 I've got one last novel series to talk about before the month of February is completely over. As you can see by the title of the video, it's the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. This is the edition I grew up with, these funky 1970s art deco covers. I've mentioned the Narnia books once before in one of my book tag videos, the Inside Out book tag, where I talked about books that made me angry, and I mentioned the Narnia books on that list because of their awful childish approach to Christianity, and now I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that. My father read all of these books to myself and my sisters when we were very young. He read all seven of them, and of course we loved them, and we grew up with a great nostalgia and affection for them, and when he read them to us, he explained to us that they were supposed to be Christian allegory. They were about God and Jesus and all that stuff, and we knew that, going in and going out, but we remembered them as just great adventure stories. But then when the Disney movies started coming out, that was 10 years ago already, I decided I was going to reread these and see what they were really like, and I was horrified. I hadn't remembered the Christianity being so blatant and so aggressive, and it is, it's very aggressive Christianity, and more disturbingly, there's this overarching sense of anti-intellectualism, anti-educationism, really. There's a scene in the first movie that I think sums it up in just a few sentences. Take a look. We need to cross now. Wait, will you just think about this for a minute? We don't have a minute. You're just trying to be realistic. No, you're trying to be smart. As usual. Susan is the oldest girl, and she's the most educated and the smartest, and she is punished for it. She's actually shamed for it. C.S. Lewis was very clearly communicating the message that education, intelligence, and thoughtfulness are specifically irreligious. There's an atmosphere throughout the books of how you should not question any of this, specifically you should not question Aslan. Aslan, he needs to be tied to the stone table, he needs to suffer, he needs to be a bloody sacrifice to the witch. Don't question it. Just do what Aslan says. No matter how awful it is, no matter how little sense it makes, just do what Aslan says, and if you're being too smart, you're being anti-Aslan and you're being irreligious. If you think I'm reading too much into it, there's a scene at the end of the second book, Prince Caspian, when the big battle for Narnia is happening, the kids send Lucy, the youngest, out into the woods to find Aslan, which that by itself doesn't make any sense, but then there's the question of why Aslan has turned his back on Narnia for like a thousand years, but again, you can't question that. Don't ask big questions like that. Anyway, Lucy does find Aslan, she leaps onto his back, and instead of racing off to the battle where people need him, where the kids need him to fight the battle for Narnia, instead of doing that, he goes racing into the human village, and the first thing he does, he destroys the schoolhouse. This scene, of course, is not in the movie, and if you think I'm making it up, look it up for yourself, it is more important for Aslan to smash education than it is for him to save Narnia itself. I was floored when I read this, and I was deeply, deeply offended. I started to read Book 3, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and gave up very quickly. The books are so badly written in addition to having this bad, mindless theology, they're just not well written, but there's something that I remembered from Book 7, The Last Battle. It's gotten plenty of talk by itself, and I'm going to tell you about it here because you've probably not heard about it. It's in the final book, three of the kids, Lucy and the two boys, are in Narnia, and there's no explanation as to why they're there. They don't know why they're there, and then halfway through the book, Lucy starts to remember, she starts to have memories of the three of them dying in a horrible train crash, and then they woke up here in Narnia, and Susan was not with them on the train, but in addition to the awfulness of the train wreck being just a thoughtless plot device to get these kids into Narnia, Lewis makes it clear that there's a reason that he didn't include Susan on the train, because Peter says, my sister Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia, and one of the other characters says that whenever we tried to talk to her about Narnia, she would say, fancy, you're still thinking about all those funny games, we used to play when we were children, and another one says, she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations, she's too keen on being grown up. There's so many problems with this, it's going to be a struggle to keep it short. I'll start by quoting JK Rowling, she said something like Susan is excluded from Narnia because she grew up and discovered sex, and I have a problem with that. That one sentence says a lot, but also I want to point out that if these three kids are dead, and they're in Narnia, then by the seventh book Narnia is being used as an analog for the afterlife, for heaven, and Lewis tossed in this hideous tragedy just as a device to point out specifically that Susan is not in paradise with the other kids, she is not with Aslan, and the way the other kids discuss it, they make it clear that Susan's irreligiousness is the issue here, and not the violent deaths that Lewis invented just to advance his little plot. They don't even express pity to Susan that she is not with them and they're not with her. What little they do talk about her, and I just read the entirety of what they talk about her. They talk down about her, and then they dismiss her all together. In fact, Peter says, well, don't let's talk about that now, look, exclamation point. Here are lovely fruit trees, let us taste them. That quote right there perfectly summarizes I think Lewis' entire theology. It's dismissive and thoughtless. I remember encountering this very kind of dismissive attitude when I was a child in Sunday school, whenever an important question would come up. The teachers would just wave away the questions with some glib, thoughtless response, without any thought at all to how that thoughtless response would be received by the children. I remember someone asking how people in heaven could be happy if their loved ones were not there with them. In other words, loved ones who were not accepted into heaven, loved ones who are burning in hell for all eternity, and people in heaven know that their loved ones are burning in hell. I have a memory of some kind of throwaway answer like oh, there are simulations of their loved ones in heaven with them. Not in those words, but that sort of thing. It was an important and difficult question that needed a thoughtful answer and it was dismissed with this go away and stop bothering me attitude that was horrifying in its implications. Absolutely horrifying. That's what you get with C.S. Lewis. He had the most vapid, mindless kind of theology and it comes out in these books. I said in my previous video and at the beginning of this video I read these books to your children. I can't tell you what to read to your children or what to allow your children to read. That's entirely your call. I think it's important though to discuss with your children what you read to them. Try to learn what lessons your children are pulling from the books that you are collectively reading and listen to what they have to say about it. You'll be surprised and in some cases you'll even be shocked. You'll be saying how in the world did they see things that way and you would never know it if you didn't discuss it with them. So first of all, read to your children. That's how they will learn to read and when you do read to them, talk to them about what you're reading and listen to what they have to say. Now with that heavy shit out of the way there is one C.S. Lewis book that I think is very much worth reading. Because I discussed Narnia here, I'll discuss that book in my first review of March and I will see you in that review after I do my February wrap up. See you then. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There is a link in the description below. And visit the 30 Seconds Sci-Fi Tumblr. That's my headquarters. In addition to my videos I publish links and updates there every day.