Yes, again, I admire C.S. Lewis very much and agree with everything you’ve said about him.
My point was not that Lewis was a socialist in the sense that Hugo Chavez or Ted Kennedy or Lewis’s old sparring partner, J.B.S. Haldane have been socialists-— just the opposite. Rather, my point was that, except in rare occasions, one cannot simply label someone or take how he labels himself and assume it follows that person has a certain detailed set of beliefs. In other words, just because Lewis proposed something called “Christian Socialism” does not mean one can simply extrapolate from that term a set of beliefs.
Of course the “Christian Socialism” Lewis endorses is very different from that of the socialism of Screwtape. The former is pretty vague, but seems to amount to something like a free market in which Christ rather than Social Darwinism, is the ideal.
I brought this up because on these threads, a great variety of people with a great variety of ideas are brought up, and often along with them comes the attitude, “well, I don’t have to deal with that person’s ideas or research, because s/he is a Creationist, or “I don’t have to deal with that person’s ideas or research because s/he is affiliated with the Discovery Institute”.
This was, in my opinion, what FReeper Dinsdale had done in Post 121 when I suggested until shown otherwise, it would be wise to assume all concerned were saying what they meant and meant what they said, Tom Bethell and Mike Gene included. Dinsdale seemed to be claiming something like:
1. Mike Gene advocates ID (although he doesn’t think ID is science yet).
2. Mike Gene says he’s not a Creationist.
3. Therefore, Mike Gene is lying because ID is Creationism.
4. Besides, all Creationists are liars, so their points can be ignored, no matter what they might be.
My point in bringing up C.S. Lewis was to try to show that this sort of extrapolation doesn’t work.
I appreciate what your message, but you would have to show me something (in the context of his entire body of work) that would suggest that Lewis endorsed “Christian Socialism.” Based on what I have read, Lewis would be opposed to socialism (Christian or otherwise) because it would concentrate too much power in the hands of the state.