There’s no need to worry, it’s all taken care of.
The reason atheists and skeptics get so upset when I say it’s good to cut down trees is that this world is all they have. If it gets completely wrecked, it’s all over for them. That’s what they believe . . . that life then ends. That’s unless Mother Nature or Father Evolution (whoever they believe made everything) makes some more trees, etc. Of course if it has to start all over again, they have to wait for around 4.5 billion years. That’s what they believe, and I guess that’s a little too long for them to wait. So they get antsy when Christians are a little flippant about creation. But we can’t help it. We don’t value creation as though our life depends on it. That’s because we know and trust Him who made all things, and if humanity wrecks this earth, we have His immutable promise that He is going to make all things new.”
So go ahead, just torch the place, it will be fine.
Callous, arrogant, and doomed.
What a man.
Oh noes! won’t someone please think of the bananas…if we destroy them what will we get our hands around?
I wonder if he wears his seat belt when he drives? Does he check to see if he’s turned off the stove? Does he look both ways before crossing the street? If he does any of these things, why? Does he have so little faith in his god that he has to be careful not to get himself killed? Does he save money in the bank, food in his fridge and clothing in his closets? Does he have so little faith in his god that he has to worry about his finances and keeping himself fed and clothed? If he can’t trust his own god for these things, why should we be expected to trust this god for the wellbeing of the whole planet?
What a sadly deluded, ignorant man.
A&E: “You’re fired from your job pretending to be a redneck.”
Christians: “Persecution! We value creation as if our lives depended on it.”
Us atheists are supposed to be the arrogant ones.
Ray Comfort has an infinite capacity to be stupid and obnoxious, doesn’t he? Including being insulting to the more than a few Christians who consider creation (whether conceived of in YEC or theistic evolutionary terms) to be God’s property, and therefore to be cherished as such.
Also, what @3 said. Prudent until it becomes theologically inconvenient.
Kids usually learn by the age of 5 or so that “I broke it so you have to give me a new one” doesn’t work.
Parable of the talents.
What is not mentioned in the story is that there was a fourth servant: he took his money and frittered it away on expensive clothes and fine meals, and dumped the refuse in the yard because, HEY! He got that money as a gift, and when it runs out the master will just give him more.
We don’t talk about what the master did to the fourth servant.
Your Name’s not Bruce? @#3:
This is nothing new. As I recall, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior (whose name I have managed to forget) was all in favour of clear-felling all the forests and strip-mining the national parks. It was because Jesus was returning any day now, and He would be able to do anything He wanted to.
Including presumably, cleaning up the mess.
Jesus as Janitor to the Earth.
I think Ken Ham is really, really bad at guessing what others think.
Christian fundamentalism and neo-liberal economics seem to be nothing more than aspects of the same ideology.
The d-bag moustache is what really sells it.
@10. Randomfactor : I could be wrong but I gather that’s actually Ray Comfort not creationist Ken Ham*?
What an appalling attitude there whoever it is. (Assuming its not a parody? Wish I could say its an obvious one but, yeah people do seem to think like that quote suggests in the world sadly.)
It reminds me of the Republican politician (Inhofe? Boehener? Somebody else?) who famously said something like Global warming can’t be real because God promised not to destroy the world and /or even if God does, it;ll be in the second coming which’ll be any day now (spoken years ago?) and so don’t worry about it.
Of course even among the Christian community that’s not the only view thats’ held as contradicted by the likes of, for example, Katherine Heyhoe (Climatologist and Christian who wrote for a Newt Gingrich book but her chapter got scrapped)) as expressed here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHYhovvLQyc
which shows how much things have changed for tehworse inthatparty not that that’ll surprise anyone here.
++++++++++
* As opposed to the NASA Shuttle astronaut of the same name whose thoughts and life I’d much prefer to be hearing about and who deserves much more respect. Wonder what he makes of his nasty namesake?
Typo fix and elaboration :
as expressed here :
(link snipped) Youtube clip is titled “Katharine Hayhoe: “..Much of This is Intended to Intimidate.” by Greenman3610 of the ‘Climate Denial Crock of the Week’ blog.
which shows how much things have changed for the worse in that party not that that’ll surprise anyone here.
I hope the stupid selfish, thoughtless views expressed in the OP here aren’t a majority , fear I may well be mistaken but hope not.
And the Nihilism award goes to . . . It shocks me that the accusation of being nihilistic falls so quickly upon the atheist when in reality many of us care a awful lot about life, the universe and everything. The creationist zealot, on the other hand, gives not a single fuck if this world burns because it really doesn’t matter in their eyes they have a magic 1-up mushroom of destiny that will let them enter the bonus stage.
A Facebook page and a blog entry!
I wouldn’t be surprised if Comfort spoke those words, but where might one find the original source.
Do you care about the universe because someone told you to, or decide to on your own?
If you decided on your own, you’re a nihilist. They’re trying to use it in a pejorative sense in the same way they keep trying to juggle “faith” around in arguments. Yeah, one form of nihilism is the “life has no purpose, woe is me”. “Life has no purpose, I’m going to make me some” is also nihilist.
This is the kind of bullshit that springs to mind when believers use the “what if you’re wrong?” line from Pascal’s wager. Their contention that no harm will occur if they are wrong is not at all a forgone conclusion.
He’s flipped Pascal’s Wager on its head here, hasn’t he.
