Ray Comfort and the Origin of the Feces

First, let me say that if you take information and intentionally misrepresent it, you are a liar. If you have others point out where your assertions are wrong (on national TV), but you continue to repeat your lies anyway, you’re also a hypocrite. If, in addition to that, you call those who have demonstrated that you lied, immoral, ignorant liars, and you claim moral superiority for yourself, you are an evil, sociopathic scumbag, Ray Comfort.

I just read the 50 page introduction that Ray Comfort has added to “The Origin of the Species” in the editions that he is donating to Universities. He is doing this, in part because he says he has learned that up to 60% of psychology and biology professors in major universities don’t believe in a god. So, he sees that persons who, almost by definition, are much better educated and more intelligent than average, have used that education and intelligence to arrive at the conclusion that there is no god, and he thinks a book, that’s already ubiquitous, can be given away with 50 pages of untruths, misconceptions, and unsupportable suppositions added and convert these professors.

This is a very typical collection of Xian apologist arguments that every supporter of evolution has heard before. Inexplicably, (after a quick biography of Darwin) it begins with a section about the structure of DNA. Since DNA structure was identified 96 years after “The Origin of the Species” was written, it is quite clear that this introduction has nothing to do with the book it introduces.

Not only is the introduction not specifically about the book, it appears that Comfort hasn’t even read the book. He presents a quote that’s footnoted as from pages 133-134 of the 1872 ed. I checked and it is from those pages, that is, one must combine sentence fragments from both those pages to achieve that “quote”. Later he employs the famously misrepresented introductory remarks about the complexity of the eye. He does mention that Darwin thought he could (not, noting that Darwin actually did) explain the evolution of the eye, but Comfort didn’t buy it anyway.

In case readers are not persuaded by the blatant misrepresentation of science, Comfort brings out the big guns for his final argument. It’s his own special version of Pasqual’s wager. According to him everyone needs religion and, although there are many choices, Christianity is the best choice because, if it turns out to be real, the punishment of burning and torture for eternity is worse than for any other religion. What a great way to choose a religion! Pick the one that has to threaten you the most to get you to join.

In summation, Ray Comfort, in a stroke of brilliance that exceeds his miraculous banana theory, is giving away a book that includes an introduction that can be rebutted simply by reading the rest of the book and the people to whom he is sending this book are among those most likely to have already read the book and whose backgrounds make them among the best equipped persons to demonstrate what a load of crap the introduction is. I think we should all applaud Ray Comfort for publishing and donating these books, in fact, I think we should encourage him to do the same thing with all the books that Darwin wrote, anyone named Darwin. Let’s keep him spending his money in this way until he’s as financially bankrupt as he is morally.