Les Miserables - When It's Good It's Very, Very Good - Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Warning: Absolutely packed with spoilers. Though I know this is 100+ years after it was published, most of the major plots twists in this book were ruined for me through the internet. So. I'm warning you.

In the first half of this post, I reviewed the story and more practical elements of Les Mis - in this follow-up, I get into the philosophy. That's code for: this will be boring to everyone but Hannah Long. Also, I am writing this from a Christian perspective, and am critiquing ideas by comparing them to theology, so Prepare Yourself.

Les Miserables – When It’s Good, It’s Very, Very Good - Part 1

SO long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved...books like this cannot be useless.
~Preface to Les Miserables

Les Miserables is a somewhat daunting task. At 959 pages, it’s the longest book I’ve ever read, barring the Bible. (Fans affectionately call it The Brick.) Settling back after the tedious first few chapters, I prepared myself for a long haul. To my shock, I finished it in sixteen days. Honestly, I’m not sure how I did it, though I do know several days I put away a hundred pages.

Another part of the mystery is that Victor Hugo had a severe case of verbal diarrhea, so I did a bit of blah-blah-interesting bit!-blah-blah reading. If there was something to be said of a thing, good old Victor was bound to say it. Large chunks are devoted to the battle of Waterloo, the operation and ideological premise of monasteries, and 19^th Century French politics—which have little to do with the story. If you have an encyclopedic knowledge of French history and politics in the 17-1800s, that’s terrific, but if you don’t, this can get tedious. Those are the two extremes: terrific and tedious.

The Dramatized Addison Walk

Your average Christian is going to know who C.S. Lewis is.

Your slightly less average Christian will know who J.R.R. Tolkien is.

A rather odd Christian will know that Lewis and Tolkien knew one another and were members of an Oxford-based club, the Inklings.

It takes a really weird Christian to know that Tolkien was one of the major influences on Jack Lewis's conversion.

Congratulations, you are now a really weird Christian. And if you want to be a fanatic, C.S. Lewis was nicknamed after a childhood neighbor's dog, Jack. (This calls to mind a certain Indiana Jones).

The Creed of the Modern Thinker

I haven't quite finished the next blog post, but in the meantime, here's a quote I heard in a Ravi Zacharias podcast some time ago. It makes me laugh every time, but the postscript is chilling. It was written by a secular journalist, sarcastically poking fun at his own beliefs.

The Creed of the Modern Thinker

We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin.

We believe that everything is okay as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt and to the best of your definition of knowledge.

We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage.

We believe in the therapy of sin.

We believe that adultery is fun.

We believe that sodomy is okay.

We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything getting better despite evidence to the contrary.

The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in horoscopes, UFOs and bent spoons.

Jesus was a good man, just like Buddha, Muhammad, and ourselves,

He was a good moral teacher, although we think basically his good morals were really bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same; at least the ones we read were,

They all believe in love and goodness, they only differ on matters of
Creation, sin heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes nothing because when you ask the dead what happens, they say nothing.

If death is not the end, and the dead have lied, then it’s compulsory heaven for everyone,

Except perhaps Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson,

What’s selected is average,

What’s average is normal,

And what’s normal is good.

(That’s the salvation-by-survey syndrome.)

We believe that there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.

Americans should beat their guns into tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good; it’s only his behavior that lets him down.

This is the fault of society,

Society is the fault of conditions,

And conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him and reality will adapt accordingly,
The universe will readjust, history will alter.

We believe that there is no absolute truth except the truth there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds and the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the father of all flesh,

Disaster is his rainbow in the sky,

And when you hear: “State of emergency:

Sniper kills ten, troops on rampage,

Youths go looting, bomb blasts school,”

It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.

-Steve Turner