Young Australian Skeptics

A little while ago now, Ray Comfort sent me some books — The Atheist Bible and You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but You Can’t Make Him Think. I actually finished reading YCLAATEBYCMHT* a little while ago, but hadn’t gotten around to writing anything about it due to the craziness of the past month. Now that all that is over, welcome to the first in a series of articles performing an autopsy on You Can Lead…** — this first article will deal with the foreword, preface and introduction to the book, and we’ll then lead into the meat of the book in later articles.

The foreword to this book was written by “Darrin Rasberry, Atheist” — an odd way to introduce oneself, but there you go — and is really no more than silly pandering. He briefly makes mentions of Anthony Flew and of his ‘conversion’ away from atheism (to understand why that riles me take a look at this article by PZ Myers) and also of the Zeitgeist conspiracy theory movie, which is hardly representative of many atheists at all. Rasberry comments that,

“Although nobody is justified with befriending those whose worldviews are outright dangerous, such as Hitler or a bin Laden, respecting those who hold opposing beliefs often opens up ways to examine the consistency of what you hold and to consider the truth claims of what others hold in as neutral of an atmosphere as possible.”

Given that stipulation, I have to wonder what Rasberry’s criteria for a ‘dangerous worldview’ actually is. After all, are we to respect the Catholic worldview? The Catholic worldview has been directly responsible for uncountable horrors in the past, and still to this day continues to retard the progress of medical science and exacerbate the HIV/​AIDS epidemic in Africa. What about Islam? Certainly what we call Islamic extremism is a danger, but even the beliefs held by those we regard as ‘moderate’ Muslims in the Middle East have a long way to go when it comes to human rights and tolerance. We haven’t even touched upon other denominations of Christianity yet and we already have over a third of the world’s population excluded from discussion for holding a dangerous worldview!

While I agree that self reflection and criticism is as or even more important than criticising the beliefs of others, I do not agree that I have to ‘respect’ overtly ridiculous beliefs in order to effectively perform critical analysis on myself. I do not even think that it is necessary to respect other beliefs in order to critically analyse them — it is possible to admit the correctness of a position, perhaps grudgingly, if one does not respect that position.

From there, Rasberry goes on to trot out all the old canards against “New Atheism” — that rather than participate in honest discussion they ridicule their opponents; that rather than perform philosophical analysis they sell ‘diatribes’ full of ‘pop polemics’; that they ignore the ‘real’ arguments made by Christians; and that all of the well known New Atheist books “demonstrate the same lack of both logic and knowledge that they carelessly paste on Christianity”. Easy accusations to make when you’re writing the foreword to a book, of course, and many have lain exactly the same charges down before — but when it comes to the crunch, where is the evidence for this? Presumably, if the New Atheists are so full of crap, it would be easy to answer the criticisms put forward in their books. Yet time and time again we see the books and article in response to Dawkins and others that show no sign of the author having even read the books, let alone understood them. Rasberry asks us if we are ‘up for the challenge’ of reading and responding to Ray’s book — I have only to say that if Rasberry considers Ray’s book to be an example of the serious arguments put forward by Christians that we fail to answer, he needn’t look any further to understand why so much ridicule is heaped upon religion by the New Atheists.

That leads us nicely into the preface, which Ray opens by telling us,

“Most who profess atheism aren’t really “atheists.” After a few moments chatting with them about the fact that every building is proof that there was a builder, and that creation therefore is proof that there is a Creator, many change their minds.”

From the opening, I can immediately draw two conclusions: First, that Ray is being downright arrogant in telling atheists what it is they actually believe (though the same can be said about his caricature (mis)understanding of evolution); second, that Ray is either making shit up, or has made a habit of talking only to the dumbest and most gullible atheists on the planet.

Of course, then there is what Ray calls the “staunch atheist”. According to Ray, the staunch atheist is a kind of fanatic, a “fundamentalist in his belief that there is no God” who is “unreasonable, angry, and bitter at God, and will colour his speech with blasphemy of His name, despite the fact that he professes that God doesn’t exist.” Again, all of this is the same old crap of telling us what we believe — we really DO believe in god, you see, it’s just that we’re angry at him. “The atheist,” Ray proposes, “is someone who pretends that there is no God.” To Ray, all atheists are ‘lost’ and in need of guidance…and of course he just happens to be the person to lead us back into the fold.

The introduction to the book acts well as a roadmap to what the rest of the book will be about. According to Ray, the reason we should all believe in god has very little to do with the ‘gamble’ that there is no ‘Creator’ — instead, he says,

“The real gamble is that there’s no hell. That’s what makes the player sweat just a little. “What if?” is the deep and nagging doubt.”

And so, of course, it all boils down (again) to Pascal’s Wager. Silly me for thinking that someone could have thought of something original in over three bloody centuries. Ray tells us that there are six things that tell us for sure that his particular brand of Christianity is true, and as these will form the basis for what is to come I’ll list them here as well. They are:

1. Creation. Because nobody has ever addressed that particular brand of silliness before — hell, this is exactly one of the arguments Dawkins has tackled in the past, yet for some reason I doubt there will be any attempt to actually rebut any of Dawkins’ arguments. Expect lots of talk about paintings requiring painters, and so on.
2. The God-​​given conscience. You’d think that the fact that even people that don’t believe in Ray’s brand of Christianity can make moral decisions (especially us naughty atheists) would be an issue for him, yet he manages to turn it around by telling us that it’s all because of god anyway. How does he know? ‘Because’, that’s how!
3. The unchanging testimony of Holy Scripture. You know. Except for all the bits that keep changing.
4. The true and faithful testimony of the genuine Christian. The circular logic Ray uses to justify this one is golden in its unintentional hilarity: “The atheist chooses not to believe the testimony of the Christian, and in doing so, accuses him of bearing false witness. But why would a Christian lie? Why would he want to be found a liar, when the Book in which he sincerely believes warns that all liars will be cast into the lake of fire?”
5. The witness of Jesus Christ. A variant on the liar-​​lunatic-​​lord argument: “To make such claims, He could only have been a simpleton (that doesn’t match His matchless words), a liar (that doesn’t match His impeccable moral teaching), insane (then billions down through the ages have followed the teachings of a madman), or He was who He said He was.” Emphasis mine — I think Ray makes the point on his own better than I ever could.
6. The Spirit of Almighty God. Basically, this is just the argument that is no god, lots and lots of very bad people will not be punished to the degree which they deserve, therefore bawww (or something like that). Again, all this is is a failure to recognise that just because we may not like the implications of a particular position, that doesn’t make that belief incorrect.

So there you have it — the foreword, preface and introduction to You Can Lead… done and dusted. Next up we’ll be looking at Chapter One: Creation Must Have a Creator. Until then, stay safe, and try not to accidentally lobotomise yourself by reading too much Comfort Food. Ciao!

* Wow, that’s a crap acronym.

** Much better…

Tags: book, Ray Comfort, Richard Hughes

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Atheist, Religion, Richard Hughes, Skeptic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.