How Not To Help...

Remember Patrick Greene? He's the guy that threatened to sue Ray Comfort a while back over Ray's silly "April 1st: National Atheist's Day" bumper stickers. Well, he's apparently still around, despite being mocked unmercifully by both the religious folks and his fellow nonbelievers (The Atheist Experience gave him a particularly harsh rhetorical whuppin'.), and he's madder than ever. He's not threatening sue over the bumper stickers anymore; Now he's trying to force Ray to shut down his goofy blog, lest Patrick bring down the wrath of the court system by claiming that Ray is disseminating hate speech.

Freakin' seriously?

According to the Atheist Experience, he sent the following letter to Ray's Living Waters Ministry:

To Mr. Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron,

This is to inform you that over a year has passed since the incident of the threatened lawsuit against your bumper sticker. Since that time I have received e-mails by the hundreds, from atheists all over the world. These atheists have unanimously agreed that the lawsuit idea was not a good one, to put it mildly.

However, after spending the last year going through your blog and your store, and seeing the sheer volume of materials against atheists, I have come to the conclusion that your "free speech" constitutes hate speech.

So, since Christians by their own admission adhere to a "loving" faith, your biblical mandate of spreading the "word" must come in the form of loving rhetoric, not insulting people who do not share your belief, and not instilling hate to your followers.

Therefore, if ALL of your material against atheists is not removed from your website by October 20, 2009, I will file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Antonio, and ask the court to issue a restraining order to curtail your hate speech.

Sincerely yours,
Patrick Greene

Yeah Patrick, that'll help. It'll help the same way rubbing a lemon juice-soaked porcupine in your eyes helps relieve ocular dryness. Not only are you just plain wrong about the hate speech issue*, but it just feeds into Ray's silly persecuted Christian persona.

Way to go. Don't you ever get tired of putting your foot in your mouth?


* See Yates v. United States for the Supreme Court decision finding that speech aiming to incite illegal activity is still protected unless it results (or is likely to result) in the imminent threat of violence or other "lawless actions". See also Brandenburg v. Ohio for a similar ruling directly related to hate speech. Ray, while irritating, is certainly not attempting to incite illegal activity with a corresponding threat of imminent violence. Therefore his speech is utterly legal. Ridiculous, brain-dead, cloying, and generally puerile, but legal.

Seriously Patrick, this is Poli-Sci 101. (Actually I think it was POLS 102 - "American Civil Liberties" was the class that turned me on to Political Science in college.)

What Vestigility Is and Isn't

Ray Comfort recently learned something that I had learned back in Dr. Karpov's Biology 101 For Non-Majors: The appendix is a breeding ground for beneficial gut bacteria. That's pretty cool, but it has Ray mad as hell - He's miffed that scientists haven't "apologized" for figuring out what the appendix does. (Seriously, read his post.)

See, Ray doesn't exactly understand what folks mean when they refer to the appendix as "vestigial". He thinks that saying the appendix is vestigial means that it has no function whatsoever, but he's wrong. A structure being vestigial doesn't mean that it has no function! For a structure to be vestigial means that it seems to have lost "most or all of its original function". That doesn't preclude its having a new, different function. So how does the appendix measure up with regards to this definition for vestigiality?

Well, for starters, there are structures analogous to the human appendix in lots of other creatures. In primarily herbivorous animals this structure is called the cecum and is generally relatively large. It aids in the digestion of plant material. A koala, for example, has a titanic cecum that (if removed and stretched out) is actually longer than the animal itself.* On the other hand, carnivorous creatures tend to have a small cecum that has been either partially or completely replaced by an appendix.

Humans are the same way - We have a sissified little cecum with an attached appendix and these structures are no longer useful for helping us digest plants. Instead they serve as a breeding ground for gut flora. Sounds pretty vestigial to me.

*Koalas are also neat for another evolutionary reason: The "forefinger" of the koala has been modified with time to the point that it now serves as a second "thumb" in order to give the beast a firmer grip when climbing trees.

It's Not Quite "King Kong vs. Godzilla"...

