One of my friends sent me an email the other day with a link to the Alpha-Course (She's a keen Christian) suggesting that I might like to attend it. She claimed it was "the best thing she'd ever done" so I thought I'd check it out and see what I could find out so that when I declined the offer I'd at least sound like I hadn't completely dismissed it out of hand.
There's a ton of stuff on-line about this course, you can pretty much view the whole thing if you can bear wading through the wall to wall logical fallacies, contradictions and fancy-footwork around the more obviously nasty bits of the Bible. From what I can see it's just your bog standard Christian apologetics wrapped up in a cloak of fake "gravitas", I think they were trying to appeal to the new-age types by posing questions such as "what is the meaning of life", the answer to which is "Jesus" of course (apparently that's the answer to pretty much every question, which I suppose is at least predictable). Of course, a simpler and more obvious answer is that some questions are just stupid questions and if the answer is "Jesus" then the question should be "what's the 6th most popular Mexican boy's name?"
I watched several videos of various parts of the course and honestly found the whole thing a bit lame, you could drive several (metaphorical) buses through most of the arguments presented and although most of the people involved seemed nice enough and generally sincere it was clear that this was indoctrination with tea and biscuits. Clearly, I'm coming at this from a position of having read, viewed and mostly agreed with many of the counter-arguments to religion (and Christianity in particular) but it was striking that many of the people engaged on these courses seemed never to have heard any of them. Then again, I guess that's what most religions rely on to snag new recruits.
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