If you follow the creation/evolution debate, you've probably heard of Ray Comfort. In case you haven't, Ray is a Christian apologist who is probably best known for his hilarious comedy routine in which he argues that the characteristics of a banana provide evidence for the existence of God.
Well, here's the part where Ray slips on the banana peel.
You see, Ray Comfort's "special introduction" to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species includes a short biography of Darwin that was apparently cut-n-pasted from University of Tennessee professor Stan Guffey's essay "A Brief History of Charles Darwin" (pdf).
Here's how Guffey described his unacknowledged contribution to Comfort's ministry:
"I am party to a scam," Guffey says. "The introduction begins with a nice, sweet little biography, then degenerates into intellectually lame, lazy distortions, selective reading of the literature, picking and choosing of facts, and misreadings of the historical record." He says Comfort "gently moves folks into the notion that they don't want to read what comes after the introduction. He just wants his 50 pages read, 47 of which are anti-intellectual, dishonest drivel, the first three of which are pretty good because I wrote them."
See? There's no Comfort in the truth.
Even worse, according to the Metro Pulse article linked above, Comfort and his publisher were confronted about the apparent plagiarism months ago and apparently chose to do nothing about it.
As I said before, I wish people like Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron would stop harming Christianity by making such fools of themselves in public. They're bumbling attempts at evangelism are self-defeating.
HT: NCSE
posted by Jeremy Mohn