I saw over on Pharyngula today that my pal Ray Comfort and uber-Catholic venom machine Bill Donohue are currently locked in a brutal slap-fight about evolution. Since Ray is arguing for instantaneous special creation* and Bill is arguing for God-driven theistic evolution combined with the special ensoulment of humans, both of them are wrong, but it's still kind of an interesting match-up to watch.

I can see the resemblance, but it just isn't the same.

Actually, while I'm loathe those to type these words, I think Ray is actually right here. He's correct to note that the Bible is a purely creationist book, and that Donohue is trying to revise its meaning to fit in with findings of modern science and is therefore undermining the point of his own holy book. Unfortunately for Ray, stubbornly clinging to a literalist interpretation of the antiquated doctrines of of the ancient Hebrews doesn't make him any more correct about reality itself than Billy. It just makes him wrong in a slightly more philosophically honest way. Bill is trying to slyly modify his doctrines to fall in line with reality, all the while trying to pretend that his religion was correct all along. Ray, on the other hand, is content to fiercely insist that his religion is correct as-is without any need to dilly-dally with such buzzkillers as observable reality and the totality of geology, astronomy, biology, and genetics. Each one is still wrong, but Ray is closer to being correct about what his religion actually claims than Bill, while Bill is a baby step closer to being right about biological reality, despite having to be intellectually dishonest about what his own Holy Book says to arrive at that position.

Alas, I'm afraid that they're pretty unlikely to engage in a brutal death-struggle on top of Mt. Fuji before being plunged into the Pacific Ocean by a sudden earthquake.

*At least as far as I can tell. Ray usually doesn't pin himself down by taking positions that are more specific than "atheists/evolution/Catholicism/paintings of boobs are bad."

Ray Should Apologize for His Apologetics...

PZ Myers recently took Ray Comfort to task for claiming that Darwin thought that male and female humans evolved as distinct species and I don't think for a second that I could pour any more derision on that particular claim. However, reading PZ's post did lead me back over to Ray's blog so I could take a gander at some of his other oddball state. While I was milling around over there, I stumbled upon this post in which Ray tries to wrestle with a Biblical contradiction.

You see, there are repeated instances in the Bible in which Yahweh feels bad about stuff that he's done, but the Bible (see Numbers 3:19) repeatedly says that God is infallible. Here are a couple of examples of God changing his mind: (all quotes NRSV)

Genesis 6:6 - And the Lord was sorry that he made humankind on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart.
1 Samuel 15:11 - "I regret that I made King Saul, for he has turned back from following me, and has turned back from my commands." Samuel was angry, and her cried out to the Lord all night.

Because Ray uses the KJV rather than the NRSV, his version of the first verse looks something like this:

Genesis 6:6 - And the Lord repented that he made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart.

Ray seizes on the use of the word "repent" in the KJV passage and uses it to make something of a false distinction - He says that God doesn't "repent" in the sense of "confessing and forsaking sins", but merely that God's really just changing his mind. See, Ray's trying to avoid a situation in which his God can be called a sinner. But wait, doesn't that miss the point? Ray doesn't seem to notice that he's still left with a fallible God, since God wouldn't regret things or change his mind about stuff if he hadn't dropped the ball about them in the first place.

Better apologists than Ray have noted that there are many Biblical passages in which God "changes his mind" only in the sense that he promises to rain ass-whuppin' from the heavens if someone doesn't change their ways only to decide later not to make good on his threats, but that's not really what we're talking about here. Gen 6:6 plainly says that God regrets making human beings - He feels bad about it because the whole mankind thing isn't working out the way He'd planned. God thinks he screwed up. That's the important part, as it kind of butts up against the whole "God never makes mistakes" doctrine - Either God was wrong to make humans, or He was wrong to think He was wrong for making humans. One way or another, Yahweh made a bad call somewhere.

It's also interesting to note that most of these passages occur in the OT, a part of the Bible characterized by a very humanized God. In the Old Testament, God can smell people's offerings, he walks through the Garden of Eden, and he sets his bow in the clouds to remind himself not to kill everything on earth again. That doesn't sound like an omnipotent, all-powerful, completely infallible deity, it sounds like a guy.

