Ray Comfort is a self-styled Christian apologist who has one major trick pony in his arsenal, basically — the slight-of-hand assuming that one possibly negative feature about something an individual has done describes the entirety of their character.
So this is how it works: he’ll go up to somebody and ask them if they have ever lied, stolen, cheated, or anything along those lines. If the response is that they have, he’ll use the response to characterize the entirety of their identity. If you lied, you’re a liar. If you’ve stolen, you’re a thief. If you’ve cheated, you’re a cheater. If you have ever lusted, you’re an adulterer. Etc. In response, the individual usually is fairly embarrassed about their moral condition, and in the moral quandary his fellow interlocutor feels in the pit of his heart at this newfound identity, Comfort then comes in for the “kill” — he says that if they want to be forgiven of this sin, they have to come to Christ.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLdI-t5IPPg[/youtube]
This tactic seems a bit wrong on its face, on a few levels. First, the moral standards that we have did not come from the heavens. They are decisions we make based on the particular situations we find ourselves in. I mean, I know Immanuel Kant had this idea that moral laws are there “just because,” but in my mind, that’s not how things work. Lying may be perfectly OK in the classic scenario of having Jews in the basement in Nazi Germany. That’s not nearly the same as, say, lying in a pulpit about the importance of having fidelity during marriage while you’re cheating on the side in your private life.
Second, the definition of a “good person” depend on us. It does not come from the heavens, it was not ordained by God, it has no “just because” status, at least in many minds. It is possible to say that some actions are more harmful than other actions. But to say that someone is completely and thoroughly a bad person — that seems problematic. It’s not that simple.
That’s the irrational jump — from, “you did this thing that hurt people” to “you, yourself, are a bad person to your core.” It seems a bit offensive, doesn’t it? People have reasons for the actions they perform, and assuming that the reason they do what they do comes from some inner, thorough evil that they have at their core and is not, possibly, the result of a collection of circumstances acting on a certain personality seems to create a drastically simplistic portrait of human nature and, by extension, morality.
Third, even if there are evil people — so what? How on earth would it logically follow that Jesus can cleanse people from their sin? I know that most Christians take it for granted that someone innocent dying for your sin can result in you being spot-free innocent of everything bad you ever did, somehow, but it’s doesn’t make sense. As Doug Stanhope once put it, you can’t tell someone “I died to pay your mortgage.” It…just doesn’t seem to follow. And besides all that, again, this is a purely emotional argument. It is not something based on logic or reason, but purely sentiment. And on that status, it fails.
And fourth — it’s just kinda cruel to try to convince someone that they’re rotten to their core in order to get them to have your point of view. Yeah, I know this isn’t a logical objection, but still. That’s very not-nice.
Then there’s Sye Bruggencate, who often says to someone, “how do you know x?” over and over again until they finally have to say, “just because.” And when, in this genius pursuit of infinite regress, Comfort gets to that point, he says “just because” isn’t good enough, and then states that he knows what he knows because, well, God. If you say that’s not valid, he does the “how do you know” routine over again, and he also says, “well, God makes it valid, so it’s valid.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcwfvZHYQJE[/youtube]
Basically, what Bruggencate is doing here is arguing to nihilism and then saying, “therefore God exists.”
What he’s forgetting is that once you argue to nihilism, you don’t really have any direction to go afterwards. That’s just…kinda it. “I don’t know anything…therefore I know that God exists!” is a complete non-sequitur. It’s like saying, “I don’t know why gravity exists…therefore I know that there’s a pillow on the bottom of this cliff!”
No. You don’t. I mean, you hardly know anything for sure — what we do is figure out what works. Does theory x allow us to figure out how things in a way that will meet our goals better than theory y? Well, then let’s go with theory x as opposed to theory y.
Does the theory that gravity pulls things down work as well in everyday life as the theory that gravity pulls things up? In case you’re still thinkin’ on that — no, it don’t. Well, then we’ll go with the theory that gravity pulls things down.
This is how most of us have gone through life since the day we were born, and you don’t need God to do it. You don’t have to argue all the way to nihilism. You just figure out what seems to work and use the routes that seem to work best. And even if you DID argue all the way to nihilism, you can’t just pull God out of the void. Again, that’s like saying, “I don’t know anything, therefore I know this!” No. If you don’t know anything, you don’t know anything, full stop.
I could say more, but that’s why, in a nutshell, I think Ray Comfort’s shit is bananas and Bruggencate doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
Thanks for reading.
And now, this:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4[/youtube]