The reason that theology is often only there for emergencies is the same fundamental reason that philosophy is only worried about in times of both suffering and hedonism.

It has nothing to do with a person’s relative level of pleasure or pain. It’s about meaning and purpose – not comfort.

Understand: Purposelessness is found in both extreme pain and pleasure.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’ Or as a friend of mine said, ‘We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; its there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.’

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)

It feels like much of theistic rejection is a simple insistence that we call our souls our own.

A defiant: “But, I don’t want to be told what to do.”

I don’t know. Maybe it was in our hearts all along.

And thank goodness we’re adjectives and not adverbs.

I despise useless adverbs.

They wanted, as we say, to ‘call their souls their own’. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours.’ But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)