Ray on Occasional Days: 8.2

For today's decimation of Ray Comfort's book, we're going to look at a little story Ray tells his readers. He tells the story of a friend of his who is going overseas to visit New Zealand, but New Zealand officials deny him entry into the country because he has a previous jail record. The guy is nice, a "Genuine Christian" but the rules of the country bar entry to former criminals. He says that even though he was angry at this New Zealand has the right to make rules about who can and cannot enter their country.

Heaven apparently is a lot like this. Lawbreakers are not allowed in, but if you believe in Jesus and become a Christian, your criminal record is erased and you become a new person.

I'm glad the justice system we have does not work like this - people should pay equally for their crimes. I hate to be crude but I completely understand why so many criminals in prison convert to Christianity - they may not have their crimes washed away in this life, but they can have them washed away in the afterlife.

It is interesting that Ray shrugs his shoulders and says, "well, that's okay. NZ has the right to have rules". What if the rule was that if you were a criminal NZ officials locked you up on a floating cage and let seagulls consume your flesh until your body fed the fishies in addition to not allowing you into the country? Would Comfort shrug then? I hope that illustrates how much this analogy doesn't apply.

Moving on, Ray makes one more unfalsifiable appeal: he says that becoming a Christian is like this:

If I look at a heater and believe the heater is hot,  I have an intellectual belief. But if I say to myself, "I wonder if it really is hot" and reach out and grip the bar, the second my flesh burns, I stop believing it's hot. I now know it's hot. I have moved out of the realm of belief into the realm of experience.

That's what happens the moment you are born again (when you become a Christian). You will move out of the realm of "belief" into the realm of "personal experience." A Christian is not someone who has a "belief," but someone who has a relationship with the living God. You come to know him.

(P.S. you can read this text for yourself here.)

This would be a great analogy if there were independent, objective verification of the phenomenon known as the Christian god. What if we were to add to this analogy that other people touched the heater and were not burned - in fact they felt no heat at all? How about if we had a group of people who once were burned by the heater, but could now put their hands all over it without feeling any heat? What if instruments used to measure heat registered the heat of the heater as being right around room temperature, while true believers in the heater continued to burn their hands while simultaneously receiving no actual, physical burns?

We would think that the people with burning hands but no evidence of burning were insane.

Unless they insisted that they respect the fact that they were experiencing terrible burns, or got angry at us for denying their experience. In that case we'd be forced to say it gently, "we think there is the chance there could be another explanation..."

I know this may be hard to understand but experience by itself does not equal knowing. If you believe something will happen but have not experienced it and then you experience it, you've moved from belief with non-experience to belief accompanied by experience.  One might consider this a form of knowledge, but said knowledge should still be subject to revision. If you hear voices in the room, but no one else hears those same voices, you might be right to conclude that they are a product of your own neurons and not due to actual voices.

Ray's analogy can once again be used to prove just about any supernatural belief one wants to prove. If belief+experience = knowing, then I know that the universe is entirely materialistic and guided by natural, rather than supernatural processes. A crystal healer knows that crystals balance the qi and heal cancer. A UFO abductee knows he's been abducted by aliens and somehow infused with alien sperm. These people don't have beliefs - they know.

The best part about learning to deconstruct arguments is that one can learn how to argue by learning how not to argue.