Ray Comfort: has a blog...

...and apparently he believes that every aphorism he can come up with is worth sharing with the world. Of course, you are talking to a guy who routinely posts the searches that led to his web page, but I banish you to the outer darkness. So there.

Ray Comfort, as you may remember, is ex-star Kirk Cameron's heterosexual life partner. Anyway, there was one aphorism (he had something like 8 posts today) that caught my attention, not because it was pithy or useful or ennobling or poetic. It was the most compact and perfect piece of crap that I have read in a long time. And there is a metaphorical beauty to this poop image. If you put a turd under enough pressure for long enough, you'll get a diamond. That's what we are looking at here. A poopy diamond, with just a little bit of corn in the center of it. Let's unpack this one:

He who doesn’t fear God, has either never been in a good lightning storm, is blind, or is severely mentally challenged.

OK, I'm certain that I am occasionally a little whimsical in the comma department, but Ray, for all the books, and leaflets and horrid jokes he's written, still seems to think that subjects and verbs should never touch, which would be fornication and an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Sigh. OK.

The feeling that Ray is talking about in his reference to the lightening storm, even though I'm willing to bet he doesn't know it, is what Edmund Burke called "the sublime." Standing in the presence of something beyond comprehension, something that overwhelms the senses and puts man in his little teeny-tiny place. Burke seemed to think that terror was a good source of the sublime. The idea of going out onto a mountain in a furious lightening storm, beholding the raw power of nature and experiencing the sense of immanent dangers, provides an adrenal rush that Burke and the Ray the Birk misinterpret as a sublime quality of the exterior world. Oh well.

I think that you could get a little closer to the truth if you squished the first two possibilities into one statement: "Blind people never see a lightening storm." What that has to do with fearing an all loving God (explain that happy crappy), I have no idea.

Of course, Ray is not talking about physical blindness. For the roots of this one, we have to go all the way back into Plato's cave, where, let me see it I remember this, there are people in a cave and there's a torch and they are on the other side of a screen making shadow puppets. I think that's it. Greek philosophy was weird. The acquisition of knowledge translates easily into metaphor of vision translates very easily into knowledge. The more knowledge (light) you gain, the clearer the truth. Actually, I believe that the name "Lucifer" reflects this, "light bearer" or a bringer of fire, a Promethean figure, and what was Prometheus known for before he stole fire from Zeus? Being smart. So, mental faculties and vision have been piled onto the same metaphorical sandwich for millennia.

And then there's the ad hominem at the end that is typical rhetoric of a condescending shit. (Did you pick up on the irony there?) So, what Ray actually has here is, from a logical standpoint, a car wreck in which the driver (the either or fallacy that controls the whole structure) is smashed inextricably into the passenger (the ad hominem). Maybe some sort of Play-dough metaphor would be better....Oh well. I won't lose any sleep over it.

Ray has a lot of gall to make fun of the mentally challenged. His argument for god, on national TV was: "Look I have a painting. Therefore, God exists." Also, at one point he sexually molested a banana. His argument was: look at the design of the banana. It fits in the hand, has a clever protective covering, it is long slender and curved slightly so that it fits into the mouth easily. Of course, by his logic, a boner is designed to fit in the mouth (except for the covering part...that usually gets snipped off). Here's what he actually says:

"Behold, the atheists' nightmare. Now if you study a well-made banana, you'll find, on the far side, there are 3 ridges. On the close side, two ridges. If you get your hand ready to grip a banana, you'll find on the far side there are three grooves, on the close side, two grooves. The banana and the hand are perfectly made, one for the other. You'll find the maker of the banana, Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface. [...] When you pull the tab, the contents don't squirt in your face. You'll find a wrapper which is biodegradable [...]. Notice how gracefully it sits over the human hand. Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry. It's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's chewy, easy to digest and its even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier

Except for the squiriting in the face when you touch it, he could have been talking about an erect phallus.

Oh, yes, Ray. Make obscene gestures with that banana, Ray. Oh, fuck yeah. Mmm. Now slap it around a little.

The funny thing is that the banana is a domesticated fruit, that is, selectively bred by man. Gotta hurt to have never taken a science class, Ray.

So what we essentially have here is the mentally challenged leading the blind, which should be funny when they get near the highway.

HJ