Weekend Part 2
This is the part where the 'good' stuff happens. Even more kool-aid than the last instalment.


Talk 4: How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?
You can see this coming now.


Part 1: The Talk
The speaker, the church leader of this Alpha course, starts:
"There are 2 types of Christian."
Expecting a no true Scotsman but thankfully there wasn't.
"The first are like my boiler, they have only a little bit of the Holy Spirit in them, like the pilot light on my boiler so I call them Pilot Light Christians. The second are like my boiler but when I put it on full blast, it makes this POOMPH! sound, they are filled with the Holy Spirit and overflowing with it, I call them POOMPH! Christians."
This was all well and good until he continued on:
"There are 5 types of people who are not filled with the Holy Spirit:
1: Those who are longing to be filled, I would say this is where you all are. Longing to be filled with the Holy Spirit and you will be.
2: Receptive, where you were at the beginning of this course, those who want to be filled but need a bit more education.
3: Hostile, the people who do not want to be filled and are vehemently opposed to the idea of Christianity.
4: The Uninformed, those who simply have not heard of the Holy Spirit, it is your job to educate them.
5: The Non-Religious, those who have decided religion is simply not for them."
Hard to decide which of these I fall into, although I'm sure most people think I belong in the 3rd.


"When people convert to Christianity and are filled with the Holy Spirit, they change..."
I heard this A LOT over the weekend, it's a tired old argument that can be applied to all religions.
"...people experience a warm feeling inside"
Seriously? Subjective experiences are common to all religions, as well as non-religious experiences.
"You can't do science on it, for example when you meet someone you love and you get that tingling in the spine etc. you don't go to a lab to analyse the tingling in the spine do you?"
This is another entirely subjective experience.
"As Christians we follow our emotions."
I will always advocate following reason over emotion when the 2 collide, although I may sound like Spock when I do, there are times when you should follow emotions, but this isn't one of them. It was as if he read my mind when he said:
"We do have evidence of the supernatural, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues and interpreting are both obviously supernatural."
Really? This is supernatural? That's pretty much what speaking in tongues is. Interpreting it is unverifiable. At this point the speaker chains a load of emotional appeals together and finishes.
Unfortunately no discussion group followed but what did, was indeed a whole lot weirder.


The speaker started with a prayer, then invited the Holy Spirit to fill the room and everyone in it, so much for omnipresence. At the end of the prayer he asked everyone to remain seated, be silent and wait to be filled with the Holy Spirit, this is where it got interesting.
An older male member suddenly bursts into tears, followed by a few others. One starts spurting out random gibberish I assumed this is speaking in tongues, I had never heard it before. This was honestly the freakiest shit I'd seen in a while.
A senior member of the church came over to me and asked if I wanted to be prayed for, I motioned to my friend who was crying and said he needed it more. Another member came over and asked so I obliged.
We went to the corner of the room with Mark and another member. We sat there and prayed, after we had finished one of the members started speaking in tongues and shaking, it was absolutely hilarious and I had to hold back the laughter. Apparently the expression on my face gave them the impression the Holy Spirit ready to burst out of me, the temptation to scream "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE" was forcibly held back.


Talk 5: How can we make the most of the rest of our lives?
This is the only life we can be sure we have, we should not waste it on childish superstitions. This is a bit of a short one and there wasn't time for a real discussion group.


Part 1: The Presentation
"There are no dress rehearsals, you are thrown straight into life, Romans 12:1-2 says do not conform to the patterns of this world."
"Instead of following the crowd we should stick to God's standards."
Is he saying we should follow authority unquestioningly? Milgram Experiment.
"God created marriage and we should stick to his standards, it was Adam and Eve for a reason."
Is he subtly bashing homosexual marriage, also marriage is older than the bible.


