Ray Comfort - Tracts and Books

Tracts and Books

According to Comfort, he has designed dozens of gospel tracts since the 1970s, and sells millions of Living Waters tracts each year. Comfort has also authored The Way of The Master, God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, How to Know God Exists and Evolution: the Fairy Tale for Grownups. His 2009 book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think, is Comfort's first book published by WND Books, Comfort went on a promotional tour to promote the book, which Amazon.com ranked No. 1 in the atheism and apologetics categories, No. 2 in spirituality and No. 6 in Christianity when it debuted in February 2009. On 22 September 2009, Comfort released his latest book, Nothing Created Everything.

In November 2009, Comfort released an edited version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, with a 50-page foreword detailing creationist arguments against the theory of evolution. Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee, has alleged that most of Comfort's section on Darwin's life was plagiarised from his work. The book was given away for free at selected schools around the United States.

According to Comfort's website, "Nothing has been removed from Darwin's original work", but Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, noted that Comfort deleted four chapters by Darwin that described the evidence for evolution, adding that two of the omitted chapters, Chapters 11 and 12, showcase biogeography, some of Darwin's strongest evidence for evolution. She 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, 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. The second edition still lacks Darwin's preface and glossary of terms. The National Center for Science Education arranged a campaign at colleges across the US to distribute an analysis of the Comfort introduction, a one page flier, and "the NCSE Safety Bookmark" in the shape of a banana, a reference to Comfort's previous presentation of the banana as an argument for the existence of God, an argument he repeated in a video segment with Kirk Cameron. Comfort subsequently used the routine as a bit of comic relief in his sermons.

In October 2010, The New Zealand Herald reported that elderly people received "appointment cards" by 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. Recipients of these cards expressed anger and horror over receiving them, and contacted police over the matter, with one of them commenting, "It's disgusting. It was quite spooky. I just couldn't comprehend why anyone would ask you to predict the date of your death." Living Waters spokesperson Lisa Law stated that the cards were a way of raising awareness of human mortality in order to spark discussion about Jesus, though she stated that anyone could order them from their website, and did not know who sent them.