Blind faith is worse than ignorance, but that's not these Christians.

This week, Southampton Uni Christian Union (CU) society have been running an ‘Events Week’, putting on events encouraging students to come and ‘find out more’ about Christianity.

I attended the “Grill a Christian” event tonight, where a panel of the most knowledgeable Christians were answering some of the toughest questions I’ve ever heard on Christianity.

What do you think about all the corruption in the Church?

Doesn’t the fact that the Bible is open to interpretation mean that it can’t be divinely inspired?

How does the Bible have more credibility than other religious books such as the Torah or the Koran?

Do you believe miracles still happen today?

Now on each of these questions, hundreds of books have been written. These are not new questions – they have been asked by Christians and non-Christians for hundreds of years.

While I was there, I was reminded of something I’ve realised before: These Christians are not stupid. Their faith is (generally) not blind, it is very real, and backed up by a huge amount of research. On the panel answering questions included a Professor of Chemistry here at Southampton Uni, a PHD engineering student, and a medic. One of the many surprising answers they came up with was that “evolution was compatible with religion”, for example.

Disclaimer: I used to be a Christian as ‘hardcore’ as any CU member, and after a long period of thinking, I stopped a month before I came to Uni.

What pisses me off however, is ignorance. A Christian who blindly throws themselves into an all-encompassing faith is stupid. A non-Christian who immediately concludes that “all Christians are morons because they don’t want to have sex before marriage” is not stupid, just ignorant.

It’s not the Christians who are trying to ‘tell me about Jesus’ that annoy me though. It is the ignorant non-Christians. I don’t mean atheists or agnostics, those people who at least have a belief (or lack of) in something. I’m talking about your arrogant cretin who feels they are 100% right even though they haven’t looked into the issue.

A classic example would be the claim: “there is no evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ”.

Believe it or not, there’s actually more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than there is of Julius Caesar. Unless you want to be one of those “pick-and-choose” historians, you’ll take it as fact that Jesus Christ (the man) existed.

The CU state on their website that one of their beliefs is:

The Lord Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son, is fully God; […] died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth.

While you might disagree with this belief, you have to admit: being raised from the dead is no more or less supernatural now than it was 2000 years ago. Our “scientific advancements” still don’t show us how someone could die after hours of crucifixion and then come back to life a few hours later.

Trying to disprove the resurrection is like trying to disprove the existence of Santa Claus, so I won’t bother trying. You can’t have a fair and logical discussion about the supernatural.

But that’s not the point. When it comes to religion – nothing is black and white. Whether you’re an atheist or Christian, treating it in that way is nothing more than ignorance.