Ray Comfort sinks to new depths of pathos

So Ray cobbled together some heavily edited footage of people answering questions he asked, called it a “movie”, and is promoting it on the internet. I’ve seen it; it’s a terrible piece of dreck, and yeah, he lies. I’ve been over this a few times before, but I gave him evidence for evolution, and he just cut it right out of the footage since it didn’t fit his claims.

Now he’s got a new strategy for promoting it: he’s taunting Richard Dawkins to “Come out of Hiding”. It’s bizarre. Dawkins wasn’t in the “movie”, he had nothing to do with the “movie”, and Comfort is just trying desperately to attach a big name to his lazy piece of crap. You know, I have some home movies of my kids; I think I’ll try to peddle them as quality entertainment on the internet by telling Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie to quit hiding from the superiority of my family and give me a testimonial.

A number of people have demanded that Comfort release the unedited raw footage so we can see how dishonestly he mangled people’s words. He’s refused. Or rather, he’s now attached conditions: he wants people to pay him for the full video recordings.

American Atheists Inc., have demanded that unedited footage be released, which they believe will show a USC professor giving scientific evidence for evolution. Comfort says that the USC professor didn’t give any, but that he is willing to release the interview if Dawkins pays the same amount he required for a debate with Comfort (payable to the Salvation Army). “I offered him $20,000 to debate me, and he said he would, if I gave his foundation $100,000. He knew that I wouldn’t go that high, so we produced the movie instead.”

Greedy lowlife. Recall that Richard Dawkins produced a documentary, The Root of All Evil?, in which he interviewed various religious figures, which of course had to be edited for brevity. Afterwards he released the full footage of the interviews, freely, so that there could be no argument that he’d edited them dishonestly.

Ray Comfort can make no such claim.

By the way, the article about taunting Dawkins is a disgraceful bit of creationist propaganda, but it’s posted on CNN…as something called an “iReport”, which has a disclaimer that it is not vetted by CNN. What does it take to get on there? Given that apparent creationists get a slot, the bar to entry must be really low.

And here I thought all Canadians were nice

The mother of a 13 year old boy with autism discovered this letter from a neighbor.

To the lady living at this address: I also live in this neighbourhood and have a problem!!!! You have a kid that is mentally handicapped and you consciously decided that it would be a good idea to live in a close proximity neighgbourhood like this???? You selfishly put your kid outside everyday and let him be a nothing but a nuisance and a problem to everyone else with that noise polluting whaling he constantly makes!!! That noise he makes when he is outside is DREADFUL!!!!!!!!!! It scares the hell out of my normal children!!!!!!!!! When you feel your idiot kid nees fresh air, take him to our park you dope!!! We have a nature trail!! Let him run around those places and make noise!!!!!! Crying babies, music and even barking dogs are normal sounds in a residential neighborhood!!!!! He is NOT!!!!!!!!!!!! He is a nuisance to everyone and will always be that way!!!!!! Who the hell is going to care for him????????? No employer will hire him, no normal girl is going to marry/love him and you are not going to live forever!! Personally, they should take whatever non retarded body parts he possesses and donate it to science. What the hell else good is he to anyone!!!! You had a retarded kid, deal with it... properly!!!!! What right do you have to do this to hard working people!!!!!!!!! I HATE people like you who believe, just because you have a special needs kid, you are entitled to special treatment!!! GOD!!!! Do everyone in our community huge a favor and MOVE!!!! VAMOSE!!! SCRAM!!!! Move away and get out of this type of neighborhood setting!!! Go live in a tralier in the woods or something with your wild animal kid!!! Nobody wants you living here and they don't have the guts to tell you!!!!! Do the right thing and move or euthanize him!!! Either way, we are ALL better off!!! Sincerely, One pissed off mother!!!!!

To the lady living at this address:

I also live in this neighbourhood and have a problem!!!! You have a kid that is mentally handicapped and you consciously decided that it would be a good idea to live in a close proximity neighbourhood like this???? You selfishly put your kid outside everyday and let him be a nothing but a nuisance and a problem to everyone else with that noise polluting whaling he constantly makes!!! That noise he makes when he is outside is DREADFUL!!!!!!!!!! It scares the hell out of my normal children!!!!!!!!! When you feel your idiot kid needs fresh air, take him to our park you dope!!! We have a nature trail!! Let him run around those places and make noise!!!!!! Crying babies, music and even barking dogs are normal sounds in a residential neighborhood!!!!! He is NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!

He is a nuisance to everyone and will always be that way!!!!!! Who the hell is going to care for him????????? No employer will hire him, no normal girl is going to marry/love him and you are not going to live forever!! Personally, they should take whatever non retarded body parts he possesses and donate it to science. What the hell else good is he to anyone!!!! You had a retarded kid, deal with it… properly!!!!! What right do you have to do this to hard working people!!!!!!!!! I HATE people like you who believe, just because you have a special needs kid, you are entitled to special treatment!!! GOD!!!!

Do everyone in our community huge a favor and MOVE!!!! VAMOSE!!! SCRAM!!!! Move away and get out of this type of neighborhood setting!!! Go live in a trailer in the woods or something with your wild animal kid!!! Nobody wants you living here and they don’t have the guts to tell you!!!!!

Do the right thing and move or euthanize him!!! Either way, we are ALL better off!!!

Sincerely,

One pissed off mother!!!!!