It also sounds like Ray isn't nearly as familiar with Biblical criticism as he'd like to think he is.

Ray Comfort's Sick New Low...

Ray Comfort's obsession with the idea that science is somehow an evil enterprise reached a gruesome new low yesterday with this blog post. I don't think I need to say much about the implication there. Ray's done little more than demonstrate the malevolence of the god he imagines to exist (Or is it apathy? Would that make it more palatable?), to say nothing of his own utter callousness.

So what has science ever done for us?

It's cured deadly diseases.

It's helped to fight world hunger.

It's provided us with remarkable advancements in medical care.

Ray's real gripe with the Large Hadron Collider is that it could help explain the origins of the universe, pushing Rays own shrill claims of "Goddidit" further into obscurity.

The Non-Controversy of Patrick Greene

I don't hang out at Ray Comfort's blog much these days - he posts about the same half dozen arguments with slightly different phrasing on a rotating basis and that gets old - but on my last trip over there I noticed that he was complaining about some mean atheist guy who was threatening to sue him. The gist of the story is that Ray's henchmen sell bumper stickers that say "National Atheists Day: April 1st" and an ill-humored atheist guy named Patrick Greene saw one, got offended, and made a bunch of noise about how he was going to sue Ray for libel (somehow).

In all honesty, I kind of assumed that the story was, shall we say, embellished. After all, my pal Ray has a story every couple of days about how fierce atheists chase him, yell at him, and occasionally slap him around for, well, being kind of an annoying guy. It seemed as likely as not that Patrick Greene was fictitious and Ray was just trying to sell more bumper stickers. Apparently, however, Greene's real and he's actually an ill-humored guy who complains a lot. I suppose that's egg on my face.

Greene has been grousing around some of the other atheist blogs out there, most prominently Atheist Experience, trying to garner support for his ill-conceived attempt to sue Ray. If he's been looking to muster a storm of righteous fury then he's looking in all the wrong places, because pretty much every atheist site that's mentioned him has done so in the context of "don't do this kind of stupid stuff". I mention him for the same reason: This kind of crybaby, litigious silliness is just plain asinine and gives Comfort and others like him the opportunity to paint atheists as a bunch of sniveling whiners. Ray is well within his rights to make backhanded bumper stickers, and there's no grounds to claim that it's libel because he's not really making any specific claims about anyone. The Constitution and common sense are both on Ray's side (That's a rare occurrence), and all Greene is doing is providing Ray with fodder for his voluminous claims of victimhood.

A few atheists, myself included, have even noted on Ray's blog that Greene's acting like a dingus. Freedom of speech either applies to everyone or it doesn't mean a thing, and going hand in hand with that is the understanding that no one has the right not to be offended. That applies to Ray, me, and everyone else. Disappointingly (though somewhat predictably), Ray has refused to acknowledge that a number of atheists have "crossed the lines" to stand beside him on this matter. Rather, he claims that other atheists "have turned on [Greene]" even though he "thought he was doing the right thing". That's wonderful, especially coming from someone who devoted a lengthy blog entry to mocking the guy - An atheist can either side with Greene, thereby proving that we're a bunch of humorless pricks who can't take a joke, or we can take Ray's side and prove that we're a pack of backbiting wolves who'll savage one of our own if bad publicity strikes. What a great choice.

So that's where it stands. Greene's behaving like a thin-skinned weenie and Ray, as usual, comes across like a smiling jerk...and the world spins on.

Ray Comfort is...Evil...?

My own opinion of Ray is mostly that he's kind of a lame apologist, but that he seems like a decent enough guy. If the rumors that he has a robot monkey are true then his stock goes up accordingly. On the other hand, some guy named David J. Stewart thinks that Ray is actually leading people to their eternal torment in hell. Stewart runs Jesus-is-Savior.com, and he's concerned that Ray is emphasizing acts over faith, thus guaranteeing that Jesus is going to stomp a mudhole in Ray and all of his followers after the time comes.

