Ray Comfort writes a novel

[Sola]

And then posts it chapter by chapter on his blog.

Would you like some comic relief? Go read it, it's bad. Very bad.

Oh and it's about evangelical Christians, Germany, Nazis and the Jews, quelle surprise.

That man couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.

http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/ Not breaking the link because I doubt Ray cares.

[fakepigtails73]

I'd rather read "Zahiba and the king", a romance novel written by none other than Saddam Hussein, than to read Comfort's novel.

Although if I'm ever really bored and need the laugh, I could give it a glance...

[tropaka]

Looks like a high schooler's history or English project, complete with terrible typos.

[tropaka]

Looks like a high schooler's history or English project, complete with terrible typos.

[Sola]

If you are looking for a 'novel' with purple prose, questionable grammar and punctuation, pages and pages of infodumps, illogical timelines, stereotypical characters, spelling mistakes and plot holes large enough for a planet to fall through, it might be your thing.

@ topaka

I'd say my 16 year old son could easily write better than that. It reads like it's been written by an 11 year old.

[freejoytoo]

My God, that's bad writing. A primary school child could do better.

[ThisOlGirl]

I wonder if he'll withhold the last chapter so his awesome fictional doesn't get stolen? Maybe he's self-publishing.

[lilwriter85]

I hate how Comfort uses the Holocaust to try and prove certain things.

[Patsy]

Joseph Greenberg was a cheerful man. He had changed his name after his relatives had been arrested, and looked a little out of place in Cracow because made himself look like a Texan. He was a large man with a large belly, standing a large six foot two inches, and he had a large moustache, reminding Samuel of the long horns on longhorn cattle. He didn’t wear a large ten-gallon hat, but he insisted on wearing his well-worn boots that many years earlier he had brought with him when he emigrated. Joe didn’t had never cared what people thought of him when he was a child. Samuel remembered him when he lived in Texas. He was always entertaining, either with bizarre hats with feathers sticking out of them, or telling jokes and laughing. He had endless stream of jokes. He would burst into a room and say,

"I have six eyes, three ears, and two noses . . . what am I?" When people couldn't guess, he would say . . . really ugly!" and run out of the room. He still delighted in making people laugh although his concerns about the Nazis weighed heavy on him.

Wow.

[acheronbeach]

I wonder if he'll withhold the last chapter so his awesome fictional doesn't get stolen? Maybe he's self-publishing.

Haha, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Raquel should do a review of this fictional... "It was really cute! I thought it was super great, but I won't spoil it by telling you what happened, don't worry!"

[Dinorah]

The premise is the most ridiculous thing ever. A German Jewish family emigrates to Texas of all places and moves back to Germany at the worse possible moment, when Jews were scrambling to get out? And then, interestingly enough they turn out to be Christian in some way?

If you can't picture characters who aren't American rednecks, maybe it's safe not to write stories set in central Europe with Polish Jews who act and look like cowboys.

But apparently Comfort is persuaded it's a great novel that doesn't need any kind of editing or fixing.

[Sola]

Yep, the latest chapter introduces us to a Jewish Texan Redneck cowboy who lives in Cracow. In 1938. Complete with big belly and ten gallon hat. Think a Jewish JR. Ewing.

You couldn't make it up. Unless your name is Ray Comfort.

[debrand]

Wow.

Have you read a lot of Christian writing? It is mostly crappy.

I think that I could make an interesting story from that character. Greenberg could be a man dealing with complex issues that develop when he discovered that his Jewish parents gave him up for adoption so that he could be smuggled out of Nazi Germany. He could be visiting Germany in the 1990's to try and discover who his biological parents were. Underneath the gregarious personality could be a deeply insecure man, trying to find himself and where he fits in the world.

[dairyfreelife]

Looks like a high schooler's history or English project, complete with terrible typos.

No way. I know high schooler's who can write way better than that. In fact, I was observing in a second grade classroom in the fall of 2010 and had them write their own fairy tale and those seven year olds had much more creative characters and plot ideas than Comfort.

[mirele]

Agh...this is awful. There are so many true, unbelievable stories of that time, we don't need made-up shit involving evangelical Christians. Let me share one, from just this week (not breaking the link because the Village Voice doesn't care), the backstory of a woman who wrote one of the first critical books about Scientology in 1971 and was harassed unmercifully by the cult for well over a decade:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninsca ... oper_1.php

...the two of them [Paulette Cooper and her sister] are still trying to piece together exactly what happened when, as young children, they were rescued from a Nazi camp in Belgium, sparing them the fate of their parents, who were shipped to Auschwitz for extermination. A Belgian man rescued the girls by paying the equivalent of what today would be about $2 million to save 22 children from the camp, and to this day Paulette would like to learn his identity.

This follow-up story gives the details that Paulette never knew--and it's a much better story and TRUE, as compared to the story that Ray Comfort is telling. But then again, most evangelical Christians didn't do jack shit to save Jews during World War II.

ETA: so this is what the Ray Comfort Food blog became after he decided he'd had enough of atheists? Blargh. What a boring mess.

[Sola]

His timeline is all over the place.

It starts off giving the impression that Jerry is in his early teens in 1939, yet we know that he is two years younger than his sister who was born in 1929, so that makes him 8. He came to Germany in 1934, so then he would have been three years old. Yet strangely in 1938, at the age of 7, he can remember attending Sunday school in the USA, and remember counting the flowers on the wallpaper but couldn't have been more than 2 at the time. Plus despite having a German Jewish father and grandmother, living in Germany and attending school there from the age of 3, he cannot speak nor understand more than a handful of commonly used German words by the age of 7 when he attends the baptist church in Germany.