Speaking as a scientist here, I’m not at all interested in dismantling young boys for their organs, so I’m going to have to reject that suggestion. However, I do think someone with such a serious case of exclamation point abuse and hatefulness ought to be condemned to live in a small trailer in the wilderness with no other people about, with the Canadian government airdropping occasional packages of supplies (moose meat and poutine? Timbits for dessert? Whatever Canadians eat) so that she can live without the interruptions from other human beings. It’s the only humane thing to do. We’d all be better off.

Say, I’ve seen this strategy in action before…

A damaging, irrational pack of nonsense is rebuked by politicians and slapped down by the courts. Proponents of the idiocy then step back and start surreptitiously (and sometimes openly) smuggling it into the classroom — if they can’t get their way now, they figure, by corrupting the next generation and keeping them ignorant, maybe they’ll be able to get their way later.

That’s straight from the creationist playbook. That’s what they’ve been up to for decades. So I’m completely unsurprised by what’s going on in the UK, where anti-gay policies perpetrated by that awful person, Margaret Thatcher, were defeated years ago…and now they’re being reinvigorated by injecting them into the schools.

Ministers, Opposition MPs and gay rights activists united to express anger and alarm over the disclosure that academies across the country had adopted policy statements that echoed the notorious Section 28 brought in by Margaret Thatcher 25 years ago.

The legislation, which was overturned by the Blair government, banned teachers in lessons from “intentionally promoting” homosexuality, a form of words that critics denounced for discriminating against gay pupils.

Campaigners have identified more than 40 schools across the country that stress in their sex-education guidelines that governors will not allow teachers to “promote” homosexuality, or are ambiguous on the issue.

So familiar…we’re on the right side of history, but the good guys all naively cheer when the right laws are enacted or overturned, thinking that now the problems will go away. That’s never true. Laws don’t change people’s minds, and our opposition knows that — and they’ve got these potent institutions, the churches, that they can use to promote extra-legal policies and attitudes and try to steer the populace back into the Middle Ages.

Well said

Read what Mano says about Glenn Greenwald. I will simply agree 100% with it.

One of our major problems in the US is that the journalists have mostly curled up and died, and we’re getting our news from lickspittles and news organizations shackled to both corporate interests and political favoritism. I appreciate someone who breaks out of that incestuous relationship.

Narendra Dabholkar assassinated in India

Dabholkar was a leader of the rationalist movement in India, who had been fighting for anti-superstition and anti-black magic bills. He was gunned down by cowards on motorcycles this morning — it was an assassination, plain and simple.

I’m passing along a brief summary I received this morning.

With deep distress and regret I have to report to you the assassination this morning of one of India’s most important Rationalist and Humanist leaders, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, founder of the Maharashtra Andha Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti or Maharashtra Forum for Elimination of Superstition. News is trickling in.

Inspired by the work of the great rationalist Basava Premanand, Dr. Dabholkar, a medical doctor, plunged into anti-superstition work in 1983 and built a concrete movement in his home state of Maharashtra. He was briefly Vice President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, a Member Organisation of IHEU.

A person of great charm and commitment to the cause,he refused to spread his activism outside Maharashtra because he was keen on first developing a branch of his organisation in each village of Maharashtra.

Organisational work of this kind made the movement a force to reckon with in Maharashtra state where he was spearheading the movement for a Bill against Witchcraft earlier called the Anti-Superstition Bill. The earlier Bill was passed in one house of the legislature but did not get through the second. His untiring efforts were successful, and the new Bill garnered the support of all the political parties except that of the Shiv Sena and the BJP. The ruling Congress party, however, did not take it up on the Business Agenda of the Legislature – many suspect that this was because of the upset it would cause to the orthodox. When passed, it would be a most potent weapon in the fight against superstitions which sap the life blood of Indian society.

Babu Gogineni

It’s about time

One more prominent scientist bites the bullet: Richard Lenski has a blog. Interestingly, he credits a talk by C. Titus Brown about “How to build an enduring online research presence using social networking and open science” as the inspiration that woke him up to the importance of this and other forms of public engagement. It looks like a good talk, too, except that it’s a presentation that’s 72 slides long — my ideal for an hour talk is 12-15 slides. But as long as it works…!

I think it’s also a little on the long side because it goes through objections people make very thoroughly.

TJ Luhrmann needs to study the works of Alan Moore

I was pointed to this wonderful interview with Alan Moore after that post about TJ Luhrmann, the anthropologist who tries to explain psychological phenomena with God. Moore has some weird beliefs — he talks about worshipping an ancient Roman god, Glycon — but he is absolutely crystal clear on the fact that this god has no existence outside the territory of the human mind.


“I understood that everything that people talk about with regard to magic is all absolutely true, as long as you understood that it is happening inside people’s minds.”

Give that man a Ph.D. and a tenured position at Stanford. Religion is interesting because it is a bizarre human phenomenon that tells us something about how our minds work: it is an anthropological and sociological and psychological process that should not be ignored. But when you come at it as if it is an accurate description of the physical universe, rather than a map of the world strangely filtered and modified by passage through the black box of our brains, you will be led astray, and you will be refuted by the evidence of the physical sciences.

Moore also makes the important point (one that I have also made in some of my lectures), that modern fundamentalist religion really is a recent event, within the last century. It is not universal, it is not conservative, it is not a return to the true path of the original church — it is a reactionary response to modernity, and it is a product of our times.