Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Pleasure

Maybe pleasure's not bad. But maybe when we're blinded to the source of true pleasure we seek it in other ways that are inherently selfish and detrimental to ourselves and others. And then religion equates this wrong pursuit of pleasure to the actual thing itself, and so vilifies pleasure and seeks to ban it. Then you have even those who have been introduced to the source of true pleasure incapable of actually partaking in it.


From the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis:

"He's (God) a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are 'pleasures for evermore'. Ugh! I don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least-sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side."

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