But hey, if it works in the mind of Ray Comfort....

[Sola]

ETA: so this is what the Ray Comfort Food blog became after he decided he'd had enough of atheists? Blargh. What a boring mess.

He's changed the blog half a dozen times since Christmas. He first decided he was bored with atheists a couple of months ago. Then he started Read the Bible in a year, which lasted about 2 weeks. Then he changed to posting about Biblical characters such as Adam, Nathan, and a few others. Again lasted about 2 weeks. Next he decided to make the blog a resource for evangelists. That lasted about a week before he changed it again to daily posts from his 'novel'. It's like he's got ADHD.

[slickcat79]

Wow.

Dear. God :shock:

Even if you're a terrible writer, with zero concept of plot and character development, you should at least know not to use the same word three times in a single sentence. Also...Cracow? Does he mean Krakow? Is that a common European spelling, or is there another city with a similar name?

[Sola]

The correct way to spell it is Kraków.

[Dinorah]

I'd love to see someone do a detailed deconstruction of this drivel. I must say I'm completely hooked, in a bile fascination way. Maybe that's why his friend stayed up reading it. And Comfort seems to really think his novel will be made into a "major motion picture."

So, it turns out Comfort can't even be bothered to post excerpts in order (though he fixed that now) and Holocaust victims are of interest only if they're Christian, or Jews who are really Christian or in the process of becoming Christian.

Another adult fundie "novelist" who makes Miss Raquel look like Dostoievsky, her story was more coherent than that and she was 15 when she wrote it.

[Patsy]

Have you read a lot of Christian writing? It is mostly crappy.

Happily, no. I feel that Ray Comfort probably brings something unique to the field, however; namely, his incredible awkwardness.

In my experience, other Christian... everything (Christian music, for example) is not simply mediocre, but massively, surprisingly so. Even the Christian culture that isn't forcibly removed from other culture, à la Gothard, benefits in no way from the wider culture. Looking at other things to see what works and what doesn't? N-ope.

For that reason, I'm not surprised that Comfort's managed to write a historical fiction that has no fucking clue how historical fiction can work well, smoothly, and intriguingly by either showing an imagining of the inner workings of leading groups of the time, or by constructing a story about a well-known moment of history wherein the characters have an entirely different perspective (not picking up on 'foreboding', not knowing what we all know is going to happen, not understanding the overall historical picture we have). Nope, instead we get

In February of 1920, the German Workers' Party began to hold its first mass meetings, and on February 24, 1920, Hitler outlined the Twenty Five Points of the German Workers' Party. They were its political platform, which included: the union of all Germans in a greater German Reich; rejection of the binding Treaty of Versailles; the demand for additional territories for the German people (Lebensraum); citizenship determined by race with no Jew to be considered a German; all income not earned by work to be confiscated; a thorough reconstruction of the national education system; religious freedom except for religions which endanger the German race; and a strong central government for the execution of effective legislation.

That's not setting the scene, it's stating historical fact that we all know. Exposition is sloppy enough in the rest of your story (and he delivers!) but that is just so pathetic. It's not what one does, Ray. And you'd know that if you'd bothered to read a little bit of historical fiction before you decided to write your own.

[finleeport]

Doesn't Ray know that Jews were not the only people Hitler tried to kill? there were Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, disabled people, even my own Greek people.

oh and his writing is sloppy, amateurish, and non-poetic.

[Sola]

Happily, no. I feel that Ray Comfort probably brings something unique to the field, however; namely, his incredible awkwardness.

In my experience, other Christian... everything (Christian music, for example) is not simply mediocre, but massively, surprisingly so. Even the Christian culture that isn't forcibly removed from other culture, à la Gothard, benefits in no way from the wider culture. Looking at other things to see what works and what doesn't? N-ope.

For that reason, I'm not surprised that Comfort's managed to write a historical fiction that has no fucking clue how historical fiction can work well, smoothly, and intriguingly by either showing an imagining of the inner workings of leading groups of the time, or by constructing a story about a well-known moment of history wherein the characters have an entirely different perspective (not picking up on 'foreboding', not knowing what we all know is going to happen, not understanding the overall historical picture we have). Nope, instead we get

That's not setting the scene, it's stating historical fact that we all know. Exposition is sloppy enough in the rest of your story (and he delivers!) but that is just so pathetic. It's not what one does, Ray. And you'd know that if you'd bothered to read a little bit of historical fiction before you decided to write your own.

So far it is chock full of infodumps. In fact some members of SMaRT have managed to find where Ray has lifted the infodumps from. Unsurprisingly Ray is plagiarising again.

[formergothardite]

I never thought I would find someone who made Miss Raquel's fictionals look half-way decent, but Ray Comfort just did that.

[Sola]

I really don't understand what the pull of Ray Comfort is. What on earth do the fundies see in him?

When you look at Dougie, yes he is an ass, but he is an educated ass. He can speak and hold your attention, the way he presents VF and all the activities they do, I can see how people get sucked in to that. Same with Gothard too; there is a professional air to everything he does. But Comfort? Hell no. He cannot write, he isn't particularly bright, some people liken him to a car salesman in his pitch, but he never goes off script and if you push him to do so, he flounders quickly. He has partnered himself with an even bigger joke; Kirk Cameron. His 'ministry' rakes in a huge amount of money a year yet how much of it goes on charitable causes?

He doesn't think before he speaks; you only have to look at the Banana Man debacle to know that. His lies are well know and documented, and he doesn't deny them he just ignores them. He plagiarises almost everything he writes and the evidence is very easily found.

Why does he have so much pull?