Alpha Course: Week 8, How Can I Resist Evil?

This is the eighth official installment in the Alpha course series, in which I recall my experiences as a Jewish-raised dude and now a Gnu Atheist who took the Alpha course with his Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Since most of us in Alpha saw one another just a few days before at the overnight getaway, there was both interest and fatigue. Personally, I wanted to see everyone and say hello. I was curious about how people “re-integrated” into the world, but I also didn’t expect to see or hear anything new. I didn't.

• Dinner was chili with hots, and ice cream sundaes. Two songs sung.
• The DVD talk was on “How Can I Resist Evil?” 
• By the end of the talk, we had used words like “evil,” “temptation,” and “sin.” 
• However, we were really talking about resisting temptation and not resisting evil.
• To my mind, "evil" was presented as a given and not well-defined or examined.
• This was a weak talk. 
• Gumbel asserted that evil did exist. 
• Why? Because if evil exists then we can make sense of the horrible things that happen in the world. 
• Amusingly, a follow-up assertion was that any philosophy or worldview that didn’t posit spiritual forces of evil has a great deal to explain. 
• I don’t need to show in detail how stupid this line of thinking is, do I? 
• Another reason we know evil exists, says Gumbel, is Church tradition. 
• No, he doesn’t mean how evil the Church has been. 
• Instead, he means that Church fathers believed that the devil was real. 
• The third reason, according to Gumbel, is that the Bible asserts the existence of Satan. Jesus believed in Satan.
• Sigh.
• Gumbel went on about how the devil worked to separate people from their God.
• Gumbel went to the Garden of Eden story, but only one of them. 
• He enjoined everyone to remember that the side of God was the side of forgiveness and freedom, while the other side (there’s only one other, apparently) is the side of destruction. 
• He then went to a famous bit in Ephesians (attributed to Paul but not certainly authored by him) about arming oneself with/in God. 
• The main supports against evil are, Gumbel says, the Bible, prayer, and the church community.
• At small group, we began with impressions from the overnight getaway, and if anyone felt tempted afterwards. 
• People shared some personal stuff. 
• For example, one woman is going on Friday for a biopsy. She’s scared. 
• Another person talked about being tempted to go out with his buds--perhaps he was/is an alcoholic? 
• We also talked about being able to talk with others openly about Christianity. 
• People generally feel discouraged from being “open” believers, at least the new ones. 
• I happen to see plenty of folks who have no problem with religious sayings on their cars or on Facebook.
• We closed in prayer. Not me, of course.