Granted, this whole acts vs. faith thing (Phrased simply: Do you get into heaven by way of good deeds, pure faith in Jesus, or both?) is among the most boring non-schisms in modern Christianity, but Stewart has banged out several pages about it, including two articles about Ray. (Here and here.) To my way of thinking, it's akin to asking if a Lawful Good fighter can equip a Holy Avenger +5 sword even though he isn't a paladin*, but apparently some Christian thinkers are incredibly interested in this topic. I suppose it is meant to be a matter of heaven vs. eternal doom, but jeeze.

By the way, don't mistake me for agreeing with Stewart here. Jesus-Is-Savior.com is a fiery quasi-Protestant site that reiterates, more shrilly and largely without cartoons, most of the positions that Ray himself takes. I'm just interested to see how one sanctimonious guy paints another sanctimonious guy from the same religion as leading people headlong into hell. I've not seen Ray talk about Stewart at all, though I have every reason to believe that he's aware of him, since I mentioned him on Ray's blog this morning (though that post seems not to have made it through the moderation process for some reason...)

Anyway, it seemed worth a giggle to me. I'd love to see a response from Ray, but I doubt one is forthcoming.

*The answer is yes, but he only gets a +2 bonus on attack and damage and doesn't radiate Protection From Evil.

Ray Knows Pornography When He Sees It...

...and brother does he see it everywhere. He recently wrote a blog post deriding the work of Gustav Klimt as pornographic, comparing it to the crude cartoons you find in public restrooms. (Readers may recall a crude cartoon I recently found in a public restroom.) So what are these lascivious works of perversion that Ray is leading the faithful into battle against?

This?













Or this?





















Or maybe this?
















Brother, I've seen pornography. This isn't pornography. This isn't even a case of "one man's porno is another man's art". It's just plain art, no two ways about it.

Normally I don't use harsher words than "disingenuous" to describe people who stretch the truth, but this time the situation is different.

Ray, you're a liar.

More Bait-and-Switch Proselytizing

We're all familiar with the goofy "predict the date of your death" websites floating around out there. The main one, of course, is the aptly named Death Clock, which tries to make a good guess at your final bow by asking for your some basic demographic info and your BMI. Some folks who are preoccupied with their inescapable terminus, however, may have discovered a site called 'Death Beth'. It's essentially the same as Death Clock save for a vaguely creepy doll head that takes up about half the screen, plus it flat out asks "are you healthy". (Isn't that kind of cheating?)

Of course, Death Beth doesn't actually make any predictions, it just notes that you're going to die one day and notes that unless you're in good with the God, Jesus is going to kick you square in the nads when it happens. Why, you ask? Turns out that Death Beth links straight back to Ray Comfort's "Living Waters" site, ironically from a link that asks "Think this is lame?". (Yeah, I do.) You also have the option of printing off dozens upon dozens of "You're gonna die" cards so you can constantly torment your friends and coworkers with the reminders of their own mortality.

Naturally these cards just advertise the "Death Beth" site without betraying Ray's hand in the whole thing - We wouldn't want people to actually realize they were being preached at, would we?

Creationists want it both ways...

I've been spending an exorbitant amount of time lately poking the creationists over on Ray's blog. I don't really expect to "convert" anyone, but it's interesting to see the ways that they frame their arguments and whatnot. Now, I largely believe that the issue of evolution is problematic for some breeds of Christian because it calls in to question their privileged place in the universe. Note that I say "their" rather than "ours". There is a tremendous arrogance among the "saved" that I've spoken of on here before, and I can only say that, among the followers of Ray's blog at least, my original griping on the subject was a gross understatement of the truth.

One of the most interesting things I've encountered thus far is the strange relationship some of these folks have with science, as both an institution and a methodology. Whenever science fails to support their preconceived notions it is uselessly and dogmatically naturalistic you see, but when it coincides with their beliefs it is not only correct but nearly infinite in its persuasive power. I suspect some of this comes from the ongoing debate between the skeptics and the believers on Ray's blog. Ray's brand of Christians seem incapable of grasping the idea of existing without out and out worshiping something, so when skeptics talk about science as a useful methodology for understanding the world we are naturally saying that we worship it. It's a peculiar thing to wrap your mind around, but some of their statements make more sense (more narrative sense, anyway) when you finally see that some of them have that perspective.

