RICEFest Rocked!

A song to personify my disposition: Ordinary Friend (David Tao)

I don't think I need to say anything more about RICEFest last Saturday. It was absolutely awesome. Looking at other pple's blogs and talking to pple who were there will give you an idea of how much it rocked. There were many more people than expected and the talks were stoopendous. It is so good to know that so many young people were able to hear about Jesus. Let's just hope they will be interested enough to come this Saturday to the main RICE event to hear a more comprehensive account of the gospel.

The event also shows teenagers that Christians aren't just a boring bunch of geeks, as is commonly percieved. Well, guess that really isn't the important bit, hehehe...

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On another note, reading a really interesting book called "Is the New Testament History" by Dr. Paul Barnett. A great book that deals only with the historical legitimacy of the New Testament rather than any theological legitimacy. It aims to show how the books of the New Testament are more reliable as sources of facts and history than most of the other sources we have about famous historical periods. To compliment this I stumbled across a show on SBS showing over the last few Tuesdays at 7:30pm about the first century Roman Empire. It was really interesting because it recalled accounts of Paul and referenced alot of information about the period from Tacitus and Josephus. Both of whom are non-Christian testaments to events that happen according to the New Testament.

Maybe when I finish reading the book I can do some more research on the topic of Christian apolagetics and then give a presentation to my youth group about the viability of the Bible as a source of historical truth.

I think knowing these things are extremely important to our faith. Unlike other religions which relly on 'mystical' writings that can only be interpreted properly by 'leaders', I think Christians are called to seek the truth on our own rather than follow like mindless drones.

If you think about it, the New Testament is a book made up of a collection of writings by a bunch of criminals who believed that an executed criminal was God. It also claims to be 2 millenia old and if you've ever played Chinese whispers you'll know that passing information down through so many years and not altering it is highly improbable. Hence to believe what it is written in such a book and live your life by its teachings without considerable investigation into its authenticity would be plain stoopid. Are we meant to be like any other member of a ridiculous cult who believes anything s/he is told? I don't think God wants us to blindly believe, I think we have a duty to seek the truth.

YOU CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!