Ray Comfort still really doesn’t like atheists

Ray Comfort

This probably won’t be true of everyone, but I, for one, am pleased to note that that every atheist’s favorite rhetorical whetstone, Ray Comfort, has finally ended his months-long spam-a-thon of his dumb “godlessness leads to Nazis!” book and has returned to his favorite fundagelical spiel. It’s been getting lonely in my Necropolis since Pastor Tom Estes of Hard Truth turned out to be even more boring than I remembered, so I’ve finally returned the Banana Man to keep Vox Day company. (They go so well together, don’t you think?)

Comfort’s also come back with both guns bubbling. For example, did you know that public schools are where kids go to fall into drug abuse, sexual depravity and – worst of all – not Creationism? I know, that’s totally what I remember all my school years being like, too. (Well, except for the Creationism bit, as Canadian schools, especially in Québec, are generally pretty good at keeping religious fluff at bay.)

He also wants you to know that atheists are the reason why public schools are so very bad, m’kay:

Atheists want to keep creationism out of public schools. They see themselves as the intellectual saviors of the poor dumb college and university students, who don’t have the ability to think for themselves. These creationism censors are the book burners, who do what they do “for the good of society” --their godless society. And they do what they do in the name of “reason” and "science," when their atheistic belief is (in reality) completely unreasonable and absolutely unscientific.

Oh, those dirty, rotten, no-good, book-burning, student-distrusting, god-hating, unreasonable heathens! How dare they try to get government institutions to comply with the very first provision in the civil rights section of nation’s founding legal document? That’s just secular poppycock. And all their talk about providing students with the most accurate information available is really just a ruse to get them to shake their rebellious, Marylin Manson-filled heads at God’s Word, and you know it.

And you know you can take Comfort at his word – after all, he understands atheists so well:

If you think atheism is scientific and reasonable, let me ask you some questions. Do you believe that nothing created everything? If you do, that's not only unscientific, it's unreasonable. This is because your "nothing" isn’t “nothing” at all. It is something because it had the amazing ability to create everything. Perhaps you have changed your mind, and after hearing that you think that you then believe that something created everything, although you are not sure what that something was?

I’d like to start by asking him just what the hell he even means by “nothing created everything” – does he really believe that atheists impart some sort of intelligence or creator power onto nothingness, itself? Maybe he should realize that it’s not those doggone atheists who aren’t making any sense; it’s his absurd attempt at trapping them within the endless convolutions of his illogic.

But, to humor him to the best of my ability in my capacity as an atheist (and, for the purposes of this blog post, the self-elected representative of godless folk everywhere): No, I don’t believe that the universe was spawned from absolutely nothing at all. In fact, no atheist alive believes that. Ask anyone who understands enough about science to accept the fundamentals of the Big Bag Theory, and they’ll tell you that there obviously must’ve been something, even while it’s beyond our present ability to explain or comprehend.

In fact, focus on that last part for a moment. It should clue you in to the only rational, reasonable, scientifically valid and honest answer that anyone, atheist or religious, can give you about how the universe was made: We don’t know. No-one does. At the moment, no-one can. Anyone claiming otherwise is either kidding themselves of full of shit. And that includes all those who, honestly or deceitfully, claim to garner their answers about the universe from a Bronze Age-era collection of desert-wandering goat-herders’ fantasies.

But, y’know, I’m the one with the unreasonable, unscientific beliefs.

Edit (08/30/12 12:59 PM ET) – Minor edit.

Tags: Ray Comfort • atheists • public schools • college • university • students