Young Australian Skeptics

If you’re new to this series, you may want to check out parts one, two, three and four. Unsurprisingly, this is part five.

In the introduction to 20^th Anniversary Edition of Neuromancer, William Gibson discussed the curious ability for plot holes to spontaneously appear in science fiction literature due the inevitable and unpredictable changes in politics and technology that march on in the present while your book is stuck permanently in ‘the future’. In 1984, Gibson wrote of a future without cellphones (indeed, one scene describes a series of payphones ringing in sequence), and yet at the same time a future where the USSR is still a major power. When the going gets tough for his hacker protagonist, Case, he desperately requests a modem. At the time of writing, these were all perfectly valid predictions to make, yet as time has passed they come to seem like holes in the narrative that raise extremely perplexing mysteries — as Gibson says,

“My real sympathy, though, is with the bright thirteen-​​year-​​old, curled on a sofa somewhere, twenty pages into the book and desperate to get to the root of the mystery of why cell phones aren’t allowed in Chiba City.”

Of course, an cursory understanding of the technology and political climate of 1984 is enough to patch up these holes and appreciate the book for what it is — a seminal work of science fiction, one that essentially heralded the beginning of popular cyberpunk and introduced us to ‘cyberspace’. There is no doubt at all in my mind that Neuromancer is an important genre defining piece of literature.

Arguably, the same could be said of the Bible: Its importance as a piece of literature should be self-​​evident, and it has set the rules for what much of the world, or the West at least, considers a typical religious text. Also like Neuromancer, the Bible is full of holes. Big, gaping plot holes; the type you could drive Ron Jeremy through and still have space on the sides. But if we’re going to assign a genre to the Bible, it’s not going to be science fiction — so patching up those plot holes is going to be a much bigger job than just an appreciation of technology and religion at the time (or times) of writing. Indeed, if pressured, I’d have to say that the Bible is a fantasy novel. An epic, horribly convoluted, poorly planned fantasy novel. And so when someone reviews the plot like this;

“It’s all so profound, yet so simple at the same time.”

I tend to react like this:

“Like **** it is.”

As you probably guessed by the big, glaring headline, the person responsible for the above inanity is none other than Ray Comfort. In order to subvert comedy a bit, I’ve given you the punchline first and now I’m going to go back and tell you how we got there. The context is pure gold, of course — he’s just finished explaining to us why Jesus had to die for our sins. After a brief section explaining why we’re all horrible people who deserve to be punished by an all-​​powerful deity, Ray tells us:

“…God, in His justice and holiness, cannot let our sins remain unpunished. More than that, because of His love for us, He hates it that sin separates us from Him. He knows even better than we how desperately we need saving, and the only One powerful enough to save us is the One Who created us in the first place. God, therefore, did the only thing He could do that would satisfy both His justice and His love for us. In the Person of Jesus Christ, He took our sins upon Himself, thereby paying our debt and offering us a chance at salvation and a restored relationship with Him. It’s all so profound, yet so simple at the same time.”

Now, if someone came to me with an proposal for a book and pitched that at me, I imagine I’d have a few constructive criticisms to make before telling them it’s a workable idea. To start with, what’s the rationale behind this ‘God’ character having to punish our sins? To me that seems a bit self-​​righteous — if he’s going to be the good guy, he probably shouldn’t be lording judgment over the entire human race.

But I hear what you’re saying — he created us, so he has the right to judge us. Fair enough. Now there’s an even bigger plot hole though — if this ‘God’ guy created us in the first place, why the hell did he create us so we’d sin? None of that free will dreck, because if this is the guy who created us he could have simply made it so that sinning wasn’t in our nature. I mean, ta-freakin’-da, if I can figure out a way to make sin-​​free living and free will compatible, you’d think the almighty creator of the universe could probably nut it out.

And that’s another thing — if this character is all powerful, why couldn’t he just cancel the debt and offer us salvation without all the meaningless mysticism and gore? I mean, why not just say, “Abracadabra, FORGIVE!” and have the whole thing be done with? I mean, he’s the head honcho right? There’s nothing more powerful than him to prevent it. Instead, we get this whole thing of coming to Earth in human form — which I gotta tell you, is confusing in itself — then waiting a full thirty years before somehow paying our debt by dying a bloody, needless death. Hell, even better than forgiveness — if this guy’s all powerful why not just change us all now? Just zap us all and change our nature so that we don’t want to sin anymore — problem solved!

Of course, Bananaman Comfort has an explanation for us ready and waiting:

“Imagine if I said to you, “I just sold my house, my car, and used all my savings to pay a fine for you.” You would understandably think that I am rather weird. My paying a fine for you, when you don’t think you have done anything wrong, is absurd.”

Well, so far he’s right — that is absurd. Especially the bit about selling his house — I mean, what was I fined for? Embezzling millions of dollars?