"God created sex, and there is no such thing as casual sex, it's like when you take 2 pieces of cardboard, and glue them together to represent the act of sex, once you've had sex the cardboard cannot be separated without damaging it."
Wow, this is the single worst analogy I've heard in my life. I recommend the speaker looks at the Bonobo Chimps who have an insane amount of sex, and some species of whiptail lizards (specifically the New Mexico Whiptail), who reproduce via parthenogenesis i.e. virgin births.


"Love can only come from God."
Love comes from a variety of places, a hormone associated with it is Oxytocin. People who don't believe in your god can still feel love and indeed do.


"The greatest act of love was Jesus's sacrifice."
Bullshit, you can't even verify that he existed, which is strange since Muhammad and Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha can be shown to have existed, even if he did exist he wasn't the only one who was crucified. Also, and I really need to say this, IT WASN'T A SACRIFICE, sacrifice means loss, what did God/Jesus lose? Nothing at all, at least when Elvis died for my sins he stayed dead (unless you're a conspiracy nutjob).
Unfortunately this was where it ended, or at least where my notes did.


Week 6: How do I resist Evil?
A fair bit of Kool-Aid


Part 1: The Presentation
Back to Gumbel unfortunately.
He starts by setting himself up as a Skeptic saying how he found it hard to believe in God but harder to believe in the Devil.


"Why should we believe in a spiritual evil? Because it makes sense."
Does it really, this is quite an assertion. I'll admit bad stuff happens, really bad, but that is no reason to posit anything spiritual as just a blanket assertion. You can't answer a mystery with another mystery, but what Gumbel is doing is worse, he is making up a mystery and trying to shoehorn his God into it.
"Any theology that does not include spiritual evil has a lot to explain."
Does it? An example of what it has to explain would have been nice, like I said we see horrific things happening, but evil is a label we apply to actions based on their effect on others and society. We can use empathy to imagine if someone did that to us whether we would like it or not and base morality on that.


This was my favourite:
"If you take God and add one letter you get Good, if you take Devil and take one letter you get Evil."
Are you kidding? The Bible wasn't written in English mate
Gumbel gives 3.reasons to believe in a spiritual evil:
1: Bad things happen
2: Personal Experience
3: The Bible
Total non-sequitur, 2 and 3 are totally bullshit and the first one needs no spiritual element.


"The devil's tactic is to destroy us by causing doubt, we see how he did it in Genesis by telling Eve she did not have to listen to God."
This is just one big self defence mechanism against disbelief, this is what I hate about religions, they use intimidation and bullying to avoid questions, this is why it is so pervasive in society, not because it's true but because you are not allowed to question.
"God did not want us to know evil, only good."
Well surely it would have been better not to put the tree in Eden in the first place, it's like putting a loaded gun in a toddler's crib and then blaming it when it shoots itself.


Gumbel gallops from point to point, mostly stuff I have talked about before like healing anecdotes, so I won't go into details.


Part 2: The Discussion
This is another short on I'm afraid.
The first question is
"Does the Devil speak through other people."
Followed by a subtle glance at me, cheers for that when you read this.
The answer given is of course Yes, I would answer that he doesn't even exist but I didn't want to get into that.
I lead with this:
"The whole concept of the Devil and Hell is just a defence mechanism against questioning, it is how the religion keeps believers in line."
Needless to say nobody agrees with me so I move onto the problem of evil.
"You believe God is Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Omni-benevolent."
"Yes."
"And yet you believe he allows evil despite having those traits?"
"Yes he will not interfere with free will."
"Is there free will in heaven?"
"In heaven everything is so perfect I would not care to make decisions."
I think that is a no, so clearly God does not care for free will since heaven is his perfection. I will admit this is a bad question since if they answer:
Yes: Then you can have free will without Evil,
No: Then God does interfere with free will.
We circled around on these points without me getting a definite answer from anyone.
But on the point of free will, having free will does not equate to having the right to harm others, it also doesn't account for harm that is not caused by free will, but they will obviously just say "Fall did it".
I am sick of these escape hatches, they are just blind assertions and when you ask how they know this the answer is always "Bible says so."


Thanks for reading guys, all comments welcome and I'm sorry for the short ones.