While I have kept a personal, online journal for four years now, this is my first true blog. My goal for this blog is to make the posts interesting, frequent, thought provoking, and hopefully humorous as well. There will be very little censoring on this blog, as I detest the practice. The guidelines will be posted at some later date once I get going on this blog. They will cover the basics regarding spamming, disruption, hate, etc. I may also parody Ray Comfort's rules.
That note brings me to the subject of Discomforting Ignorance. I am a long time reader now of Ray Comfort's Comfort Food: The Soap Box. Ray Comfort is a co-founder of The Way of the Master ministry, which is an evangelical Christian organization. Ray, who is a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, keeps this blog mainly about atheism. In these posts, he often makes asinine arguments against atheism or in favor of God.
I describe myself as a "fan" of Ray Comfort's blog because, well, I am a fan of it. One of my morning rituals is reading his posts, which I always enjoy doing. I do not mean to be cruel in this following comment, as that is not my intention. The reason I enjoy reading it is for the faulty logic he uses in it, his blithe ignorance in presenting the positions of his opponents, and his clumsy attempts at gaining converts. Reading his blog allows me to practice picking apart arguments as the fallacies in his posts are not subtle at all. It also allows me to see how Christians think.
Do not misunderstand me, I do not think Ray Comfort is an evil man. Although he castigates all atheists as evil and wholly ungood, I do not think the same of him. Although he states that he think atheists are liars and that they actually do believe in God, I do not think that he is a liar and I think he really does believe in God. Although he thinks atheists are trying to be wicked by debating theism and speaking about the ills we see posed to society by religion, I do not think he is trying to do anything wicked by trying to debate atheists and spread Christianity.
With that said, he is ignorant. He is closed-minded. He uses flawed arguments. His blog is popular and so I have offered this blog as a refutation of his. I will attempt to respond to each of his posts, though I will not always make this goal.
His blog reaches many people and they need to understand why his points are invalid. Sometimes he makes arguments which sound very nice to the average reader. When he talks about atheists not having absolute knowledge of God, someone needs to be there without absolute knowledge of Bigfoot. When he says that God controls the rain and fires ripping through the gay-marrying California, someone needs to be there to point out that God also controls the rain and lightning flooding the non-gay-marrying Midwest. And every time Ray holds up a banana, someone needs to be there to hold up a coconut.
This blog is my personal coconut.
Regards,
JT
1 comment:
Do not misunderstand me, I do not think Ray Comfort is an evil man. Although he castigates all atheists as evil and wholly ungood, I do not think the same of him. Although he states that he think atheists are liars and that they actually do believe in God, I do not think that he is a liar and I think he really does believe in God
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I've been posting to Ray's blog awhile and I must admit my opinion of the man is softening slightly.
While at first he seemed to be just a religious con-man little different from Robert Tilton, I no longer view him that way. Although he's always ready to make a buck, I pretty much accept now that for the most part, he's sincerely concerned for my welfare and believes most of what he says.
However, he is by no stretch of the imagination honest, at least when he tries to sell his anti-science denialism. He's doubtless been corrected thousands of times when he insists evolution says the universe came from nothing but continues to spout that claim, to cite but one example.
What Ray seems blissfully ignorant of is the simple fact that once it's discovered how dishonest his denialism-sales techniques are, the rest of his theology is mortally wounded as well, since evolution denialism is a central theme of his shtick. Just look at how much of his blog he devotes to bashing science.
I consider your blog to be a public service--an attempt to undo his Xtian fundie propaganda and head games; thanks for taking the time.
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