"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"
I must emphatically say that is most certainly not what we believe. One of the problems I have with evangelicals is their insistance that they know what we unbelievers believe, and their inability to represent what we believe accurately. More often they don't just the bullseye of the target, they miss the target completely.
Let me correct Ray by telling what I belive. It's good to cut down trees. See how wrong he is, already? Trees are excellent resources. The problem is that too often, trees are cut down without being replaced, and this makes wood more scarce, and thus, more expensive. The other problem is when tree-cutting is mismanaged, and we end up with not enough trees to help clean the air. You need forests and green parks near cities to counter the air pollution caused by all the cars and industry. Also, help beautify our living areas. You wouldn't want to live in a wasteland of concrete and steel, with no plants or animals anywhere nearby, would you?
Ray goes on to get everything wrong by stating:
"... 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."
This part of Ray's paragraph borders on incoherent. Not only did he fail to represent what atheists beleive, he completely misrepresented several science topics, and though he tried to make a joke, I'm afraid that the only thing funny is the irony that we atheists find in just inanely he wrote it.
The Ray goes on to blunder:
"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."
That is really quite an unflattering thing for Ray to admit. He apparently doesn't realize how disrespectful he is to his god, whom he allegedly worships and trusts? He is literally saying that it's perfectly okay to trash his God's creation, and just be disrespectful towards it, because God can just fix it with his omnipotent powers if we screw it up too much.
Suppose instead of God, we were talking about your neighbor. Suppose your neighbor asked you to house-sit for him while he was away. During your stay, you wreck his house, and break a bunch of his belongings. When he gets back, you just flippantly say "sorry bout' the mess, mate, but you can just get some new stuff to replace the lot that I broke..."
I am totally amazed at what a childish, almost selfish attitude Ray just admitted to having. It doesn't speak well for him or the people who will defend it. In fact, it's downright thoughtless.
6 comments:
If it's the same neighbor that abuses his dog because, after all, it's *his* dog, then maybe his flippancy is not so undeserved.
Good point. Perhaps part of the psychology of evangelicals like Ray is that they think that they have this direct link to God, and somehow they think that God's thoughts are just like their own. So if they personally think "Aw, screw the environment!", then that is obviously what God told them to think!
Ray Comfort is amazing...first he says belief in God does not require faith (when that's the backbone of Christianity) to you can trash your God's creation, because God will just fix it.
Here is something I wrote on my own website about Ray:
"Last night I was watching Numb3rs, and I asked myself how Ray would react if he watched that show. Here is what I decided would happen:
The logical approach to problem solving used in Numb3rs would interact with the antilogical approach to problem solving used in Ray’s brain. They would cancel each other out, and RAY WOULD HAVE NEVER EXISTED."
Gamingasshole wrote:
"Ray Comfort is amazing...first he says belief in God does not require faith (when that's the backbone of Christianity) to you can trash your God's creation, because God will just fix it."
Well, that's the main problem with all the arguments from religious nuts -- they are totally inconsistant, and fail to see the importance of consistancy for making coherent arguments.
Well, Ray has his review of "Expelled" up, and I've written my reply. I'm posting it in more than one place, just in case. Besides, I'll take all the help I can get:
As I said in a previous blog entry, the Expelled blog talked a lot about what would be in the movie, and it's the same old lies...One of which you eagerly embraced, the Hitler ploy. So, I've rounded up some info I had lying around (I did say that this is stuff that has been refuted before, right?)
Please, tell us if Ben Stein is able to refute was I say below, or if he even mentions this information to try to explain it away.
By the way, what evidence FOR "intelligent design" was in the movie? If they're claiming to be "suppressed" it'd be nice to see what evidence for ID they present when they have the chance. They sure couldn't do it in the Dover Trial.
Anyhoo...here's what you said:
It’s now morning, and I have had more time to think clearly about “Expelled.” Again, this is not a Christian movie. There’s no mention of the gospel--not even slightly. Ben Stein is Jewish. He took on this project because he is passionate about the Jewish holocaust, and he can see the same pattern in the United States that led up to Nazi Germany--the suppression of free thought. Blatant censorship.
Bull. Check out some facts, Ray.
Evolutionists deny that Hitler and his extermination of those who were weak was motivated by Darwinism, but history attests to it. This is very clearly documented in the film.
How many times did Hitler say that he admired Darwin? How many times did Hitler mention Darwain in his writings? I've read Mein Kampf, and I can tell you. None.