One thing that is of interest to me is the degree to which creationists think scientists are in (dis)agreement about evolutionary theory. Many of them seem to think that there's an enormous amount of debate within the scientific community as to whether or not evolution in the broad sense is true. Indeed, a recently Pew survey indicated that something like 54% of lay people think that scientists in general support evolution. Read that again. 54% of lay people think that scientists in general support evolution. What a weird survey. Actual surveys of scientists reveal acceptance of evolution by anywhere from 95% to 98.5% of scientists. In fact, the good ol' "Scientific Dissent From Darwinism" that the Discovery Institute is so proud of represents a minuscule number of scientists (approx. 700 out of nearly 500,000) and its numbers are likely padded by its pallid wording that "Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." Hell, I think almost everyone would agree with that. Add to that the fact that numerous signatories on the list are either not in biological science fields or openly admit that their concerns about evolution are ideological and you have a list of names that just doesn't mean much.

Another question that never quite gets answered is what creationists make of scientists with both strong Christian and strong bio-sciences backgrounds who believe in God but also accept evolution as settled fact. The figurehead of this group is the eminent Francis Collins, whose belief in God has been manifested in public debates with atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins but whose entire professional career has been spent doing legitimate experimental work and, among other things, heading up the Human Genome Project. Here's a man whose faith is not in doubt but whose lifetime of work in the fields of biology and genetics has left him thoroughly convinced of evolution's reality. It is scientists like Collins who make it impossible for the creationists to have it both ways when it comes to science.

I've been asking the creationists over on Ray's blog what they think of Collins for weeks now and I've gotten no replies. I guess, as with the evidence of evolution, they choose to pretend that he doesn't exist.

My pals Ray and L. Ron...

Believe it or not, I don't actually dislike Ray Comfort. He seems like a decent sort of fellow, and I'd probably trust him to watch the apartment if I was on vacation. He just happens to be staggeringly wrong about reality, though to all appearances he genuinely believes all the nonsense he spouts to be true. I'm even willing to attribute his truly heroic amounts of quote-mining to just having a bad handle on the process of academic writing. Also he's got that easy-going koala sort of look to him.*

On the other hand, L. Ron Hubbard was a malevolent huckster who I wouldn't trust not to pee on a public toilet seat just for kicks. While the argument could be made that by the end of his life he really did believe in his crazy pseudoscience/religion, it's pretty obvious that at the start he was just plain pulling it all out of his backside to see how far he could run with it. Plus he just plain looked creepy.

The problem here is, regardless of what I personally think of these two guys, their claims about reality were equally specious, and some of their methods for gaining converts are equally disingenuous. If you live in my area and you've ever picked up a LEO, then you've probably seen a Scientology questionnaire. If you hang around outside the humanity's building at U of L long enough it's also even money that someone will eventually hand you one. Pretty much the same thing goes for Ray's "Are You A Good Person?" test, though you're more likely to get it handed to you at the mysterious creationist booth at the regional flea market.

The best part about both of these tests is that you can't pass. Try it. You can take Ray's test at the link I gave above - the "right" answers should be obvious. You can take the Scientology Test here. I probably wouldn't put in my real name and address. The "correct" answers for that one are on the link from the last paragraph.

The results? Even with the BEST POSSIBLE ANSWERS, both tests are quick to point out how flawed and needy you are and how only their respective purveyors can help you. Ray and L. Ron's tactics are one and the same. They already know what they want to see in the people they purport to help - weak-minded, worthless people that can't be trusted to make their own decisions. What an arrogant and shallow view.

Sorry Ray, I'd trust you with my stuff, but not with my mind.

*For reference.

