Ray Comfort: 180 Filmmaker 'Felt Sickened' by Response to Holocaust Question
Evangelist Ray Comfort revealed that during the making of his dramatic pro-life film, "180," 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.
The 33-minute video released for free online at the beginning of the week, documents the responses of young adults to questions from Comfort about their stance on abortion, but also includes discussions on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust in Europe.
While focusing on the responses given by several people with a pro-abortion stance, Comfort then transitions from talk about lives lost in the Holocaust to lives lost as the result of abortions in the U.S.
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The hypothetical scenario Comfort described to those he interviewed for the film went like this:
It’s 1943. A German officer has a gun pointed at you. He wants you to get into a bulldozer and drive it forward. In front of the bulldozer is a pit in which there are 300 Jews who have just been shot. Some of them are still alive. He wants you to bury them alive! If you don’t do what he says, he is going to kill you and do it himself. If you do what he says, he will let you live. Would you drive it forward?
“I was surprised that so many said that they could bury another person alive. I felt sickened, but at the same time I don’t know if I believed others when they quickly said that they would take the bullet, rather than do it,” said Comfort in a recent interview made available to The Christian Post. “I guess it takes a lot of soul-searching. It certainly is a character-test for each of us.”
Comfort explained how the conversations with the people he interviewed at different outdoor Southern California locales began.
“I would begin an interview by asking the question ‘Have you heard of Adolf Hitler?’ If they said, ‘No,’ I had the difficult task of getting them on camera,” Comfort said. “It was hard to hide my shock that anyone didn’t know who Hitler was, and the moment they suspected that they should know about him they refused because they felt foolish. So there were a number of interviews I missed out on because of that."
“Still, we were able to get 14 people on-camera, mainly university students, who didn’t have a clue who Adolf Hitler was,” Comfort said. “The swing from the Holocaust to abortion was fairly seamless because it came in the form of a question: ’How do you feel about abortion?’
“Then came ‘Do you think it’s a baby in the womb?’ If they said that they thought it was a baby in the womb, I asked if they could think of any justification for taking its life. The only people who became angry were the two women who had painted their bodies silver. After one admitted that she couldn’t kill Jews but other people should have the right to kill them, she must have realized what she had just said. She then became angry, and walked off. However, each of the others were genuinely moved by the interview.”
Comfort said the other surprising moments came when he discovered that so many people said that “it was a baby in the womb, and yet they still said that terminating the pregnancy was a woman’s choice.
“After giving them some knowledge that made them change their minds, I realized that so many have been brainwashed and that all they need is information to give them another perspective.”
Produced by Comfort’s Living Waters Ministry, "180" was released Sunday at 180Movie.com and had nearly 340,000 views on YouTube by late-afternoon on Friday. Shane Martin, who is managing the social media aspect of the film’s release said that 75,000 people have shared a link to the movie on Facebook.
The 180 Movie Facebook page is receiving 800 to 1,000 “Likes” per day, Shane said. Many on the social media site are taking part in a grassroots branding of the film. “Hundreds of people a day are changing their profile photos to the 180 logo,” Martin said.
“Keep in mind that this isn’t just a 30-second clip of a child having his finger bitten,” Comfort told the CP, referring to a popular YouTube video with millions of views. “This is a 33-minute movie. So it’s a big deal. But the real encouragement comes from the wonderful comments.”
Lead singer Mark Hall, from the popular Christian band Casting Crowns, recently made an endorsement of the film.
"This short documentary has totally rocked my world this week. Please check it out … I dare you to watch 180," Hall said.