This is maybe an indicator of how much Hitler liked Darwin
In 1935, Die Bücherei, the official Nazi journal for lending libraries listed books to reject:
Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel). (Die Bücherei 1935, 279)
They made an undated "Blacklist for Public Libraries and Commercial Lending Libraries" includes the following on a list of literature which "absolutely must be removed":
c) All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk. (Blacklist n.d.)
from the "Index to Creationist Claims is where I first found this. Check out his source.
Did Ben Stein come across some writings I did not? Guess who Hitler did say he admired in his book? Martin Luther. The guy who wrote On the Jews and Their Lies... He's one of your guys, isn't he?
Here's another guy who admired your Martin Luther...
Julius Streicher (one of Hitler's top henchmen and publisher of the anti-Semitic Der Sturmer) was asked during the Nuremberg trials if there were any other publications in Germany which treated the Jewish question in an anti-Semitic way., Streicher put it well:
"Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. In the book 'The Jews and Their Lies,' Dr. Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent's brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them..."
Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-- 1 October 1946, Vol. 12, p.318
In Mein Kampf, Hitler said that it was some christian preacher, Karl Leuger who first inculated anti-Jewish hatred in him.
(see Hitler, Mein Kampf: Volume 1, Chapter 2.)
Check it:
"I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party ... The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes. My common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work; and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times ... How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all."
More Hitler fun as he caters to his target audience in his book. Guess who it is, "darwinists" or someone else?
"Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image."
Mein Kampf Volume 1, Chapter 6.
"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe."
Mein Kampf Volume 1, Chapter 9.
You can say he didn't believe that himself, that he wasn't a true "Christian", but so what? Who do you think he was catering to there?
How much stuff from Mein Kampf did Stein show that had Hitler pandering to "darwinists" as much?
Hitler:
For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst. Speech delivered by Hitler in Salzburg, 7 or 8 August 1920. (NSDAP meeting)
Did Stein go after the guy who came up with the germ theory of disease, Ray?
Read Mein Kampf. There's more of that.
For similar information, check out GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY:
The Psychosomatic Source of Culture by Richard Koenigsberg
For some of Darwin's views about "races", check out his "Descent of Man" from 1871
"But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory de St-Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them." (you do realize that all people thought like the first part of the last sentence above in Darwin’s time, but it’s Darwin’s observations that led him to say "it is hardly possible to discover distinictive character between them."
About Darwin's first book,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, when they talk about "races" it's used as an alternative for "varieties" – the first use in the book refers to "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage", and Darwin proceeds to discuss "the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants".[10]
From Wikipedia about The Origin of Species. Read the book yourself if you want.
Tell me, Ray...did Stein give any quotes that had Darwin mentioning Jews at all, much less those of the virulence expressed in Martin Luther's On the Jews and their Lies?
If you want, Ray, try looking up "blood libel" on the net. See how much "darwinism" is in there. The Jewish Encyclopedia may be a good place to look, too.
Time for some reading, Ray:
The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism
by David I. Kertzer
"After Auschwitz: Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps." Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Ind., 1966
"Theologian Richard Rubenstein wrote that the Nazis "did not invent a new villain...They took over the 2,000-year-old Christian trdition of the Jew as villain...The roots of the death camps must be sought in the mythic structure of Christianity...Myths concerning the demonological role of the Jews have been operative in Christianity for centuries..."
"Has God Rejected His People? Anti-Judaism in the Christian Church", Abingdon, Nashville, Tenn. 1982
"Theologian Clark Williamson of Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, said centuries of Christian hostility to Jews "prepared the way for the Holocaust" he said the Nazis "are inconcievable apart from this Christian tradition. Hitler's pogrom, for all its distinctiveness, is the zenith of a long Christian heritage of teaching and practice against Jews".
Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
Dagobert Runes' books: "The Jew and the Cross" and "The War Against the Jew" by Philosophical Library, New York.
"Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches....The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the burning of the people-Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas."
Don't believe those sources? Then check out some sources from Judaism who, unlike Stein, have done research into this. By the way, did Stein mention any of the above factors in anti-semitism, Ray?
Anyhoo...Here’s a Jewish site where they discuss anti-semitism. Oddly enough, evolution is not brought up…guess what is??
The jewsforjudaism site. Check out the "New Testament Anti-Semitism" section of the Knowledge Base.
One criticism that has already surfaced is that the evolutionists who expose their hate- filled agenda in the movie were coerced into being interviewed. Not so. They signed off for their part and were well-paid for their efforts.
Outright lie, Ray. No one said that they were coerced. They were lied to about the name of the film, and what it was about. They were told it was for something called "Crossroads", only the domain name for "Expelled" was already bought at the times of the interviews. Check out the PZ Myer's blog, or Richard Dawkins'.
If I have time, I may deal with the rest of the bull later.
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