The Banana Man can — me vs Creationism

Well Howdy! Thought we needed a temporary visual change, I’m sorry that the banner's a bit bleak for what’s normally an entertaining and thought provoking blog. Kudos to Mr Pablo Picasso, painter of the above piece(though I screwed with the colours), who’s lawyers have already boarded a flight from Spain and are now licking their lips and flexing their post-cubist fingers.

To those of you wondering why haven’t Didled for a while (coined that just then, like?), I’ve spent the last week working on this behemoth. I’ve loosely split it into three parts with †††, if anyone would prefer I posted them separately I can. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, I’d love you to comment and discuss anything with me and would sincerely appreciate disagreement. Everyone has an opinion on these issues, it would be awesome if we could discuss them. Here goes.

Ray Comfort: The Atheist's Nightmare

I saw a creationist physically assault a student at uni.

Last Tuesday, outside Melbourne University on Swanston Street, in front of an old man trying to sell The Big Issue, a group of beaming 20-year-olds were handing out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species. The book, with it’s obscure 19th century scientific vocabulary (think Isaac Newton times Crucible Tongs, but rational) is all there. Well except for four chapters, but still. The cover is totally inconspicuous, even if the font of the text in side is miniscule. The blurb is a little unusual, but not sus:
“A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved”.

Perfectly normal copies of one of the most important books of modern science ever.

Oh, and these copies of Origin of Species also had a 50 page, large print “Special Introduction” by Evangelical Fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist Reverend Ray Comfort.

His radical Christian ministry, “The Way of The Master Ministry” (unfortunately not Star Wars related), also happens to publish the edition, with the express purpose of spreading creationist propaganda to unwitting people curious about evolution. Before we get started, Young Earth Creationism is the belief that the Bible and Genesis are literally true, that evolution is not real, and that the earth is less 10,000 years old, and that cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis and suffering happens because the devil turned into a snake and told a woman made from a rib to give some fruit to her husband, which he took and ate.

A bit uncertain about that last bit? Well here’s Ray Comfort explaining why! From inside the matrix! And then on a box in the middle of the road!



That’s a very mild Comfort Clip but I thought I’d start nicely. Yes, he’s a sickly saccharine cross-breed between a deranged, extremist preacher and Murray from Flight of the Conchords.

A little bit of a digression for something that I thought I'd comment on. Some of you might have noticed that Professor Richard Dawkins has been in town lately, copping a lot of praise and criticism. I’ve read one of his books and seen him in quite a few interviews, and he’s nowhere near as arrogant as short clips suggest and nowhere near as vicious as media sound-bites make him sound. He’s generally eloquent, poignant and extremely convincing, and I recommend you check him out before passing judgement. Personally, I agree with what he has to say on God and the supernatural, even if I strongly disagree with his disapproval of fantasy and fairy tales. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and rational criticism on the existence of God, or want to justify your faith by honestly being able to say that you’ve considered the alternatives, look no further than “The God Delusion”. That said, he’s can still be a douchebag: I think he spends too much time amongst lunatic fundamentalists to see that moderate and personal religion or spirituality is often benign or benevolent. And the whole “atheism movement” thing makes me cringe a bit as well, I don’t consider atheism a belief but rather a lack of one.

Anyway, Dawkins dubbed our good friend Ray Comfort “The Bananaman”, due to this thoroughly convincing video, 'The Atheist's Nightmare':



If I was a cynic, I’d point out that the pineapple, which is just as tasty and nutritious is also covered with vicious spines, or that there are hundreds of just as easily accessible and appealing fruits that are fatally poisonous to humans. Or that people are the perfect size and shape to eat bananas and distribute their seeds, allowing them to reproduce, making humanity evidence for a Banana God that cares for it’s chosen yellow species. Or the fact that every one of those factors making bananas seemingly human-tailored are there because humans tailored them through millennia of selective breeding, and that the wild banana looks like this:

Or that this video is so hysterically laden with innuendo that even Thomas Aquinas would be smirking.

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Let me take you back to last Tuesday.

