In case you didn’t realize this already, he’s got all the kook symptoms. Kent Hovind is a young earth creationist, and now, quite clearly, a vaccine denier. This is a short excerpt from a much longer conversation with another creationist, in which he apparently felt comfortable letting his hair down. Watch it while you can, it wouldn’t surprise me if it gets taken down.
To summarize, he thinks the Tribulation (which isn’t in the Bible) is about to start this year, or has already started. He thinks the Rapture (also not in the Bible) will occur in 2028. He believes that there are microchips (mark of the beast!) in the vaccines, and that the government will be tracking you by shining UV or blue lights on you.
I guess I’ll have to cite Deuteronomy 13:1-5.
1 If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder,
2 And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;
3 Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
5 And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God…
Also Matthew 24:36.
But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.
Those actually are in the Bible.
You’ve actually pulled that Matt 24 quote out of context the same way most Christians do in order to claim that no one knows when the end comes. Here’s a bit more context. (Matt 24: 32-36, bolding mine)
In other words, the end is coming really soon (in Jesus’ time) and will happen sometime within one generation of Jesus. We don’t know the exact day or hour, but it’s within this generation.
Of course, Christians like to reinterpret it, since the end times obviously did not occur 2,000 years ago, so they just focus on the second part. But the idea that the end times are near (2000 years ago) is found throughout the New Testament.
OverlappingMagisteria @1
Yes, this is the first major “doublethink” of Christianity (not counting the resurrection, which followed a separate phenomenon of psychology I would call “Elvis is alive!”). Ever since the second generation of Xianity we have always been at war with Eastasia.
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Kent Hovind is following the script of every cheap evangelical film out there to feature David A R Wright or Kevin Sorbo. He needs new material.
Like “an army of multiculturalist brownshirts will help the antichrist take control of Merica, confiscate the guns and add our country to the dominion of a world government ” (This is the plot of at least two films I can think of).
I wish this was actually true and the whackaloons would hurry up and get raptured already.
Most of what xians believe isn’t in the bible.
They just make it up as they go along.
There is a Rapture uptake event in Revelation.
144,000 male Jewish virgins will be taken up to heaven sometime for some reason.
I suppose the average age will be 12 or so.
That is it for the Rapture. The gods aren’t even going to bother with the xians.
Hmmm, maybe the gods aren’t quite the losers we thought they were.
And they claim that Jesus wasn’t into dude/dude sex.
Unfortunately those numbers are too small to rid us of the worst god-botherers. Maybe we can ask Kali to accept a few million Christians. And Mammon! That’s half the senate right there.
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The nanotech in The X File is still not around but good luck convincing the kooks it is impossible. Hillary Clinton must have the black goo in her refrigerator.
OverlappingMagisteria @1: I think the meaning of ‘generation’ has narrowed since the KJV (and other bibles). The Luther Bible Matthew 24:34;
I’ll leave it to our German speakers to give the best interpretation of ‘Geschlecht’ (google translate says gender, sex, race, lineage), but I don’t think the modern meaning of ‘generation’ fits.
Rob Grigjanis @8: I’m not sure why you’re looking at a German translation, since the NT was not written in German. The original Greek word that is translated as “generation” is “genea” (γενεά). It does translate pretty well to “generation” meaning a group of people who live at the same time, or a span of about 30 years.
The guy is a space denier too. I don’t know if he’s a full fledged flerf or if he’s a geo-centrist, but he talks about the “firmament” A LOT. Not a real thing. Still waiting for someone to tell me what the firmament is. I’m afraid that all the bible says is what it is not.
I don’t need to learn Koine Greek to see that Kent Hovind is a wackaloon.
OverlappingMagisteria@9
Generation is but one of the possible meanings of γενεά. Not an uncommon problem in translations, especially in religious texts.
Which meaning is the most fitting is a question for an expert, I guess.
IIRC there are words in the original Greek or Aramaic texts of the bible where nobody really knows what they mean.
Well, I don’t know about Rapture; the whole book of revelations sound like the writer had a bad trip.
But what is clear that Hovind’s mind has been Ruptured for quite a while now.
OverlappingMagisteria @9: If a translation from Koine Greek into 16th century German (or any other language) differs substantially in meaning from a modern English reading, that suggests that meanings (in German or in English or both) may have changed in a a few centuries. Not particularly surprising.
The modern meaning of γενεά is primarily (according to google translate) ‘generation’, but it can also mean ‘race’. See also
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/γενεά#Ancient_Greek
Leaving aside the fact that the original text to interpret wasn’t German, as OverlappingMagisteria said, I don’t get how those choices are supposed to fit.
Also, German-to-English Google Translate of the whole sentence (not the single word in isolation) does give this: “This generation will not pass away until all of this happens.”
