Two weeks ago I finished reading Richard Dawkin’s “The God delusion”. One of my very good friends is a “comfortable agnostic” and we have a regular conversation about faith and life. As a supplement to our conversation we invite books into our friendship in order to keep the dialogue going. So far we’ve read two books – the other one being CS Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”.

As I posted a few weeks ago, our community has recently studied through the question of what evangelism means for us here in the Southern point of Africa. During our first session I recorded a twenty minute interview with my friend. It served at least a dual purpose. Firstly it introduced our community to someone who feels like he struggled through the faith questions and as he himself described it was “reborn” into a life without a God. Secondly it explored his rearing in the church culture of South Africa and gave us some valuable listening and learning time.

But now back to Dawkins. Last week we ended our three week exploration by watching Dawkins’s documentary that was aired on BBC last year entitled “Religion, root of all evil?” We watched part one and two and then talked about the issues that were raised. The idea behind the methodology was to raise some valid questions that we have to go and research. Some of the people in our group, as a result of this specific process are now researching topics like:

– The inspiration of the Bible and the origin of the canon.
– The evolution/design debate.
– How one reconciles the God of the Old Testament with that of the New.
– The educational process of children

Personally I’m looking into the genocide question. How can a loving God order a nation to do ethnic cleansing? If you have any resource ideas, please leave it in the comments section.