The chapter includes this quote: “Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you will get neither.” Explain what this means. How does a person’s life look when they understand this quote?
The quote has different levels of meaning. The most obvious one is that once a person focuses on something very high, that is like heaven, things beyond ordinary life, perhaps some spiritual thing, he ends up also doing well in the earthly life as an addition. In contrast, if he only focuses on something earthly, he will fail in both the spiritual and earthly things. This literally means that focus on something transcendental, then getting other minor things automatically. People who understand it completely will probably live a life with no anxiety because they won’t need to focus on a lot of earthly things anymore.
In our culture, why is it difficult for us to have a Christian hope of heaven?
Lewis points out that our whole education and culture train us to focus on this world superficially. Since then, when someone talks about heaven, it feels like it sounds weird and unacceptable because it made a direct contrary with the reality that people live and feel. Another problem is that even when people do somehow feel the deeper thing, they don’t recognize it as a desire for heaven. This brings a huge distraction around us to refute the existence of heaven, which makes it ambiguous to believe.
How is it that the desire for heaven gives a good reason to hope that heaven actually exists?
The author demonstrates this with a simple argument, which every natural desire we have points to something real that can be satisfied. For example, the state of hunger can be solved by eating food, and the desire to swim can be filled by the physical water. He then claimed that there’s an indescribable desire in humans’ minds that something has evaded people. Then an ambiguous idea brings out that if every other built-in desire has a real object, then it makes sense that this desire also has a corresponding material object, and that object was described as heaven in his opinion.
Are you inclined to the Fool’s Way, the Disillusioned Way, or the Christian Way of thinking about heaven? Why?
I would like to be inclined to neither of them, but limited to the level of the human world, I would pick the Disillusioned Way. I think the fool’s way was like a hallucinogenic drug that forces you to keep moving forward and get progression, but there won’t be an end to this. So, in my opinion, I would just choose not to have any desires beyond. This might sounds frustrated, but at least I know what I am doing exactly. I don’t believe in heaven unless human technology gets more advanced to have some proof or other progress of it.