Just been down to Grill a Christian at Bod Bar. Good fun. I got the questions going although I was a little disappointed by the questions asked by others. I think those sorts of situations are best with the most taxing questions that question something they can’t just quote the Bible from.
For example, questions about whether homosexuality is wrong. Fair question, and you might not know the answer but their point of view is going to be fairly certain and they can back it up with biblical quotes. Whereas my opening question “how do you explain the direction relationship between an increase in education and a decline in religion?” can’t be answered with a simple Bible quote because it’s not about what they believe it’s about whether their beliefs are correct which is the point I think I have been trying to get at in this paragraph.
Out of interest, the answer I was given (at least it seems to me this is what I was told, you never get a straight answer out of a Christian ;)) was that people say in Africa are more religious because they need God more (because they live in poverty and die young, etc). As I explained to Dan in the chat we had afterwards, I don’t believe this is the case because say within our society, a university graduates quality of life is not significantly (if at all) higher than someone who only has a few GCSEs and is less well educated. Yet in terms of the percentage of people that would call themselves religious within our society clearly has a divide between the more and less well educated.
The other question I posed was that if God is both all loving and all powerful, why are people in Hell? Surely he is either all loving and cannot prevent it or he is all powerful and doesn’t want to prevent it. The ideas seem mutally exclusive to me. The answer I was given here differed between the panel. The first answer being that Hell is not in fact a place of eternal suffering but a place in which the person will no longer exist (which I would take over eternal life anyday). The second answer I was given was that although God is loving he is also just (and therefore I guess not all loving).
Quite a debate kicked off surrounded homosexuality although that was of limited interest to me. I’m aware of Christian’s views on homosexuality and while I don’t agree with them, they at least accept that it is a real orientation and just condem the act of homosexuality itself. While I don’t think it’s fair to expect homosexuals to repress their biological instincts and abstain from a relationship, I think the Christian point of view is that they could if they wanted to just like hetrosexuals can abstain from relationships also. It’s a fair point although the basis of this expectation appears to be purely the Bible and there doesn’t seem to be any scientific evidence to back up their claim that homosexuality is wrong.
In conclusion, I would urge people who attend these events not to ask questions about what the Christian doctrine is as these type of questions can easily be Googled to reach a satisfactory answer, but rather question the validity of their beliefs and what evidence they have to support the claims they make. The idea is after all to grill them.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.