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Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

Besides Dostoevsky, there is abundant wisdom and deep truths to be found in the classics of Christianity. The apologetics of C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, The Problem with Pain, The Great Divorce), Augustine's Confessions and City of God, Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man.

These are seldom read (or known) by young people today and I see that as a tragedy. Western spirituality was demolished and nothing substantial has emerged to fill the void left, besides a coterie of self-help charlatans and intellectual tricksters, with the predictable results that we see all around us today.

This is also something that Nassim Taleb (a voracious reader and lifelong student of the Western classics but also an Orthodox Christian) frequently outlines.

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I have delved into the very literature you describe, and it's not simply an issue of 'kids these days'. What all these works have in common is that they are replete with thoughtful insights about human nature, but fail to convincingly present Christianity as the solution. They tend to simply drop it on the reader without explaining the logical leap or why similar but competing belief systems couldn't also play the same role.

I would say if the words of Christ are not enough to convince someone, who else could possibly say it better?

I’ve read lots of Chesterton and CS Lewis, and they didn’t change my perception of Christianity a single bit. What they did though was expose the enormous inconsistencies of the materialistic worldview. It’s not an argument for Christianity as much as a critique of its critics.

> I would say if the words of Christ are not enough to convince someone, who else could possibly say it better?

Christ didn't write anything.

The words attributed to him, a few hundred years later, are inconsistent and unreliable.

I'd love to hear from the man. I'm pretty unimpressed by those who claim to represent him.

If I had to choose, and my goal was to understand Christianity a bit more, I'd definitely pick a conversation with Paul of Tarsus instead!

I re-read Screwtape Letters some 10-12 years later at the age of 40 and was floored by how accurately depicted the various maladaptive behaviors (eg sins) within myself.

Sometimes, I’d have to put the book down and do something else because it hit so close to home.

A beautiful, timeless work.

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