The Problem Of Pain -- A Submitted Amazon Review

Pay No Attention To The Humbugs Behind The Curtain
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Lewis believed we should try to enter into the meaning, the intent of the authors we read, instead of bringing our own biases and immediately subjecting them to our own categories of thought. We cannot help but enrich our minds if "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself." Therefore, if you’ve stumbled upon this book for whatever reason and feel inclined to read it then I’d urge -- pay no attention to the humbug critics, at least until after you’ve read what could be a life enriching book, as this was for me.

Ten years ago I began reading Lewis; the Problem of Pain was one of the first of his works, after Mere Christianity, I picked up. It wasn’t long after I read PoP that I was watching Schindler’s List. Scene by scene, the dilemma of evil in the face of a good God assaulted me till I was overcome with intense and sickening violence. I ended up falling to the ground, in anguish, crying “how”? I received no blinding insight, I’m sorry to say, into the mystery of evil; but Lewis’ logic had infected me, and suddenly an argument took hold of my mind, checked my despair, and gave me something to hold onto (incidentally, those critics who, in reading Lewis have immediately subjected him to their atheist framework have a-priori cut themselves off from understanding the ultimate logic of their own position – or they just don’t care, which is far worse).

The argument, in so many words, ran something like this: the proposition that God doesn’t exist amounts, at the same time, to the proposition that all this anguish at the injustice unfolding before me on my TV screen is not rooted in reality, that it’s all a purely subjective illusion, which reflects no eternal value, goodness or justice, and, logically, could just as well be delight and approval. In other words, the extent I thought evil truly evil and wrong – that was the extent to which I had to believe in a good God; to deny Him would be, at the same time, a denial of the reality of evil, which was driving me to deny Him in the first place. I simply refused to concede that the Nazis, slaughtering Jews, were no more morally culpable than if they were involuntarily swatting mosquitoes.

Many people are keen to respond something along these lines, “well, I personally feel this or that is wrong,” and seriously think they’ve resolved the matter. However, this “line” has a shocking corollary, which runs thusly: “…but it is not really wrong”. In it’s blunt, down to earth form, and applied to my experience above, it looks like this: “I feel the Nazi’s were wrong, but I cannot speak for them and say they were wrong, because they were not REALLY wrong.” When the mind reflects objective reality it has truth; if my mind isn’t reflecting the eternal reality of value, goodness, and justice, then my gut reactions and intense emotions are a response to nothing in reality, to no quality innate to human beings, which categorically warrants such a reaction – they’re a fictional response, a response to a pretended reality. We all know, deep down inside, that this cannot be true, and that evil really exists because there’s an eternal standard of goodness (God) by which to identify evil as evil…

Read this book – make your own judgments…