Also, what could it even mean to say that about “this gender”? Not clear at all.
rsmith#12:
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blockquote>Which meaning is the most fitting is a question for an expert, I guess.
Fully agreed. I know that Bart Ehrman and Dale Martin, both experts on New testament history and Greek take the view that Jesus and early Christians thought that the end times were just around the corner. This is a common view among critical scholars due to a number of instances in the NT that say this. So the translation to “generation” fits pretty well.
Rob Grigjanis #14:
I agree that it is not surprising that translating a word through three different languages will give you a wide array of meanings. This is true whether or not a lot of time has passed or not. It’s best to look at what the original said in context, rather than play the telephone game in Google Translate.
The rapture has begun. All FaceBook apps are down.
cr @15:
If a text in ancient language A is separately translated into more recent languages B, C and D, I would say that comparing those translations could be very illuminating. No?
I don’t attach much significance to what google translate says. That’s why I said “I’ll leave it to our German speakers to give the best interpretation of ‘Geschlecht’”.
But in what way? It may illuminate what some speakers of those more recent languages want to get out of the text. So what?
If one translator’s agenda is to make it appear as if there wasn’t a (failed) prediction which concerned the immediate future at the time the original was written, they can make choices which reflect that. That’s a change in the meaning, and translations/revisions/adaptations can certainly do that, obviously. Others (speaking the same language or a different one) may not make that sort of decision.
But the only illumination I’m getting out of that pertains to what those various types of translators are interested in doing (now or recently). It doesn’t pertain to the people who wrote it then, who had a very different agenda.
And they can still do that. But even if you did leave it to Google Translate, it didn’t provide the one that you said it did — and what it did give does work — in that very minimal context of a complete thought (a full sentence that can stand on its own), not to mention the rest of the passage or the whole of Matthew, the gospels, or the Bible.
I suspect that if Google translate recognizes a quote from a published source like a standard German Bible translation, then it may use a canned idiomatic translation that matches the corresponding English version better than a literal translation. I have had cases in which I’m looking for a literal translation (e.g. of a proverb) and it jumps straight to the best idiom in English (no, I can’t think of one offhand).
Anyway, I definitely wouldn’t use Google to tell me anything about the nuances of language (though it is a handy tool for reading foreign language news).
PaulBC @20:
Exactly my thought.
Re: OverlappingMagisteria @ #9…
The relevant term you’re looking for may be “cohort”. Usually in the context of “the cohort of <year>”.
This is where one can have fun playing kickball with JWs. For a long time, they had one prediction for the end of the world after another, as the chosen dates came, went, and nothing of note happened. The last one the picked was 1914 and then they interpreted things to be that the world would end when the “generation” (aka cohort) of 1914 “passed away”. They never made it plain whether that meant when there were so few of that cohort left that they would have no influence on the world, or if they meant when everyone born that year is dead. Barring some really revolutionary medical breakthroughs in the near term, given modern records, we can reasonably state that the cohort of 1914 will all be dead by 2044.
On the other had, one can point out that for various Eastern European monarchies, they year 1914 really was “the beginning of the end”, as they were swept away in the aftermath of World War I.
Meh, I always say that the earth isn’t due to be destroyed for around another 5 billion years . So I really don’t care as I’m not going to be around to care.
@Ray Ceeya #10: Kent is surprisingly NOT a flat earther, and activity affirms that it is round.
Barbara Thiering’s excellent book “Jesus of the Apocalypse” offers a fine alternative, well worth the read.
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/jesus-of-the-apocalypse-9781742747286
In it she argues that armageddon happened in the first century, (the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70) as a failed armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces, the text of which was written in prophetic language (Judaic pesher) to deliberately obscure the truth of this insurection (by an illegal underground ‘king movement’ headed by the semi-legitimate son of Joseph who was the heir to the throne of king David – official title ”the holy spirit’), as was most of the rest of the new testament.
The book of revelation simply describes the process of canonisation of the first 5 books. It also covers the period of Jesus the son, and Jesus the grandson…..progeny from the wedding of Jesus the first with Mary Magdalen (this marriage interestingly ended in divorce, but also produced a daughter Tamar who was married off to Peter in her teens).
Thiering’s first book was called ‘Jesus the Man’ in adult countries, but in the USA had to be called ‘Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ because Jesus being a man is just toooooo unsettling for middle Americans.
If one removes the faith aspect, as in the divinity of Jesus or his alleged miracles, the new testament is simply a deliberate lie. The edifice of christianity should be demolished at every opportunity.
“The edifice of christianity should be demolished at every opportunity.”
that’s as good a summary of ALL of it as any.
though I would extend that to “Abrahamic religions” instead of just Christianity.
religion is going to burn us all alive while we argue about what color matches they plan to use.
Which is odd, because I learned that as doctrine (in the Nicene creed, among other places).