16 Facts About Ray Comfort

Ray Comfort was born on 5 December 1949 and is a New Zealand-born Christian minister, evangelist and young Earth creationist who lives in the United States.

In 1989, Ray Comfort accepted an invitation to join the pastoral staff at the non-denominational Calvary Chapel in Southern California.

Ray Comfort says that evangelism is the main reason the Christian Church exists and that many of the evangelistic methods used over the last century have produced false conversions to Christianity.

Ray Comfort often uses the Ten Commandments to speak about sin before presenting the gospel of Jesus.

Ray Comfort speaks professionally at churches and evangelism seminars, and preaches in Huntington Beach, California.

In 2006, Ray Comfort recorded a segment for The Way of the Master's television show in which he claimed that the banana was "the atheist's nightmare", arguing that it displayed many user-friendly features that were evidence of intelligent design.

Ray Comfort retracted the video and claims upon learning that the banana is a result of artificial selection by humans, and that the wild banana is small and unpalatable.

On 13 April 2001, Ray Comfort appeared at the 27th National Convention of American Atheists in Orlando, Florida, where he debated Ron Barrier, the National Spokesperson for American Atheists.

The debate, which was moderated by Nightline correspondent Martin Bashir, focused on the existence of God, which Ray Comfort claimed he could prove scientifically without relying on the Bible.

In October 2010, The New Zealand Herald reported that elderly people received "appointment cards" by Ray Comfort's California-based publishing company, Living Waters, asking them to fill out information regarding the date and time of their deaths, and advising them to contact evangelists in order to avoid hell.

Ray Comfort has authored more than 80 books and tracts.

In November 2009, Ray Comfort released an edited and abridged version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, with a 50-page foreword containing creationist arguments against the theory of evolution.

Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee, alleged that most of Ray Comfort's foreword was plagiarised from Darwin himself.

Ray Comfort wrote that Comfort's foreword is "a hopeless mess of long-ago-refuted creationist arguments, teeming with misinformation about the science of evolution, populated by legions of strawmen, and exhibiting what can be charitably described as muddled thinking".

On his website, Ray Comfort said that the four chapters were chosen at random to be omitted in order to make the book small enough to be affordable as a giveaway, with the absent chapters available for download, and that the missing chapters were included in the second edition, which had a smaller text size that made printing the entire book as a giveaway affordable.

In 2011, Ray Comfort wrote and produced a 33-minute documentary film called 180: Changing the Heart of a Nation.