Proselytes or Pitchmen?

I want to take a few brief moments of your time to point out something that most freethinkers are attuned to when it comes to evangelical Christians: they are buying and selling... souls. The WOTM crew does it in a very clever manner and disguises it with a false sense of concern for the eternal destination of your immortal soul but, come on, can they even demonstrate that such a "thing" or "place" exists? Of course they can't; that's where their carefully crafted, finely honed sales pitch comes into play.

A quick internet search will reveal a great deal of interesting information on the perfect sales pitch. Here is the tried and true harangue:

* Start with conviction
* Winning against negative sentiments
* Preparations are the Key to Success
* Use emotions in the sales process
* Complete focus on the customer
* Objections are buying statements
* Closing thoughts

The way in which these points translates to the cookie-cutter WOTM speech is blatantly obvious. Knowing that Todd, Ray and Kirk are not only attuned to these sales methods but employ them, we can further understand why Living Waters and Way of the Master marketable goods are in such high demand. They've cornered a very large evangelical Christian market; they sell their products to both evangelists and the newly-converted alike.

We have to ask ourselves if they are really concerned for our souls or if they are simply looking for the next great sales gimmick. In all actuality, Todd would make quite an effective and prosperous replacement for Kevin Trudeau.

News Mash : News illiteracy on the rise!

I've personally been off WotM for some time now, and actually find myself smiling at my podcasts directory, as I have a dozen hours of material to go through. Why I smile, I don't know. I'm weird that way.

A reader of ours sent the Watchdog crew a message concerning a recent gem in WotM news coverage. Yes, they do news. Science news when they disagree with the results, religion news, funny news, religious news, politics when they pertain to religion, etc. Inspired by this message, I decided to check the show out with my own ears. It's amazing! So let's examine the hour 2 news bit on WotM Radio on October 15th!

I can reed news reel gud

It's that time of the year again when the Nobel prizes start rolling out. Let's see how WotM's unbiased news hawks cover some items of this most exciting of ceremonies!

Tony Verkinnes, WotM news anchor and stoic counterweight to Todd's exuberance, sits in his chair, prays to God that his mic won't fail and starts his reporting. The news item that's at hand here concerns the fact that Al Gore won the Nobel peace prize, which is odd to Tony, because global warming is a fairytale. Of course, it couldn't have anything to do with someone working to encourage people to work together in harmony towards a good cause, being rewarded for propagating such selfish ideas is outright silly! Tony also passingly mentions that Al Gore kills babies, so he surely cannot be a man of peace. How relevant to the story, I'm glad you managed to sneak that in, Tony.

Tony finds relief in the fact that other Nobels go out for silly things too. Actually, he goes on to build a case that the whole Nobel ceremony has withered into a shebang of silly, and this to him perfectly discredits Al Gore's ideas in the process. For example, the Nobel of medicine, was awarded to a pair of researchers investigating the side effects of sword-swallowing and the literature prize was awarded to a linguist on her research on the word “the”. Now if anyone at WotM had paid more attention, they would have noticed, that among these prizes, we find that the peace prize actually went to the Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a “gay bomb”. What? No Gore?

Of course no Gore, because I'm going through a list of the Ig Nobels. Tony just somehow “forgot” to mention this? This strikes us as an attempt to poke at the scientific community, trying to somehow signal to the listeners that “Gosh, those scientists are a kooky bunch”.

The Ig Nobel prizes, if you do not know (shame on you), are a spin-off and parody of the “real” Nobel prizes. It's a play on words, as you can read it as “ignoble”. The Ig Nobels are handed out by actual Nobel prize winners, to scientists and researchers for research that “first makes people laugh, and then make them think”. Did you know, that a hamster gets over a bout of jet lag faster when he ingests male potency medication?

Now let's not be hasty and throw blame around before we've considered the possibilities. I see a couple of possible scenarios here:

A) Maybe WotM studios received this list of prizes from someone that intentionally left out the crucial two letters “Ig”. Maybe it's not all their fault? Still, it's the Nobel prizes. Once. A. Year. Pretty much everyone runs into them in some form or another, digital or cellulose, it's not too hard to do a little background checking on something like this. If this is the case, it's a prime example of what I consider to be one of the most damaging effects of fervent fundamentalism: you lose your critical faculties. Hear/read something, eat it up, just as long as it sounds good to you. An example of information illiteracy and reader bias.

