'The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club'

  (NOTE: There's a TL;DR at the bottom)


   "Like a quietly efficient nurse arriving in a house confused by illness, or like the new general arriving at the siege of Ismail in Byron's Don Juan, our chairman* broke in (if she will pardon the word) during the autumn of 1941 on that welter of discussion which even in war-time makes up five-eighths of night life of the oxford undergraduate. By stages which must have been very swift (for I cannot remember them), we found that a new society had been formed, that it was attempting the difficult programme of meeting once a week,** that it was actually carrying this programme out, that it's numbers were increasing, and that neither foul weather nor crowded rooms (they were lucky who found seats even on the floor) would reduce the size of the meetings. this was the Socratic Club. Socrates had exhorted men to 'follow the argument wherever it led them': the Club came into existence to apply his principle to one particular subject-matter -- the pros and cons of the Christian Religion.
  It is a little remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, no society had ever before been formed for such a purpose. There had been plenty of organizations that were explicitly Christian -- the S.C.M.,*** The Ark,**** the O.U.C.H.,***** the O.I.C.C.U.,****** -- and there had been plenty of others, scientific or political, which were, if not explicitly, yet profoundly anti-Christian in outlook. the question about Christianity arouse, no doubt, often enough in private conversation, and cast its shadow over the aesthetic or philosophical debates in many societies: but an area specifically devoted to the conflict between Christian and unbeliever was a novelty. Its value from a merely cultural point of view is very great. In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. the absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. In the Socratic all this was changed Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-god weeklies. At the very least we helped to civilize one another; sometimes we ventured to hope that if our Athenian patron were allowed to be present, unseen, at our meetings he might not have found the atmosphere wholly alien.
  We also learned, in those motley -- and usually stifling -- assemblies where English boys fresh from public schools rubbed shoulders with elderly European gelehrten in exile, almost any type of opinion might turn up. Everyone found how little he had known about everyone else. We of the Christian party discovered that the weight of the skeptical attack did not always come where we expected it; our opponents had to correct what seemed to us their almost bottomless ignorance of the Faith they supposed themselves to be rejecting. 
  It is (theoretically) a difficulty in the British Constitution that the Speaker of the House of Commons must himself be a member of one of the Parties. there is a similar difficulty about the Socratic. Those who founded it do not for one moment pretend to be neutral. it was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the Challenge. It will therefore always be possible for the lower (the less Athenian) type of unbeliever to regard the whole thing as a cunningly -- or not even so very cunningly -- disguised form of propaganda. The Athenian type, if he had this objection to make, would put it in a paper and read that paper to the Socratic itself. He would be welcome to do so -- thought I doubt whether he would have the stomach if he knew with what pains and toil the committee has scoured Who's Who to find intelligent atheists who had leisure or zeal to come and propagate their creed. But when all is said and done, the answer to any such suspicion lies deeper. It is not here that the honesty of the Socratic comes in. We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours. Worse still, we expose ourselves to the recoil from our own shots; for if I may trust my personal experience no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended. the arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated; in it you risk nothing, and we risk all. 
  Others may have quite a different objection to our proceedings. they may protest that intellectual discussion can neither build Christianity nor destroy it. they may feel that religion is too sacred to be thus bandied to and fro in public debate, too sacred to be talked of -- almost, perhaps, too sacred for anything to be done with it at all. Clearly, the Christian members of the Socratic think differently. they know that intellectual assent is not faith, but they do not believe that religion is only 'what a man does with his solitude.' Or, if it is, then they care nothing for 'religion' and all for Christianity. Christianity is not merely what a man does with his solitude. It is not even what god does with his solitude. it tells of God descending into the coarse publicity of history and there enacting what can -- and must -- be talked about."--God in the Dock, part 1, section 15, The founding of the Oxford Socratic Club



*Miss Stella Aldwinckle, who is still chairman.
**The first meeting was in Somerville College, Oxford, on the 26th January 1942.
***The Student Christian Movement
****An Oxford Christian Society
*****Oxford University Christian Union
******Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union, now Called the Christian Union
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This is Lewis's Preface to the first Socratic Digest, vol.1 (Oxford, 1942-1943). What is not mentioned here is the very important fact that Lewis was the society's President from the time of it's first meeting until he Went to Cambridge in 1954.







[What this means, as applies to Deviantart and other social media, is A) never block someone for disagreeing with you, for that removes all possibility of anyone's mind being changed. B) Simply putting your thoughts into a submission will do hardly anything, since the only people who see it will be the sort of person who goes out of their way to look for that stuff. If you don't go out of your way to read what the people you disagree with have to say, then they probably won't read what you have to say either, and thus whoever's wrong will never come to see the error of their ways. C) If you refuse to hear what the other person has to say, then they have no reason to hear what you have to say. Oh, and while we're at it, it would probably be best for everyone to memorize this list:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_… ]