I had an idea about this very dodgy publication because I’d read about it on the internet, but with my morbid love of being outraged, I took one anyway.
A flick through,some raging and a few minutes later I went back, annoyed, righteous and ready to argue. There were more than a dozen of them, with books in hand, terrifying youth-group grins on faces and regurgitated fundamentalist sound bites stockpiled inside their heads, safely insulated against reality. (… for the sake of my simile, not by Peter Garret. I think everyone’s being pretty harsh on him. He insulated those houses asbestos he could!)

They lurked around the main Swanston street entrance to the campus, close to the tram stop where a lot of students off at, trying to pick off stragglers like lions around a heard of zebras. A handful of the satchel-clad quadrupeds were cornered, eyes flicking desperately for escape as they were barraged with lines “Some people will go to any length to deny God, but blood of Jesus is flowing through your veins!” delivered with mega condescending smiles. A few of the god-botherers were filming the grizzly spectacle with professional camera gear, undoubtedly for some sordid youtube account or self-congratulatory cable channel.

Only a few idiots like me tried to challenge them, which they relish in: their responses are well practiced and loud, and they are totally impervious to reason. Unfortunately for my rage-duct but probably fortunately for me, I happened to chose a really nice one, and just kind of felt guilty the whole time I was talking to her. I wasn’t on good form, and I while I wanted a debate she wanted mild-mannered conversion. Still, by the end I’d just about managed to convince her to read some Richard Dawkins to ‘strengthen her faith’. When she said that she hopes she never changes her opinion I politely left. Regardless of what someone thinks or believes about anything, you can’t really reply to that sort of desperate stubbornness with anything except a sigh.

I met up with a couple of new unifriends and started to leave. As we walked past, one kid, a first year, though he looked maybe 16, took one of the books, realised what it was and went to throw it in the bin. One of the creationists, a guy with a shaved head, taller than me and much bulkier, grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. He got up physically shaking. ‘He pushed me to the ground’, he repeated over and over again, ‘that’s fucked up man’.

The guy didn’t deny it, screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the bin! Take one, but don’t put it in the bin!”. The others creationists, rather than trying to calm down the situation, actually continued trying hand the first year copies of the book, to the point where at least four where surrounding them . The camera kept filming. I uncertainly tried to tell them to give him space, and one of them realised that it was serious, telling the kid that he should go see someone and asking me if I was his friend. The first year kept hovering uncertainly, had gone pale and had a look on his face of someone about to go into shock. I stupidly got scared that I’d get caught up in something serious and scampered of cowardly, and still regret it. Fortunately, I saw him walking a bit later, flanked by two friends, so he must have been alright in the end. For the rest of the day I was distracted by anger and disgust.

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Well for your own personal benefit, I read through Comfort’s 50 pages of drivel, and I’m going to debunk his arguments with my secondary education and access to the internet. Yes, I know this means I’m grossly overqualified. The forward starts subtly and develops; moving from “misleading” to “grossly inaccurate” to “ludicrous, barely-contained preaching” and ending with “hokey, delusional, woaaah this guy is a nutjob fires-of-hell hysteria”. Here’s a breakdown and some rebuttal.

Rayman starts his picture-filled intro with a seven page history of Charles Darwin, the only moderately objective part of his sermon. That’s because Comfort didn’t write it, it was stolen almost verbatim from a professor called Ted Guffrey who’s now planning legal action. Yep, if this was a grade 4 assignment Ray would have already failed from copy-and-paste plagiarism. He then goes on to fail science, rudimentary common sense and life. 

Let’s have a look at his third paragraph:

“Aside from the immense volume of information that your DNA contains, consider the likelihood of all the intricate, interrelated parts of his “Book” coming together by sheer chance. Critics (ie. Ray Comfort) claim that would be comparable to believing this publication happened by accident”

Did you just feel an involuntary jerk in your neck? That’s the overwhelming urge to smash your head against the desk until it’s a bloody pulp , a phenomena which the almighty Ray Comfort definitely did create. He goes on with his “Books can’t appear from nowhere! That’s silly!” comparison for the next two pages, then confusedly starts talking about DNA, which he seems to believe in, and why just because we share 97% of our DNA with chimps doesn’t mean we’re related to them. To prove this he provides a totally out of context quote from biologist Steve Jones: “We also share 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas…” It’s at this bizarre point that we realise that Ray Comfort has a serious banana obsession. Personally, I think he can have whatever fetish he choses, though some of his religious buddies might insist that it’s an abomanananation.

