School shootings prove Bible is right and people are born evil, need Christianity

Creationist Ray Comfort: School shootings prove Bible is right and people are born evil
By David Ferguson
Creationist Christian author and anti-science crusader Ray Comfort said that violence and mayhem around the world is proof that humanism is false and that the Christian Bible is true. Everyone is “born evil," he said, and needs Christianity to cleanse them of that original evil because otherwise, we will degenerate into savagery.
“Yeah you can see humanism rear its ugly head every time there’s a school shooting or some father gets a knife and slits the wife’s, uh, the throat of his wife and children," said Comfort. “What the world does is that it believes that every person is born good, and this person who did this heinous thing has gone off the rails. There’s some mitigating circumstance."
Humanism, he said, cannot accept that some people are “evil by nature as it says in the Bible," but rather seeks to find some external cause that brings about an effect. Therefore people who believe that individuals are born good are “in direct opposition to the Bible," he said, which says that all people are born evil and impure and need the love of god to redeem them.
“The human heart is deceitfully wicked," Comfort said. “We don’t have to keep making excuses and calling in psychologists. The trouble is that it’s getting more and more common. More and more people are doing evil things.
Comfort is the author of You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can’t Make Him Think, and worked with former teen star Kirk Cameron on a series of anti-evolution videos and on the release of Darwin’s Origin of Species with a new, anti-evolution forward.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/31/creationist-ray-comfort-school-shootings-prove-bible-is-right-and-people-are-born-evil/

What’s disturbing is that many people will read his drivel and accept it without further thought. How can he explain the many who are atheists but still don’t do anything evil, or conversely, that even more who are quite immersed in the belief in a god yet do incredibly evil things? According to his logic, it appears that this “god creature” redeems at random.
It seems there could be an entire book written called, “You Can Lead Comfort to Physical Reality but you Can’t Make Him Understand It.”
Occam

What's disturbing is that many people will read his drivel and accept it without further thought. How can he explain the many who are atheists but still don't do anything evil, or conversely, that even more who are quite immersed in the belief in a god yet do incredibly evil things? According to his logic, it appears that this "god creature" redeems at random. It seems there could be an entire book written called, "You Can Lead Comfort to Physical Reality but you Can't Make Him Understand It." Occam
He's a typical Calvinist. Of course, we need Christianity to "fix" the naturally depraved people god created in the first place. "Calvinism: the theological system of Calvin and his followers marked by strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humankind, and the doctrine of predestination." It's nothing new. Lois
What's disturbing is that many people will read his drivel and accept it without further thought. How can he explain the many who are atheists but still don't do anything evil, or conversely, that even more who are quite immersed in the belief in a god yet do incredibly evil things? According to his logic, it appears that this "god creature" redeems at random. It seems there could be an entire book written called, "You Can Lead Comfort to Physical Reality but you Can't Make Him Understand It." Occam
He's a typical Calvinist. Of course, we need Christianity to "fix" the naturally depraved people god created in the first place. "Calvinism: the theological system of Calvin and his followers marked by strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humankind, and the doctrine of predestination." It's nothing new. LoisBut that reminds me of Tea Partiers in a way. They claim to love america, but hate its people. Calvinist seem to love god, but hate his creations. If I were god I'd be pissed.

People can be good or evil, and sometimes both at the same time. So the institutions and cultural traditions that they create, including religions, can naturally be used for both good and evil purposes as well.
“religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it." Emil Durkheim

This is one of the reasons I finally let go of Christianity, such fanatical nonsense. You can see the good in people every time there is a disaster, someone is in need, someone is hurt… but none of that matters. Now the Bible will serve to keep laws at bay that might finally ban this gun madness. It’s not reasonable faith, it’s totally fanatic. If Christians had the power once again they’d be cutting off people’s hands and heads as well, or better burn them.
There are very many well-meaning believers, but this kinda stuff, as Hitchens put it, “poisons everything”. Utterly disgusting.
Why do things like school shootings happen? Because we are “evil”? I don’t think so. We’re social animals and such “snappings” can very well be explained by bullying or sociopathy, the former a natural, albeit wrong reaction, the latter the logical evolution of a kind of human being I have my problems with. The access to guns made the shootings possible, or as I once read in a neat little quote, “simply saying “bam, bam, bam” wouldn’t have hurt anyone”.

This is one of the reasons I finally let go of Christianity, such fanatical nonsense. You can see the good in people every time there is a disaster, someone is in need, someone is hurt... but none of that matters. Now the Bible will serve to keep laws at bay that might finally ban this gun madness. It's not reasonable faith, it's totally fanatic. If Christians had the power once again they'd be cutting off people's hands and heads as well, or better burn them. There are very many well-meaning believers, but this kinda stuff, as Hitchens put it, "poisons everything". Utterly disgusting. Why do things like school shootings happen? Because we are "evil"? I don't think so. We're social animals and such "snappings" can very well be explained by bullying or sociopathy, the former a natural, albeit wrong reaction, the latter the logical evolution of a kind of human being I have my problems with. The access to guns made the shootings possible, or as I once read in a neat little quote, "simply saying "bam, bam, bam" wouldn't have hurt anyone".
Exactly!

I wonder if Comfort knows that humanism is basically liberal Christianity condensed and with god removed.

Besides having no real data to back up that “more and more are doing evil things" or that psychologists aren’t helpful, he says nothing about what humanism is, so who knows what he is really trying to say.
His reaction here is to something that I think psychologists, sociologists and caring people in general started figuring out in the 70’s. That is, you can’t just focus on societal responsibility, what Comfort calls “mitigating circumstances". You do have to look at individual responsibility. But you can’t look at individual responsibility in isolation either.
Ray tries to remove the societal responsibility, our input into laws, our votes for school referendums, our concern for our neighbors, by giving it all up to God. That would be great if it actually worked, but of course the same flawed humans that need God are the ones who have to decide how God’s will is carried out. And you’re right back where you started from, figuring out how to create a society that encourages individual responsibility.

I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. An ambitious project if I’ve ever seen one. One might say that he’s at least a couple of centuries ahead of Ray Comfort in his critical thinking and research. But, as Comfort mentions violence in this thread’s quote, this book has a small something to say on the matter. I haven’t finished it yet - by a long shot - but the nutshell I’ve garnered so far is that Pinker refers often to Thomas Hobbes and his idea of a Leviathan, as a centralization of power which reduces violence in a society. A Christian state (not just a sect but a state, and also really any kind of state) does apparently provide this Leviathan which reduces violence, but Comfort apparently hasn’t ever looked beyond that, how lots of further progress has been made at reducing violence in society since the Leviathan was adopted in societies millennia ago.

We are evil because god made us evil, so we need the one who made us evil to make us good?

People can be good or evil, and sometimes both at the same time. So the institutions and cultural traditions that they create, including religions, can naturally be used for both good and evil purposes as well. “religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it." Emil Durkheim
I'm having a hard time thinking of the good.
We are evil because god made us evil, so we need the one who made us evil to make us good?
That's great!