Ah, Ray Comfort.

The more I read from Ray Comfort's Atheist Central, the more I suspect he's playing the long con.

I read a story a while back from a guy who thought the Tea Partiers were complete idiots. So he decided he was going to join up. Get in, go to the rallies, make his voice heard. Except that his plan was to out-crazy the crazies. He was going to take their viewpoint to ludicrous extremes. The goal was to help make the tea party look even crazier than it actually is, thereby lowering, even in small part, their creditability.

Is Ray Comfort doing something like this? A lot of the religious crowd, debating us godless heathens, use actual arguments. They're not scientific arguments, for the plain reason that religion isn't based on, and is unprovable by, science, but at least they commonly have internal logic and pay attention to facts that are so well-known that to rally against them is lunacy.

The big exception is evolution, obviously, but you see my point.

Today's post, however, goes well beyond these lines. Ignoring for a moment that atheism does nothing to explain why the solar system is the way it is - it's physics that explains that - he's asking questions that scientists, and a hell of a lot of laypeople, know the answer to. It's an easy one. There's no debate here. Hell, it's math.

There's no reason to argue these points. Doing so serves only to make him look utterly ignorant, even to his fellow fundamentalist Christians. One commenter in the thread linked above suggested that Ray Comfort does more to spread atheism than atheists are, simply by virtue of making Christianity look ass-backwards.

I think I agree. My question is, is he doing it on purpose, or is he truly as ignorant as the face he presents to the world? It's possible we'll never know, that with his last breath he'll curse the name of Darwin for making the universe so big.

I gotta say, though, if he ever comes out as an atheist and tells everyone it was just a huge, years-long joke against Christianity, I'm going to fly to wherever he is and buy him a keg.