Southern Comfort (that would be so much wittier if he was from Texas rather than New Zealand) then spends seven pages insisting that evolution doesn’t hold up because apparently, there aren’t any “transitional forms’ between species. This argument is a favourite of Bananaman’s padawan, former child star and current wacko Kirk Crocoduck Cameron:

…Oh my god is right. Every time I watch that, a little piece of me breaks off and plummets into the abyss. Did you spot Ray? He was the only other person in the room who didn’t look like they wanted to drink drain cleaner. Sorry, I’m doing a lot of cynicism but not much debunking. There are a plethora of transitional form discovered by modern science, and mentioning the occasional fossil that happened to be cheap fake 50 years ago doesn’t in any way discredit the thousands of others, from Australopithecus to Homo Erectus (stop sniggering) and everything else in between, that have been consistently and repeatedly proven to be real by a myriad of modern scientific technologies. I’m not going to into that in detail, but if you’re interested or doubtful I challenge you to have a thorough look here and for humans in particular, here.

I should probably mention that Ray constantly gives what almost looks like evidence with often misunderstood, largely out of context quotes from a variety of sources, both credible scientists and diploma-mill creationists. Darwin himself made it a little hard for himself in the very book comfort is introducing (and which I STRONGLY suspect neither me or him have read in full) by his writing style, which often involves dramatically saying what appears to be a hole in his theory, then carefully rebutting it. This allows creationists like Ray to use half- quotes such as: 

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree…"

To argue that complex structures such as eyes could never have developed through gradual processes. But the rest of that same quote tells a different story: 

“…When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Ol' Charlie went on to offer effectively a whole chapter on to discuss this occurred, and since then, numerous gradations from a simple eye to a complex one have been thoroughly and repeatedly proven to exist. 

Comfort goes there on page 26, and cherrypicks the website Understanding Evolution to say that mutations “did not occur because the organism was placed in a situation where the mutation would be useful.” he then writes:

“Again, mutations have been found to be completely random and not based on the environment. So with no evidence to show that mutations could cause creatures to evolve gradually over millions of years, what is the scientific basis for proposing that they could make very significant changes very rapidly?”

THAT’S A BINGO. Ray just made it excruciatingly clear is that he doesn’t actually understand the of modern concept of evolution. This subtle fallacy, I think, is in of almost every criticism of evolution I’ve read. Evolution doesn’t mean that a fish that needs to walk will concentrate really hard and suddenly grow legs, because it needs them in that environment. Mutations are always random. A tiny amount of these many random mutations will happen to be beneficial in a given situation, by total chance. But because of this benefit, the organism with this mutation will have a greater likelihood of surviving and reproducing, passing on the mutation. That part ISN’T chance. That’s… well that’s natural selection. Evolution is an enormous, 3 billion year exercise in trial and error, stuff that’s good at surviving survives and makes more of itself, and stuff that isn’t… doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t mean, as Ray suggests, that “everything came from nothing”. Rather, it suggests that everything came from a previous something. The only advocate of spontaneous generation here is Ray, who believes that god turned nothing into everything. Comfort’s knock out argument against evolution, and final even attempted argument on the subject is on page 31:

“Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world's hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can't make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that's true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?”

…WTF?! Delicious Yoghurt?

