“Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”  So says Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion and godfather to the New Atheists.  This recent breed of atheist is no longer satisfied to pronounce religion as mistaken.  Believers aren't merely wrong, they're irrational.  And to such a degree that they very likely suffer psychological disorders.

But is it the believer who is irrational?  I don’t think so.

In February, I took the high schoolers of Crossline Community Church in Mission Viejo on their first Berkeley mission trip.  For students and staff, it was a rational test of Christianity’s truth claims.  It was also an occasion to humbly yet confidently demonstrate the utter irrationality of atheism. 

Here's an idea.  First, let's get a group of Christian high school students together, many of whom have grown up in the safety of the church, a Christian home or a Christian school.  Next, we'll put them in front of atheists, skeptics, gay rights activists, Unitarian pastors, college students and whoever else we can find, to talk to them about evils of religion and the irrationality of Christian belief.  A recipe for disaster, right?  

Wrong.  

In fact, I've already done it.  For 4 years now, with Stand to Reason.  And it's the most effective training I've ever done with youth.  In 2006, spurred on by my good friend Jim Wallace, founder of PleaseConvinceMe.com and pastor of The Rising Tide church, I developed an "apologetic mission trip" to Berkeley.  Here's a series of blog posts I did about that very first trip.