Ray Comfort visits Orange County Atheists

For the January 2008 meeting of the Orange County Atheists I invited Ray Comfort from Living Waters Ministry to come by and have a lively discussion with us. Much to my surprise, he accepted! So he and Mark Spence came by and chatted with us for an evening. We were worried that it may be an ambush, that they were just looking to preach to us, that sort of thing. But I never got that vibe from our emails. Fortunately, the entire evening turned out to be an excellent discussion. They honestly wanted to learn more about us, and we honestly wanted to find out more about them. Everyone kept pretty calm and it was a nice rational discussion. Ray filmed a chunk of the conversations, so we divided up our group of about 40 people into a filmable table and a non-filmable table, for those who prefered to remain anonymous. Ray even bought dinner for everyone, and had gifts for myself and about a dozen books for everyone to check out. Very generous of him! The key discussion points, from my point of view, are: Absolute Morality vs Moral Relativism Since the bible has been interpreted since it was written, and since they're still interpreting it today, I have trouble believing that there's any "absolute" that we can discover without god coming down and clarifying everything for us. Evolution I'm familiar with Ray's misconceptions of what evolution is based on his youtube videos. One of his primary arguments is that we don't see one species evolving into another species. Which is true, but that's not what evolution is about. For example, at the National History museum in LA they have the skeletons of a horse, a north american camel (extinct), and an ancestor of both that is neither horse nor camel, but both. A horse can't become a camel, but the common ancestor slowly created both. If you go back even farther you can find a common ancestor between humans and apes, lizards and birds, even fish and land animals. Ray put up Dinner with 40 Atheists on his blog. I'm really confused by a lot of the comments left by his readers. They're making him out to be a saint because he talks with atheists? Perhaps it's the culture of "witnessing". I think chrisclarks's comment sums it up: "You make it sound like you were walking into a den of ravenous snakes, and you're amazed you walked out alive. I think many people misunderstand the beliefs of an atheist."

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