I believe it's an Aussie or Kiwi accent, but you're exactly right. Off the top of my head, I can come up with half a dozen reasons those 'man on the street' interviews are just ridiculous. For instance, you don't test the merit of an argument against the least informed person. But I also just love the idea that the "no female" idea Comfort loves to point out sounds insane to him, yet a woman magically turning into a pillar of salt sounds A-OK.

(Let it be noted that his male without a female idea isn't how natural selection works.)

I like how he uses the example of a dog (3:00). Apparently he's never noticed that dogs are domesticated, just like bananas.

So Ray, was the first French poodle male or female?

I'm sure he got lots of interviews from people who weren't quite so dumb. I'd do an on-camera interview with him, but somehow, I just can't see it making the cut for the 700 Club.

Here's a good'un from Ray: 0:45 "'Cuz I'm trying to think. Here is this sort of animal who's coming out of the ocean without lungs. So he comes out with gills, and goes gasp, gasp, gasp, runs back to water, and just keeps coming out until lungs develop."

Time to read a second book, Ray.

He challenged Dawkins to a debate and offered to pay him something like $10K. Dawkins' counteroffer was $100K to the Richard Dawkins Foundation. I don't think Comfort ever came up with the money.

A cursory examination of world history would seem to support your hypothesis.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/150471/detail/

Kohlberg stages of morality.

Deist, Deist, atheist, agnostic

Yes, they do.

Its good that they're posted on here, so they can be exposed. "The worst thing for a bad product is good advertising."

According to popular culture, monkeys eat bananas.

I think Comfort accidentally shot himself in the foot by proving human evolution.

But of course, sir! If you don't have Jesus in your life, naturally you're not going to experience anything but darkness in the afterlife!

The theory of evolution says nothing about how life began. It only describes how life can proliferate into many different forms over time. Abiogenesis is the study of how life on Earth might have begun.

These preachers like to conflate the Big Bang theory, evolution, abiogenesis, accretion, thermodynamics... well pretty much all science under the label of evolution. And then they hang the whole package from Charles Darwin's neck and draw on little horns and a dunce cap, since they seem to need a person to vilify.

Just once I'd like to see a creationist with a high-school understanding of science, but sadly, there seem to be none. Or maybe they could debate a scientist using theological arguments. They might look less idiotic if they get home-court advantage.

No one's debating his points because he's not really making any. Just going around posing surprise questions on people who don't really care. Then talking about how we must save the ignorant godless heathens by showing them how bad they really are. Such arrogance I have not seen in quite some time. But hey, he "is" the banana guy.

Now for something completely constructive:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

Google exists for a reason. You don't have to wait for people to bring the science to you.

Ah yes, the "argument from intellectual laziness," as I like to call it: You don't understand, therefore it must be false.

"Why no discussion about how something that lives underwater can move onto land. How?"

It's not discussed here because, in middle school science classes, they discuss animals that begin as water dwellers and develop into land dwellers in one lifespan. They're called frogs.

I mean, c'mon.

We've covered the eye, even here on Milk and Cookies.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/106026/detail/

In my experience, ID/Creationists like to dismiss such things. For some reason, our evidence doesn't count when it makes sense.

And yes, this (evolution) is what I learned in public school, and my school district was the first in the country to go bankrupt. Richmond Unified, what what!

If you believe what you really believe, Sir, why are you trying to tell us what to believe? Shouldn't your faith be enough?

I am quite comfortable believing in evolution. I think it makes perfect sense. From fossils to antibiotics to flu to bacteria that eat nylon, testable, repeatable, follows a theory. I like that. Magic, that I'm not to keen on.

I'm a theist, too. That works for me.

What you believe in none of my fucking business. Your arrogant, smarmy preachiness and smugness bugs the fuck out of me though.

Okay, I'll answer Ray Comfort's amazing new questions:

"Do you believe man evolved from apes?"

Homo Sapiens ARE classified as a species of ape. So I suppose since 20th, 19th, and 17th century humans were also homo sapiens, then the answer would be yes. We evolved from apes.

"When we were under the water do you think we had lungs or gills?"

Whenever I go swimming, I have lungs. I assume you do to, Ray.

"Do you think we could've evolved from horses?"

No, Mr. Comfort, horses are not an ancestor of primates. All living horse-like creatures share the Hyracotherium as a common ancestor, which is also not an ancestor of primates. However, horses and humans do share a very distant common mammalian ancestor, and * I * DON'T * KNOW * what it's called. I guess you got me, Ray.

"This animal that came out without lungs and then breathed and went back in -- was he male or female?"

Some of each. That would've been thousands or millions of individual animals. Some of these animals would've spent many generations taking slightly longer dry crawls (or slithers) than previous generations; others would've stayed close to the water most of the time. Of those taking longer walks, the ones with the better walking stamina would have had a survival advantage over those with a lower walking stamina, and thus more babies just like them. So the air lungs, the land legs, the sun skin, whatever added up to better walking stamina contributed more to shaping the next generation than did the lamer land traits.

There are many living animals that spend part of their life-cycle in water and part on land. Sea turtles only leave the water to bury eggs. Most frogs live near water, their larva have gills, and the adults have lungs. Some species of frog ("toads") are almost fully terrestrial. Newts spend their larval stage in water, their juvenile stage on land, and their adulthood in water. Mudskippers are a fully amphibious fish.

The process of speciation does not happen when one individual is born as the sole member of a brand new species. It happens when a bunch of animals live in isolation from a bunch of other animals just like them. The two populations begin to be slightly different. The longer they're separated, the more different they get. After only a few dozen generations, they might only be able to interbreed with difficulty. After a few hundred generations separated, they may be completely incapable of interbreeding. This has been observed in farm animals (sheep) and in the laboratory (fruit flies). No-one's actually watched this happen in the wild, but there's really no great mystery in the mechanism.

There's also a concept called "ring species." Larus gulls live in northern latitudes, but not inside the Arctic Circle. The English gulls can mate with the Canadian gulls, the Canadian gulls can mate with the Alaskan gulls, the Alaskan gulls can mate with the Siberian gulls, but the Siberian gulls can't mate with the English gulls. Speciation happens. We see it happening.

"Do you think God had anything to do with this?"

Well that depends, Mr. Comfort. Is your god a delegator or a micromanager?

Let's not generalize too much. My initial reaction was more like "Damn, I really wish the peanut butter dude showed up."

I often wonder the same thing... I wonder if he's an ingenious, extremely disciplined prankster, in the mode of Andy Kaufman, infiltrating the bottom-feeders of fundamentalism for the purposes of sabotage and amusement.

He seems way too stupid to be for real. Even the dumber of the Creationist crowd are not quite as dumb as him...