Monday, April 24, 2006

Spectacularly Bad Religious Analogies

I was reading CS Lewis's Mere Christianity and got to the section where he tries to argue that modern society has an unhealthy obsession with sex. He tries to support his argument with the following analogy to food (which I have paraphrased since I don't have the book with me):

[comparing to a striptease] If a porterhouse steak was placed before an audience and slowly uncovered, and the audience stared so raptly at it, one would conclude that they were either starving or overly gluttonous. If the people in question are not lacking for food, they must therefore be gluttons.
Now, Lewis's thesis is highly debatable, but my point here is that this analogy is not valid. We do in fact pay this much attention to the presentation of food (silver domed platters, garnishes, nouvelle cuisine, restaurant decor etc.), and this does not make us gluttons, or even make people think we are gluttons.

This has been bugging me for a while and I just had to get it off my chest. Anyone else have a bad religious analogy to share?

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