All that proves, if anything, is the limits of intelligent design in every form that humanity has ever encountered it. I still don’t understand what he means here… is he suggesting that blades of grass do not appear from pre-existing materials, just conjured suddenly by god rather than growing from a seed that’s absorbed various nutrients and sunlight? Nothing currently existing in the world that wasn’t previously something else, as Comfort himself almost said when he wrongly accused evolution of stating that “everything came from nothing”. It’s called the Law of Conservation of Mass (and energy). Perhaps Ray is trying to suggest that there must have been an initial cause for all that mass, a bastardised version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, which pretty much goes as follows: Everything is caused by something prior, so there must have been an original cause to start the chain, and this cause must be inherently self-explaining, and doesn’t need to have been created (like God) That’s interesting, and could be harped on extensively, but it’s effectively irrelevant to Bananaman’s Premise because of these major problems:

1. Even if there was a self-explaining initial cause for the universe, it does not necesarily follow that that cause was intelligent or in anyway deliberate designed anything. It is possibly that the big bang itself was a completely self-justifying cause. That sounds counterintuitive, but is actually less unlikely than an omniscient, physics transcending deity. To say that the fact that universe had an initial cause is evidence of a wrathful, anthropomorphic, non-catholic Christian God is a pretty huge leap.

2. Even if there was an initial cause that was intelligent, this does not in any way refute evolution, as things are known to have a chain of prior causes. For example, ‘delicious youghurt” was once grass, that grass came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, which came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, etc. Nothing suggests that there was no variation or evolution in that causal chain of blades of grass, in fact, all evidence ever gathered suggests that there was.

Wow, sorry, even lost me there. Back to Bananaman (BM). you might think I’ve been harsh, but I’ve actually portrayed his arguments reasonably generously by focusing on the ones I have. The other half of his introduction is despicable slander and emotional blackmail. BM moves into contemptibly low blow field with depressing ease. He talks about Darwin’s incidental racism (obviously despicable by todays standards, but it was a total must have for anyone in the 19th century, and BM even acknowledges that he was actually quite progressive for his time) as if Darwin’s personal views in any way has any bearing whatsoever on the scientific veracity of modern Evolutionary Theory.

Comfort includes some whimsical portraits of Darwin such as this, to subtly and intellectually demonstrate the hypothesis that he was a stupid godless monkey.

Next is how Evolution=Hitler. I refuse to dignify this with a response.

And finally, when BM makes the shift between shonky disinformation to deranged preaching, he writes this:

“Perhaps the thought of going to Hell doesn’t scare you, because you don’t believe in it. That’s like standing in the open door of a plane 10,000 feet off the ground and saying, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences if I jump without a parachute.” To say that there will be no consequences for breaking God’s Law is to say that God is unjust, that He is evil. This is why.

On February 24, 2005, a nine-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Homosassa, Florida. Three weeks later, police discovered that she had been kidnapped, brutally raped, and then buried alive. Little Jessica Lunsford

was found tied up, in a kneeling position, clutching a stuffed toy. How do you feel toward the man who murdered that helpless little girl in such an unspeakably cruel way? Are you angered? I hope so. I hope you are outraged. If you were completely indifferent to her fate, it would reveal something horrible about your character. Do you think that God is indifferent to such acts of evil? You can bet your precious soul He is not. He is outraged by them. The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of His goodness.”

No Ray. No. All this is evidence of is your reprehensible exploitation of a child’s murder. How you could use this example to suggest the goodness of an omnipotent God who could have stopped the act in the first place is also totally unfathomable.

People can personally believe what they chose. But when people like Comfort, and the horde of others like him, shamelessly lie, slander, guilt-monger, sew disinformation and emotionally blackmail people to advance superstitious agendas, a line has been well and truly crossed. This is line is crossed when a man would throw an eighteen year old to the ground for throwing out his propaganda. This line is crossed when creationists with a total contempt for science wrestle control of the education system in Texas. This line is crossed when religious institutions causes the oppression of minorities, the cleaving of families, the manipulation of the emotionally vulnerable and the destruction of countless lives. Yes, there is a line were faith becomes no-longer benign, when reason is vanadalised, morality sacrificed and where personal belief transforms into public lies that jeopordise the advancement of humanity. And Ray Comfort and his ilk have crossed that line a hundred of times.

Thankyou for actually getting through this...

And finally, some religious wisdom of the day from American pastor Marc Driscoll on why the movie Avatar is satanic propaganda:

Go in peace to love and serve the lord!