The Arrogance of the 'Saved' Part 2

Ray's post from earlier has been jangling around in my brain all day like a handful of nickels in a washing machine. Declaring something a miracle simply because you don't understand it is so arrogant that it's almost awe-inspiring, and it has stuck in my craw much more so than I would have imagined. Likewise the arrogance of those who fancy that the all-powerful creator of the universe is taking an interest in their day-to-day affairs, helping them find parking spaces, arranging lovely vistas, and, once supposes, causing cows to lactate solely for the benefit of the faithful. It must be fun to live in such a self-centered world.

Christianity in particular and the monotheistic religions in general play hosts to a strange dichotomy. First, believers are taught that they are lowly, sinful, useless creatures who couldn't sit the right way on a toilet seat, much less conduct their lives in this big scary world, without their deity to protect them. Meanwhile, they are simultaneously taught that the all-mighty, all-knowing creator of the universe is at their beckon call, ready to answer their prayers and bend to their will. Alternating delusions of worthlessness and abject grandeur constitute symptoms of schizophrenia.

Honestly, think about it for a few minutes. Here are folks who, for example, are content to call the process of lactation a miracle rather than look at the underlying science because their god tells them they have all the answers, yet they're also afraid to make decisions in their own life without begging the same god for answers about the most piddling stuff. (For example, check out this page of Christian dating tips, courtesy of P.Z. Myers' awesome blog. I never expected anyone to seriously ask if their erection was honoring god.)

I have to draw parallels between some subspecies of Christians these days and the weird UFO subcultures such as the Unarius Society that have sprung up over the years. Both are equally hilarious because of the bollocks they spout and the self-contradictory nature of many of their beliefs. I don't dwell on the UFO stuff quite as much because the UFO True Believers don't constitute a major a voting constituency, but sometimes it can be pretty instructive to compare the two.

Here's a great explanatory model...

Well, ol' Ray has outdone himself again with this stunning illustration of how cows process plant material into substances more easy for humans to digest. Check it out. Read his text too, just so you know that I'm not misrepresenting him. It's wild that he's trying to turn an extremely well-understood biological process into a magical mystery.

By the way Ray, humans are awesome at turning biological inputs into milk. We're mammals. :-D

Summing it up up nicely...

Well, Ray Comfort has taken to making about 36 micro-posts a day over on his blog, most of them consisting of a single vapid paragraph accompanied by a likewise vapid cartoon. One of his posts from Friday is striking. While the text is more of Ray's typically drivel, the cartoon that accompanies it is, I believe, pretty revealing about Ray's opinion of the Xians' place in the world vs. that of mere mortals.

Utterly charming, as usual.

Hey Mr. Comfort

Ray Comfort is best known to non-evangelicals as the fellow who hangs out in front of lakes with Kirk Cameron and pontificates about the godliness of bananas. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with hanging out in front of lakes or grooving on a good banana. Where he errs is the chronic vapidity of his reasoning. For example, he seems not to realize that the modern domestic banana is in fact powerful evidence of guided evolution via preferential selection by humans, whereas the wild banana is a lumpy green nightmare that looks rather more like the Frankenstein monster's wang than anything you'd want to eat.

Well, it turns out that he not only has a blog, but that he has it on the same site as this one. I suppose I could have found that out easily a hundred other ways, but I discovered it as a result of the links my pal's fundagelical son pasted into one of my books last week. In perusing his blog, which in some ways resembles a prose version of certain Jack Chick tracts, I stumbled upon a whopper of a post from earlier today. Now I'm not going to cast aspersions on the guy for drawing up a nice straw man about atheists to knock down. Hell, I paint with a nice broad brush when I call people fundagelicals, but c'mon! Money? "Do you love it?" Wowza.

If we want to talk about the love of money, lets talk about the beginnings of the religious resurgence here in the States. Let's talk about Popoff, Roberts, Robertson, and Tilton and their tax free empires. Come back with something better, Ray.

Comfort is also known for his bizarre refusal to accept that atheists exist. No lie. Actually it's a rhetorical device for the book I linked above, but honestly he doesn't seem to realize that his entire book is an argument for universal agnosticism rather than Christianity. Weird.