Posts Tagged ‘christianity’

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monachy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is of course complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]

Having been invited down to Fonze’s church to do Alpha, myself, Norm, Paul and John went down this evening to check out a session. We arrived at the second week which was all about why Jesus died.

Having met Simon, the head guy, who was a nice guy as you would expect, we enjoyed a meal of rather higher standards than we are used to expect - I love it when the CU provide free food but they simply don’t have the resources to add the fancy touches such as a place mat full array of cutlery.

The session then took the form of a video lasting around 40 minutes which was reasonably interesting then we had a group discussion afterwards. It was good although it was no replacement for the speakers offered at Christianity Explored, it’s just not the same as an interactive speaker you can question on their talk afterwards.

We ended up heading back to The Terrace and got to know John a bit more who seems to be a really sound guy. He is doing joint honours artificial intelligence so we have some common ground and he also has excellent slogans on his t-shirts so it’s win win.

The figures don’t lie.

Abstinence only education really does work for the Bible belt of America. Almost one million teenagers get pregnant in the United States each year. Teenage pregnancy rates in the states were abstinence only sex education are far higher than those in states that offer proper education.

What does this result in? Lots and lots of young Christians having babies which are then raised to be a whole new generation of Christians. As I said, works fantasticly. Maybe we should be giving out condoms with holes in for freshers’ week?

Because we’re all about learning about other people’s beliefs (perhaps so we can ridicule them further) and because it is unfair to judge something until you have really given it a fair evaluation (and we do love to judge), we headed off to church last Sunday.

It was on Sweet Street, the heart of Leeds’ red light district and the “church” was actually an industrial warehouse which seems to be the way to go as far as the new “evangelical” churches go (I use quote marks as they don’t classify themselves as evangelicals, I simply use the term to convay the atmosphere I am guessing most non-Christians would take from that term).

The service was quite good I thought though Norm was less impressed. I was slightly worried when we first walked in as Michelle seemed to know more people than me but that problem soon worked itself out as I began to spot faces.

All in all it was an experiance and I like to think I can offer something in return for the experiance they gave me. So here it is, my golden nugget of information for them - if you’re going to jump around in worship for Jesus, wear a bra that actually gives you some support. It can’t be easy for the guys to be good Christians when you have four limbs reaching for the lord :p.

Just to pick out a few of my favourite quotes…

“They [kids] are so usable in Christianity.”

“Where should we put or focus? Our enemies are putting it in the kids.”

“I want to see [young people] radically laying down their lives for the Gospel.”

“How many of you want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?”

“Use your cute kid thing until your thirty, and [by] then you’ll have good content.”

“They jump round him [my dad] yelling martyr, martyr! It’s really cool.”