Preamble to Alpha Day 4 - I'm getting pissed

There are purely theological questions discussed in Alpha, things like “What about babies who die? Or mature tribals who never get to hear about Jesus? How does Jesus’s death work as a sacrifice if he’s no longer dead?” However, what I’m interested in is more the historicity of it; prove to me within a reasonable doubt that the bible can be trusted. There are also the scientific arguments; Christianity (at least literal interpretations) contains many claims that can be tested against what we observe in the natural world, and the only way for Christianity to be true is if it agrees with observations (or if Christians admit that God is being a lying dick – strangely, I’ve met few Christians willing to go that far). For me, these (history and science) need to be addressed to my satisfaction if I’m to go anywhere near Christianity as a belief upon which to centre my life. Once these are addressed, then the theology would become important, but before that, it’s just intellectual masturbation.

The theology in this case is the icing; the historicity and the agreement with the natural world is the cake. I’ll debate the icing, but really it doesn’t concern me much when the cake is still missing. Unfortunately, I’ve looked ahead in the course and it seems that from this point on, Alpha concerns itself not only with icing, but with sprinkles, candles, cherries, and serving a big piece to your overweight cousin Darryl. But there’s still no cake.

Stay tuned for my summary of day 4 of Alpha, which will explain why I’ve introduced this post with such a snarky editorial. But for now, all this cake talk makes a good segue into discussing dinner.