On the matters of faiths, beliefs, sciences and worldviews.

I thought I’d start a new category here on PTPOI. Inspired by ExtantDodo’s Hovindism videos, I thought I’d focus on Ray Comfort’s wacky analogies. Naturally, I shall call them Rayologies.

This week, Ray is speaking about God’s “rich mercy” in that he will save those who worship him from damnation for breaking a law they didn’t know about. This is how he likens mankind’s state of sin with a lowly thief getting caught stealing:

Think of a wanted criminal. He has committed multiple and serious crimes. One night, he is stealing in the dark of a moonless night. The darkness gives him a sense of security. Suddenly police spotlights flood the area. He is exposed. The darkness is no longer a cover for his unlawful activity. He hears a loud voice tell him that ten sharpshooters have his pounding heart in their sights. One wrong move and he is a dead man. At this point he has a choice. He can try and make a run for it and die, or he can lift his hands high in surrender and live.

This is, of course, ridiculous, as I already pointed out in the comments of his post. A thief is defined as someone who willingly and knowingly steals something for himself, thereby breaking the laws set up in most, if not all, countries of the world. Stealing something from someone else has direct consequences, that person might really need the stolen goods, they’re lives might even depend on it. However, this in no way represents the situation God allegedly put us in, and then offered us to buy our way out of.

See, God invented sin, and before he even told Adam and Eve what sin was, or how it worked, they happened to do one simple thing that God inexplicably thought was very, very bad. Now, claiming to not have known you were breaking the law when in fact you did is not a good legal defense. You can’t say that you “didn’t know” you weren’t allowed to murder that sweet old lady who lived next door, because every intelligent human being knows it’s wrong to murder someone. However, when compared with Adam and Eve, we see that the consequences of their unlawful act is the very thing that actually gave them that human sense of “right and wrong”. Before they did the thing they weren’t allowed to do, they didn’t know the very meaning of not being allowed to do something, or at least not why it would be considered “bad”.

That isn’t even all. God not only judged Adam and Eve for doing what they couldn’t possibly have known not to do, but also decided to judge each and every living descendant thereafter, for all eternity!

If you start from the viewpoint that God’s word is law, and every command of his must be followed, then I suppose it all makes sense. However, in our modern times, the “I was only following orders” defense is no longer valid. You’re required to question orders from even the utmost highest of authorities, and should they be unlawful then it’s your duty to disobey them. In that case, disobedience is actually considered “good”, turning the whole scenario of Adam and Eve disobeying God’s orders to begin with upside down.

So not only is Ray’s analogy directly false, but it also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you start to really question things. If any Christians read this, that is my advice to you: don’t avoid questioning God’s orders just like you question anyone else’s. God, too, has motives, and as I’ve just explained he doesn’t really play fair all the time either.