C.S. Lewis wrote:
. . . . We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behaviour. And it would seem, at first sight, very sensible to stop before we got there, and just carry on with those parts of morality that all sensible people agree about. But can we? Remember that religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must either be true or false. If they are true one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.
Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I’m going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But might be absolute hell in a million years: if fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation of a civilization which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably important, for he is everlasting and the life of the state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment. ~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, N.Y.:Macmillan Publishing Company, 1942, 1945, 1952), 72-73 (pocket book edition)
