You know it’s going to be good if it’s on Ray Comfort’s website, and this article by one Tony Miano sure doesn’t disappoint. The Clergy Project, as you may know, is based on research by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola called “Preachers who are not Believers“, and is currently run by former pastor Teresa MacBain. The project is supported by the RDFRS. The main message out of Dennett’s study was how many practicing priests and clergy are out there who have lost their faith, or never had any strong religious convictions in the first place. And these people are in a very difficult situation, stuck with a job that requires them to pretend to their congregations that they believe in the nonsense that’s in their religion’s holy books.
Whenever Christian zealots are faced with such evidence, they frantically try to redefine terms, and equivocation and ambiguity are their sharpest weapons. Take a look :
There is nothing the likes of Dawkins and Barker can do to turn genuine believers away from Jesus Christ (John 10:27-29; John 6:37-38; Romans 8:38-39). All they can do is draw the false converts away from the Body of Christ.
May the Lord God continue to remove false converts from His pulpits, for the purity of His Church! And thanks, Rich and Dan, for being used by God to make that happen.
If you are contemplating turning your back on Christ, and the efforts of folks like Dawkins and Barker are contributing to that leaning, please understand this. You must examine yourself and test yourself to see if you are even in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5). You may have never been a Christian to begin with. You may be a false convert.
Of course, a true believer could not possibly lose his or her faith, therefore, they can’t be True Christians™. This particular timeless fallacy of ambiguity and question-begging is called the No True Scotsman fallacy, and what would Christians be without it !
You may have walked like a Christian, talked like a Christian, prayed like a Christian, worshiped like a Christian, served like a Christian, and witnessed like a Christian, but you were likely never saved (Hebrews 6:4-6). You were likely never born again.
No one is born again and then “unborn” again.
Says Tony Miano the last Scotsman, on the blog of Ray “Banana” Comfort. It doesn’t get much funnier than this ! Oh wait, it does get funnier :
Richard Dawkins and Dan Barker, who foolishly deny the existence of God (Psalm 14:1-3), while actually knowing God exists (Romans 1:18), are being used by God to separate the weeds from the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30), to identify wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15-16), and to reveal those who are apostate within the Body of Christ (Hebrews 6:4-6). The Body of Christ is always healthier when the weeds, wolves, and apostates are removed from her midst by God.
I’m not sure what the obsession of this guy is with Dawkins and Barker, since they aren’t running the Clergy Project, but never mind. You know, there is a certain irony in telling a guy who was an Evangelical pastor for nearly 20 years, only to go through a long process of disenfranchising from his faith and beliefs until he came out an atheist on the other side, that he actually still believes in the invisible man in the sky that Tony Miano and Ray the Banana man tell us exists. Barker used to play that game Tony, he used to win people over for god, he has probably converted more people than you ever will. And all this time, he was doing the devil’s work ? Why should we believe you and your quotes of Stone Age poetry ? Well actually, we don’t. Rather, we point and laugh.