(Not that anyone on “our side” takes Pascal’s Wager at all seriously — nor do we take Ken Ham seriously, for that matter — but obviously some creationists do, so I think it’s worth fleshing out the point about Pascal’s Wager a little…)
In his own words, if believers are right, their god will “make all things new,” but if they’re wrong, “life then ends.” The whole show’s over, for everyone and every living thing, for billions of years.
That’s a helluva gamble. You’d think anyone persuaded by Pascal’s Wager would take Ham’s point the opposite way he intends: the safest bet is surely the one that doesn’t put all of earthly life on the table, just as the safest bet on the afterlife is the one that doesn’t risk eternal damnation. But creationists aren’t much for consistency, are they.
(They’re not much for nuance, either: “life” will not cease to exist for 4.5 billion years if humans keep cutting down trees. But I’ll take him as conceding that environmental recklessness poses a great risk to humans’ and many other species’ existence in the absence of divine intervention.)
Oops, that’s Ray Comfort. My mistake.
(Whatever; same difference.)
Um, Ray Comfort people. Ken Ham is the one with the scarey beard. (Easy to mix up, as they say similarly stupid things).
Original quote, in context: http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.fr/2008/03/bloggers-confession.html
When I was a kid I had a brief period where I blamed my imaginary friend for anything that I did wrong. I guess Christianity is for those who don’t ever want to give that up.
That quote admirably captures my main problem with faith: That it allows otherwise intelligent people (as well as vacuumheads like Comfort) to think and act as if such statements were true whether they are in fact true or not. What we call religious extremism is simply what follows, quite naturally, from that.
@Omar Puhleez #9:
You’re thinking of James Watt. He gets a bit of a bad rap, I think; IIRC the accusation you’re referring to arose from a somewhat tortured interpretation of this quote:
On the other hand he was certainly a right-wing asshole:
Hercules @ #24:
Could you post a link to those Watt quotes?
I saw Reagan in a TV interview once opine that the Lord might just use a nuclear war between East and West to cue His return. You know, stage set: lights, camera, action!
A powerful zealot convinced along those lines might be tempted to stampede the Lord into returning by starting just such a war.
holy disgusting shit batman
Hang on. I’m putting my Snopes hat on here. I find that quote attribution to Comfort doubtful for two reasons:
1) It’s really bad PR. Comfort is a fool, but he’s a fool who understands how to fool others. That quote is a really good way to turn people off. I’m doubtful he would have said it.
2) There’s a theological position held by some Christians that God placed Adam and Eve in the garden to cultivate and tend it. Comfort very probably knows about this. I can’t see him contradicting that theological view as flippantly as he has in the quote above. Again: He’s a fool, but he’s a fool that thinks theology is important.
I could of course easily be wrong, Comfort easily could have said that.
But I wanted to check, so I drilled through to try and find an original source from Comfort. But I couldn’t find one. At some stage along the path I got bounced to another site with no related content on the page.
Does anyone know of a straight-up primary source – video or text – where Comfort directly says this?
In the absence of such a reference, it’s possible that this is a false attribution. It’s important to be fair-minded to our opponents as it is to insist on fair-mindedness towards ourselves.
Hang on…
Just noticed that Eamon put a link through. I think that’s the one I found that wound up bouncing somewhere else.
Has Ray taken down the original context?
Hmm… I can’t find it either.
There are a number of references to the quote, all dating around early 2008, including this blog post by a critic who attributes it to Comfort’s blog:
http://priscusforem.blogspot.ca/2008/03/ray-comfort-admits-too-much.html
Ray Comfort used the unusual term “Father Evolution” in 2011 in one of his books, which further inclines me to believe that the quote from 2008 is authentic.
Perhaps Comfort took it down?
Found it. Thanks, Wayback Machine!
https://web.archive.org/web/20111018074635/http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/03/bloggers-confession.html
Good work artymorty!
Looks like maybe my 1) and 2) caught up with him. 😛
Well, that’s weird. When I click on my own link above, if I allow Javascript, I get immediately redirected to that other site. However, the original is or was Ray Comfort’s blog. And he’s still mouthing the same sanctimonious, patronizing inanities.
@ Eamon Knight:
Ray Comfort has taken down everything from his old blog. If you click on any link to his old blog, you will automatically be redirected to the new one. It’s not just the link that you posted.
If you want to try to find a post of Ray’s from his old blog, you’ll have to use the Wayback Machine or something similar, like ArtyMorty did.
I got redirected to Comfort’s blog homepage when I clicked on the link in the second source that I provided (the one under the image). That’s why I didn’t look for another one, I figured it was just gone and redirecting to the home page. Thanks everyone for the digging.
Oops, cross-post. Ya, that’s what I figured when I looked for the link yesterday.
@33: I found the original by Googling on a lengthy quoted phrase. I run NoScript and thus have JavaScript off by default for all new sites, which I guess is why I didn’t get redirected (at least, that’s the only reason I can imagine, since I got redirected as soon as I enabled JS for that URL).
Comfort is an example of what I call a Bullshit Volcano: someone who just spouts whatever pushes their POV, without regard for whether it makes sense, or is in any way truthful or ethical.
A Bullshit Volcano; oooh that’s a good one.
It would by no means amaze me were it to be discovered that Ray Comfort has driven more people away from religion than any other voice of this era.
(/… so, y’know, a little jealous, here. If also impressed.)