Young Australian Skeptics

Those of you who have been reading YAS for a while now may remember that back in July of last year I started writing a chapter by chapter review of Ray Comfort’s excrementally bad book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence But You Can’t Make Him Think. For those who haven’t been around that long, I managed to get around to writing five articles on it, here, here, here, here, and here; go and check them out. It’s okay — in cybertime I can wait as long as you need.

If you’re astute, you’ll notice that the last of those was written way back in September of this year, just around the time things started to get extremely busy for me both at university and in other aspects of my life. Up until the end of university exams, things were continually hectic, and the chapter by chapter review got put on the backburner while I sorted things out.

Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I thought maybe I’d go back to the book and finish the chapter by chapter write up. Upon fishing out the book and cracking it to the requisite page, I found my mind quickly changed.

See, what you probably figured out from reading my reviews thus far is that the book is a steaming pile of stupid, and tremendously insulting at that. In the first half of the book reviewed so far, he’s compared atheists to racists, homosexuals to rapists, paedophiles and murderers, and committed so much emotional blackmail it’d have to border on the illegal; if only the illegally inane. The tone of the book is something akin to, “I love all you atheist c****, and you’re all going to burn in hell for eternity. Because God loves you.”

What you may not have picked up quite so much from my review is that the book is intensely draining. The primary reason for this is  because of the aforementioned stupidity — it’s all so densely packed and disorganised that it is emotionally draining to think that there is actually a human being out there so incredibly dumb; let alone half a country of them. The secondary reason the book is draining is more structural — that is, it is incredibly hard to read. Now, book that are hard to read generally fall into one of two categories: Dense books that are incredibly well written, but which are so intricate or beautiful that they require attention be paid to every single sentence lest something be missed and the story fall apart (think Gravity’s Rainbow); and crap writing. Comfort’s book does not fail to disappoint this dichotomy, though I’ll leave it up to you to guess which category his book falls into.

The point of all this is that I simply cannot face delving back into Comfort’s book to finish the review. It’s far too depressing a situation to put myself through. But so as not to jib you completely, I will leave you with a brief commentary on the very same thing that Comfort leaves us with in his book: A short piece of writing called, In Complete Control.

“Hello. My name is “Unreasonable.””

Wow. Sucks to have your parents.

“I am a very proud demon. I love to hate, and I live for lust. I am extremely prejudiced. Come too close, and I will hiss out my venom. I don’t fear God or man, and I live in the House of Atheist.”

I like the idea that, as an atheist, I am supposedly prejudiced, hateful, and driving by my libido. Just over a week ago I marched with a large group of people in Melbourne in support of gay marriage. I, and the other atheists who formed part of the crowd that day, did not do that out of hate, but rather we did it to challenge the primarily religious prejudice spread by people just like Ray Comfort that restricts the rights of homosexuals and treats them as second class citizens. Brahma knows I didn’t do it because I have a voracious appetite for cock.

“If you want to enter my house, know that I control who and what gets in, and I’m in complete control of what comes out. Try knocking to see if I will open the door. Before you even try, let me tell you that I despise truth and will not let it enter…unless I think it’s in my best interests.”

Holy Hokulele! By that description, I either live in a church, or in heaven itself.

“Take the subject of bats. The Bible says that bats are “birds,” probably because they have wings and fly. That’s ridiculous. Bats are not birds. Now if science had said that having wings and flying makes them a form of bird, then that makes sense. In fact, it makes perfect sense.”

I know what you’re all thinking right now. You’re all thinking, “Richard, you sly devil you trickster you, why, you’ve taken us all in! You really had us going there for a while, but you’ve lost out on this one. We all know that no one out there could possibly so far divorced from reality as to write drivel like that!”

I really, really wish I was. I promise you though, I haven’t changed it a bit — save of course, to add fair use commentary between paragraphs. Not. A. Tittle.

“How about Cain and his wife? Where did she come from? They say he married a sister. I won’t even come to the door on that. It’s moronic. However, if science said that we trace our human ancestry back to one individual, then the truth is welcome, because it makes sense.”

Ugh…it’s horrible on so many levels. First up — the people who say Cain married his sister are Biblical literalists who do so because, quite frankly, they’ve got very little else to work with. When you believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of the creator of the universe, and the Bible says we’re all descended from a dirt man and a rib woman, there ain’t much to it except to have the dirty-​​rib children commit acts of Biblical incest to propagate the human race. It’s necessary because we’ve already assumed our conclusion.

Naturally, when science tells us about Y-​​chromosomal Adam and the far snappier named Mitochondrial Eve, it isn’t because we expect things to turn out that neatly. They just do.

“I can look directly at this vast, intricate creation and say that it’s not proof that there is a Creator. I need give no explanation. Such talk flies in the face of reason and common logic, but I don’t care.”

To say that the intricacy of the universe automatically implies the existence of a creator speaks not to logic or reason, but instead to an incredible ignorance. Far from the perpetual clockwork imagined by Issac Newton, we now know that the underlying laws of the universe are fuzzy and uncertain; the universe at large most likely built to one day run down to nothingness. The miraculous facade of beauty we encounter everyday in the biological world, though superficially graceful, belies a improvisational bottom-​​up design impressive in many cases for its ability to function at all, let alone as well as it does. Needless to say, if there’s a creator, he’s either inept or lazy.

“There is a reason I don’t like truth. It’s because it carries light, and I don’t like light…unless I can control it. There is a room inside my house that I like to keep dark. Very dark. It is what I call an “adult” fantasy room. You know what I mean. That room keeps the residents here, and it keeps me in control.”

Apparently, the good and pure Comfort just can’t bring himself to say ‘sex’. Of course, he certainly has us pegged here — it’s a well known fact that all atheists are perverse, nymphomanic freaks whose penchant for beastiality is arrested only by our inability to find new endangered species to breed for buggery.

“I like to call evil good and good evil. I do this because I hate absolutes, because absolutes speak of truth.”

That is, absolutely, the dumbest thing I’ve read this sentence.

“Each time I am unreasonable, I fortify my house. I love living in the House of Atheist with my other demon friends. That’s because we are very welcome here. When the resident is seized by my master and taken to his permanent place, I will just move on and find another house. There are plenty out there.”

Because, presumably, that’s what atheists are to Comfort — demonic hives, that will either be converted or driven to hell. If ever we wonder why we’re portrayed so poorly and (dare I say) demonised by the Religious Right, that one sentence may well encapsulate the answer.

“Actually, I know that everything the Bible says is true. The Word of God makes me tremble. In the face of what I have said, that makes no sense. I know that…I’m just being Unreasonable.”

So finally we get the end of the book, and find more of the same ol’ same ol’. The suggestion that atheists, far from not believing in god actually believe and consciously reject the salvation of god knowing full well that it will lead to their eternal damnation is…well, to be honest, it’s nothing I wouldn’t expect from this paragon of idiocy. Comfort, in short, doesn’t get it, never will get it, and will lie out of his arse to pretend that he does get it.

With that, I’ve finished (in a fashion) the worst book I’ve ever written in my life. In order to rate it, I’m going to have to take my cues from Billy Madison…

Mr. Comfort, what you’ve just written… is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on the internet is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Tags: book, Ray Comfort, Richard Hughes

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 9:00 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.