on it or not. Because without it, law will eventually become what the strongest say it is. And though might, in a world with a creator, doesn't make right, if right doesn't have might, evil men will forcibly banish right from the world and replace it with their own selfish versions. First it will be the egotists who think they know what's best for all and therefore have the right to enforce their vision. This will be followed by egotists who will use that power merely to persue their own interests with impunity and with rampant disregard for anyone elses.
We must be able to recognize evil. We must be able to recognize dragons. And we must know what to do about them.
A shared framework, a shared reference is handy. This is where culture comes in. And one of the things I know is that "multi-culturalism" amounts in the end "no-culturalism". A fractious society is a weak society, and this one is becoming more and more fractious every day.
And shared religion, even if it's only for the references, is cultural glue.
Not everyone may really believe. Many really do. At one time, perhaps most. But at one point, just having one dominant religion in the culture meant that whether or not you did, you ran into the symbols and the rituals and the holidays all the time. At one point, people said "Merry Christmas" to each other without pardoning the expression. There were shared experiences that held us together. No, not everyone had the same ones, but most of us did, and it rubbed off on a good chunk of those who didn't.
I'm not sure where this goes, really. But I do know one thing.
I think I'm old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
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