Ray Comfort's Origin

As many have heard last week roughly 100,000 copies of Ray Comforts edition of the Origin of Species were handed out to college students across the nation. The difference with his version is a few of the chapters have been removed, apparently due to cost restrictions on length, and a special “introduction” was added by Comfort. The introduction is essentially a diatribe on evolution. Originally the books were planned to be distributed on the 19th but campuses were surprised when they were handed out a day early. A lot of critics cried foul saying that it was a detestable tactic, Comfort disagrees. While I agree with his critics that his attacks on evolution are baseless and, frankly, stupid, I have to side with Comfort on this one. He was met with threats of book burnings, people who were planning on ripping out the introduction, and others who were planning on taking as many copies as possible to prevent them from being handed out to anyone else. There is nothing wrong with counter protests, but physically preventing the books from being handed out goes a little too far. Besides that, it adds a little more drama to the situation, and drama makes for high volumes of blog posts. And it looks like there will be more drama. It seems Comfort is planning on having 1 million more copies handed out, as this article explains. A recent interview with Comfort was done over at Friendly Atheist and can be read here. It is pretty interesting as the questions asked were purposely not about creationism but more about things dealing with Comfort exclusively.

I do not know if the next round of distributions of his book will include Purdue again. This past time they handed out the copies on our campus on the originally planned date. When I heard they were hear I went to see if I could get a copy but by the time I was able to get there they had already ran out of copies and left. Luckily Mike, over at Politics and Pucks, had an extra copy and was willing to give it away. I have not been able to read it yet as I just finished Finding Darwin's God but from what I have seen the introduction, the part written by Comfort, is pretty sad.