Posts Tagged ‘christianity’

Yesterday we screened Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed documentary which looks at the reaction of the scientific community to intelligent design proponents. It was of course pretty rubbish and didn’t really present much evidence but has plenty of emotional pleas about the future of freedom and of course the obligatory appearance of Godwin’s law in.

Attendance was good for an exam period, at least for those who managed to find us tucked away in the Baines Wing, in the three years I spent running around that campus I think I have only been up there once.

On Wednesday I headed down to give Kat some company at Alpha at South Parade Baptist Church. The theme of the night was tough questions and so our group discussions looked at a number of questions, namely why does god allow suffering, what about other religions and are science and religion incompatible.

The general answers where because Jesus took our sins, because Christianity has Jesus who was unique and no because Jesus said so 😀 . Actually those weren’t quite the answers but that was the general theme. I found this session much more engaging to be honest and enjoyed it far more though I did find some real cliched points.

I had to hold myself back at least twice, first when people commented that what really sets Christianity apart was that it had Jesus and his story was unique. Of course his story isn’t unique, it fits brilliantly into the hero pattern and is very, very derivative of previous gods. Secondly the girl opposite me, Charlotte, was no doubt a very nice girl and very friendly – but did bring up the “bad, mad or god” argument and I had to bite my tongue from saying “I dealt with this last time I was here, it doesn’t hold any water.”

All in all though I found the discussions much more engaging than the previous visit so thumbs up.

Friday saw us kick things off with One Life, this week’s session being about ethics. As John was running late I started the session as chair for the first half an hour or so raising a few topic discussions before the real content matter was entered when John arrived. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough plates and cutlery for the committee ended up eating out of a cup with a spoon!

Afterwards we headed up to City Church on Headingley road who were running re:fresh, a free BBQ and hot drinks session to catch drunk people Otley running it. We would have had a few drinks in the old bar first but as they were Christians they had to go to bed at 11 so we had to go there first 😀 .

Having come direct from One Life we were of course in our Atheist Society hoodies which made for a fun time – of course they were very welcoming though the hoodies did get described as inappropriate by a girl on a fancy dress Otley run dressas as a Roman which we didn’t find at all ironic. After all, what have the Romans ever done to Christians? 😉

Headed down to Alpha at South Parade Baptist Church last night.

I was expecting a fairly young audience given South Parade is reasonably heavy with students but that certainly wasn’t the case. It was very much a whole of church thing and it was nice to have a bit more of a classy atmosphere for the evening 😉 .

You could tell students weren’t involved from the standard of the food to be honest, which was excellent.

The event itself though was reasonably disappointing, it was a live speaker and the turn out was reasonably good which are both plus points but the standard of table leaders provided was somewhat lacking. Answers like, “yes, that is a tough question” aren’t really what we were looking for.

Still a fairly enjoyable evening and we got an Alpha book out of it so far from wasted time.

Last Friday saw the citywide Alpha launch event in Leeds which saw churches from across the city come together for a big launch event for the 36 Alpha courses which are apparently launching across Leeds this week.

The event began with a speech from Nicky Gumbel, the man behind Alpha who was a good speaker as ever though also, it turns out, a massively repressed homosexual. I wouldn’t know myself but Rich who was sitting next to me assures me he is gay, not only in spite of how much he mentioned his wife, but because of it.

Rich enjoyed much of Nicky’s speech too – or at least he did the first time he saw the material when performed by Jasper Carrott. Apparently the jokes aren’t as good the second time around.

After this we got onto the “celebrity guests” which were Cameron Stout the winner of Big Brother 4 and an apparently famous fitness video instructor. She did have some good advice though – the way to loose weight is to actually do some exercise. So at least she has some common sense when it comes to wellbeing, if not in the field of religion.

The show finished off with a few personal testimonies talking about Alpha, all carefully selected to hit each demographic. Flawless all the way.

Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.

While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.

The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.

So, turns out Christianity isn’t at the heart of Christmas after all 😉 .

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 monarchy 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?