Ray Comfort, abortion, and the fallacy of arguments from popularity

Ray Comfort is not a very intelligent man. He is a religious clown from the US who believes that god made the banana to fit into man’s hand.
Now I read on Christian Today that Ray and his ministry of fools have produced a “pro-life video”, and that it has received half a million views on Youtube since its launch 9 days ago :

Evangelist Ray Comfort produced “180” with the help of his Living Waters Ministry. He recently revealed that during the making of the film he was sickened by the answers so many young people gave to a hypothetical question he asked them after describing a life and death, Holocaust-like scenario.

On Tuesday, the film had hit the half-million milestone, and by mid-afternoon Wednesday, it had 525,494 views as displayed on the 180movie.com site and tabulated by YouTube.

Half a million fools, or just people who like to watch a good internet train wreck or highway pile-up ? I guess we will never know, and it doesn’t really matter, because this is a classic ad populum argument, and it is utterly stupid. As is of course the notion that a clump of cells is a human being. We do not deduce from the fact that 500.000 people watch an internet video that the message relayed in that video is true. The only thing we can deduce is that the video is of interest to people. I’m not surprised that the journalist caricatures at Christian Today can’t tell the difference.

Ray Comfort sadly is way too stupid to know that 60% of all conceived embryos are naturally aborted before 10 weeks gestation, most of the time because of genetic abnormalities at early gestational age without the woman even noticing, and a few through causes like uterine incompetence, trauma, or infection after the early stages of pregnancy (there are other causes as well).

“There seems to be a fresh stirring going on about the horror of abortion,” Comfort told The Christian Post. “Just today I was told that Rick Warren tweeted, ‘If we were all forced to WATCH 1 baby’s abortion, outrage would end them. A ghastly, grisly, inhumane torture not fit for dogs.’

You know, just the other day, I was with a woman who did nothing wrong, got up for breakfast with her loving husband like every other day, started bleeding, and then within an hour aborted her 16-week old fetus. A spontaneous abortion. Was it god’s work and will ? It surely must be, because god is omnipotent and omniescent, right ? So why does god impose this “ghastly, grisly, inhumane torture not fit for dogs” on women ? Maybe Ray Comfort and the anti-abortion (not pro-life, no Goebbels type word games please) lobby could get around to answer me that question sometime.

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