“But if I put it this way, it may make more sense: “Angry police officers showed up with a warrant for your arrest. They have video of you going eighty miles per hour through an area set aside for a blind children’s convention. There were clear warning signs everywhere saying that fifteen miles per hour was the maximum speed. You are in big trouble. Add to that the fact that, just ten minutes prior to that happening, the police stopped you for drunk driving and confiscated your driver’s licence. You were in serious trouble with the law. The judge was furious, and handed down a massive fine. He said that if you couldn’t pay it, you were going to be thrown in prison for a very long time. I knew you didn’t have any money, so I sold my house, my car, and I used all my savings to pay that fine. You are free to go.””

…o-kay…that makes less sense. Let’s start with the size of the fine — I’m pretty sure there are legal limits on just how much you can fine a person for speeding, drunk driving and driving without a licence, and even if you total up the cost of all three fines I don’t think it’s going hit the multi-​​million dollar mark. Second, what kind of retarded police officer would pull me over, confiscate my driver’s licence for drunk driving, and then let me drive off? I mean, seriously — you actually believe that could happen? Police tend to specifically make sure that drunk drivers don’t wind up getting back into their car and driving off, so either the cop was retarded or you got lied to. Finally, if they were looking for me, why in the name of Xenu would they go to your house? And if they had a warrant for my arrest, why would paying a fine help? Those things aren’t optional, Ray — paying a police officer to not arrest you is illegal. It’s called bribery. So, honestly, I’m not sure what you think you acheived through all this, but if I were you I’d start looking for a poor-​​house for the extremely gullible.

Aside from the surreality of your analogy, it breaks down anyway. After all, with the sin thing, who paid the fine? God did. And who was the fine paid to? God again. I mean, talk about wanting praise for nothing — imagine if I came up to you and told you that, for no discernable reason, you owed me a million dollars or you’re going to be horribly tortured. But guess what! I’m such a nice guy, I took my own million dollars, and paid that fine for you. So now you don’t owe me any money anymore, because I’m such a nice guy I paid myself! Aren’t I a mensch?

Well, no actually. Because, as you may have noticed, you didn’t have any reason to owe me money — so that’s a bit off in the first place. And then the whole convoluted act of sorting out payment to myself…if you really owed me money, why wouldn’t I just cancel the debt instead? Do I want to be praised for being inefficient? And why the hell would I have you tortured for failing to pay back a debt you didn’t know about? Isn’t that less praiseworthy and more, I dunno…sadistic?

Ray also takes time in this chapter to have a little dig at homosexuals. First, on being asked why god can’t change gay people who want to change, he offers this morsel of idiocy:

“If someone comes to God for the purpose of being “cured” of homosexuality, they are almost certain to end up worse than when they started. […] The reason all should come to Christ is to be saved from sin — not from a problem or from a lifestyle they seek to change.”

Emphasis mine — it seems no matter how much evidence is stacked up against them, evangelical Christians will always return to the old canard that being gay is a lifestyle choice. Honestly, it’s hardly worth rebutting again — the facts don’t matter to people like Ray on this issue, because the facts conflict with their prejudices and dogma, and they just can’t stand for that.

Of course, that’s not all. Ray takes the line that he doesn’t agree with other Christians who say that homosexuals weren’t ‘born that way’…because he thinks all of us were born that way, because we’re all born sinful. Ray says that we all have…

“…the potential to be a fornicator, a liar, a thief, an adulterer, a pervert, a homosexual, a drunkard, a murderer, a rapist, or a paedophile.”

Because, obviously, being a homosexual is totally on the same level as being a rapist or a paedophile. Jackass.

For the rest of the chapter, Ray basically riffs on how freaking awesome heaven is, and how you can’t know anything about what it’s like…except there’s probably going to be fish (seriously!) Oh, and also,

“…perfect fruit, incredible animals, unimaginable color, massive waterfalls, amazing plants, more beautiful birds, bigger fish, grander canyons…”

…you know — unknowable. What’s more,

“…there are no rapists, no murderers, no pedophiles, no hypocrites, liars, blasphemers, or thieves.”

And no homosexuals, presumably. They were on the list with rapists and pedophiles before, so they must be burning in hell with the rest of us.

Finally, it would be amiss of me to leave you without some classic Comfort stupidity. When talking about where heaven actually is, he reasons thus — and I use ‘reasons’ entirely incorrectly:

“The location of heaven doesn’t concern me. Just because I couldn’t tell you the exact location of the country of Mauritania doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

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And one to make the physicists cringe:

“As science has discovered in the last couple of centuries, we are surrounded by invisible realms. Take for instance television or radio waves. We can’t see them, but they are there whether we believe in them or not. We now understand that we need a “receiver.”

It’s the same with the spiritual realm. It, like television and radio waves, is invisible to the human eye. The experience the power of God we need a “receiver,” and that receiver is unplugged until we are “born of the Spirit”.”

As stupid as that sounds, it could explain a lot. It is my hypothesis that, if these God waves do exist, they appear only to induce gullibility directly proportional to the density of the God field around a receiver. More than that, if God waves can travel faster than light, it might explain why so many evangelical Christians think they’re still living in the Fourteenth Century.

Tags: book, Ray Comfort, Richard Hughes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 2:00 pm 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.