B) They read a story on the Ig Nobels and just ignored the letters"Ig", because of course that's the Nobels the story is written about, since they have never heard of the Ig Nobels. Ig is just something that they don't have to worry about. Mash the two stories together in your mind and you're good to go! A failure in fundamental literacy, the words are there but they are not heeded.

C) They intentionally didn't discern between the events because they are pushing an agenda and needed something to stick it to some liberal wackjob whose pitch-black soul is fueled by satanic ectoplasm that he extracts from the succulent eyeballs of cute little babies.

D) We listeners were undergoing a mass hallucination when in reality Tony was actually making perfect sense, covering the Ig Nobels in a sound and lightly humorous fashion as they should be.

None of these sound too good. I'm especially worried about the fourth one. Can you come up with more?

We've sent WotM Radio requests to address this issue on the show, as what they are doing is, intentionally or unintentionally, deceiving their listeners, peddling a distorted view of science by offering a misrepresentation of the facts. Nothing new there. Except that we now know that with the Fundie(™) method, you can get up to 78,5% more logical fallacies into two minutes of speech!

Nobel Prizes, official site
Ig Nobels at Wikipedia
The news bit in WotM, at beginning of the show

Ray, have you ever told a lie?

Click here to download WOTMWatchdog's blitz promo video, then post it on your YouTube account in response to this one! Help support your friendly neighborhood Watchdogs! Click here for the now-famous Monkey song! Yes, it's ours, and the WOTM crew knows it, despite their continued feigned ignorance!

Yes, the RRS vs. WOTM debate on ABC's NightLine is old news. It happened back in May. I remember joining the fray on ABC's message boards, teaming up with another atheist, a perfect stranger, who called himself Former Follier. Ah, the memories. Little did I know that one day, WOTM Watchdog would bring us together once again to battle the juggernaut directly.

But now we hear a side of the story that has never been told. Our good friend Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad has agreed to share some inside information regarding the lead-up to the debate... And it doesn't reflect well on Mr. Comfort and Mr. Cameron.

For those who watched the debate, do you remember the promos? I do. Mr. Comfort and Mr. Cameron stated repeatedly that they would prove the existence of God, "scientifically, absolutely, without mentioning faith or the Bible." In fact, they are directly quoted saying exactly that on the ABC News web page promoting the debate. It's a claim Mr. Comfort makes often. For another example, listen to his "What Hollywood Believes" sermon. Conveniently, this sermon was broadcast the Way of the Master Radio program on October 10th, while the radio team took a day off. Thus, it's available on their audio archives page.

Ignoring, for now, the gaping technical flaw in Mr. Comfort's argument... Well, okay. We won't ignore the gaping technical flaw of Ray's argument. I just can't resist. Nothing can be proven scientifically and absolutely; science doesn't deal in absolutes. Nor does it deal in "proof." If it's proof you want, look into mathematics or formal logic. You'll find no such concepts in science, which only concerns itself with evidence. This is why nothing ever gets beyond the status of "theory" in science. If Mr. Comfort doesn't understand that, then he doesn't understand what the academic discipline we call "science" fundamentally is, and really shouldn't be throwing the word "scientifically" around. It just makes him look foolish. Anyway, back to the matter at hand. In the debate itself, "without mentioning faith or even the Bible" mysteriously became simply "without mentioning faith." When I first watched it, I didn't catch it. I had no idea that they tried to weasel their way out of their self-imposed terms until I saw Mr. Sapient's recently-released video. Rather convenient for Ray and Kirk, really, considering that they almost immediately invoked the Ten Commandments... Which, it turns out, are in the Bible.

Yes, there's really no way around it. The Rational Response Squad crew won this debate hands-down, and any honest, competent moderator would have granted them a decisive victory. Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron clearly failed to stick to the terms of the debate. They even failed to stick to their own stated position. It's not that they're poor debaters, it's that they're liars. Sleazy, slimy, manipulative, and very, very slick liars indeed.

Remember, Ray: Your own God says that all liars will have their part in the Lake of Fire. Does he make exceptions for people who lie for Him?

If you've been living under a rock for the past six months, click here to view some of the highlights of the debate, courtesy of the Rational Response Squad.