Crazy Creationist of the Month: June

Posted by Lionel Boyd Johnson.

This month, it's Ray Comfort, for the usual reasons (even I'm starting to get bored by this).

In a blog post he made last month, he attacks the claim that atheists have any right to say that pedophilia is wrong.

The basis of your argument is that pedophilia is morally wrong "because it harms the child." Therefore, if a professional photographer used a two-way mirror, and took photos of naked children without them being harmed (and paid them well for their time), you would therefore consider it to be morally acceptable. The child hasn’t been harmed in the slightest. It fact, he (or she) has been greatly benefited with monetary gain.

Comfort then broadens his claim to all morality.

Your problem is that you cannot say that anything is morally wrong, because your morality is dictated by changing ideals.

And, of course, the punchline.

This isn't so with Christianity. Morality isn't dictated by sinful society nor by "does it harm the person." It is solely dictated by what God says is right and wrong.

In other words, it's okay to cause harm to a person, if God says it is.

None of this is new, especially not from Ray Comfort, but this deserves the prize of Crazy Creationist of the Month because of his follow-up post. When he first made the claim that atheists have no right to declare that pedophilia is wrong, but Christians can because they have the absolute moral standard of God's word to rely upon, the comments section lit up with the observation that the Bible never condemns pedophilia. This is a problem for Ray Comfort because he has already claimed that pedophilia is wrong, and also that right and wrong are specifically determined by the Bible, and nothing else. So if Ray Comfort can't find a verse in the Bible that says pedophilia is wrong, he'll have no choice but to admit that morality does not come from the Bible alone. Here's what he came up with (emphasis added)...

"But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust" (1 Timothy 1:8-11).

In other words, atheists' problem is that they decide what's right or wrong by the standards of the imperfect society in which they live, but Christians can take comfort in the fact that they have God's unchanging moral standard, which includes society's imperfect and ever-changing standard, thanks to this minor loophole found in one obscure verse.