Hovind’s followers, however, are still treading the long and candy-sprinkled road of self-delusion. I’ve been sent a letter pleading for help in his case — they want to take it to the Supreme Court. I will be very surprised if this gets anywhere.

Greetings from Adrienne Gilbert in Kentucky…

An alarming situation with Dr. Kent Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism is putting every American’s first amendment rights in jeopardy. I have been following this case since its beginning, so I wanted to share with you briefly what needs to be done and why.

Summary of situation: Dr. Kent Hovind is in prison for practicing his first amendment right of free religion, and his case needs to go to the Supreme Court. We need everyone united together to overcome the oppression we’re facing.

Summary of needs:
$25,000-$35,000 in the next 2-3 weeks
specific prayer
lots of publicity about the problems with this case

Summary of action:
listen to conference call
send money
pray
spread the word

Details:
First, visit Dr. Hovind’s website, drdino.com, for an explanation of the situation.
http://drdino.com/legalupdate.php
This explains the ministry, what has happened, and what the plans are so far. It also gives the conference call schedule, which will give you the opportunity to really dig deep into the issue and understand why Dr. Hovind is innocent and his case is full of lies. The most shocking to me is at the end of the trial when the judge changed the law saying “more than $10,000” to read “less than $10,000.” Multiple horrors like that stack up to a case that needs to be heard and overturned by the Supreme Court.

Second, make the conference call. (Next call is Monday, March 16, 7:00 p.m. CST, check http://drdino.com/legalupdate.php for updates.)
Besides just learning this case and what we need to do, it will be an amazing time of digging into our government and our Constitution beyond anything you ever imagined.

Third, follow the Lord’s leading.
We are up against spiritual oppression, so there is no textbook-format to follow to make this situation work out. God knows it and can tell each of us what to do.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me any time. I am a super-busy person already, but this project has to take priority because it is a 90-day window to save our freedom. So please pass this along to anyone else who can help as well!

Blessings, Peace, Freedom,
Adrienne Gilbert

The entire sad defense story is built on lies. Hovind is not in jail for practicing his religion — he’s in jail for tax evasion. If you read his legal update, you will discover that he has several feeble arguments that will not hold up. He claims that he was advised by legitimate lawyers that he did not have to pay taxes, and that he did not knowingly structure cash transactions to avoid reporting requirements. Unfortunately, he lives in a country where everyone knows of the 15 April deadline for filing their taxes, where tax cheats are publicly excoriated (especially by the right wing, of which he is a member), where it is well known that tax fraud is an avenue for arresting criminals — Al Capone, for instance — and where we have a prominent public institution, the IRS, which is inescapably well known, again especially among right-wingers, who love to shake their fists at it. When you get a lawyer who throws around terms like “subornation of false muster” and claims that taxation of any kind is unconstitutional, in complete defiance of the obvious operational reality surrounding him, you should know that you’re not working rationally (although, of course, Hovind’s entire professional life is wrapped up in denying reality, so perhaps this is no surprise.) And finally, Hovind and his wife made a whole series of bank withdrawals that were just slightly under the $10,000 limit that would trigger reporting of the activity. They knew. They knew very well what they were doing.

So sure, pray, pray, pray. It’s a complete waste of time, and I encourage the Hovinds to engage in that activity all they want. That con artist has received the punishment he deserves; sadly, it looks like his son, Eric Hovind, is planning to follow in his footsteps — I suspect because he isn’t smart enough to do anything productive with his life.

And with that hypocritical announcement, the Intelligent Design creationist blog bans DaveScot, for writing a comment that points out that anti-evolutionists have a history of using Christian ideas to advocate racism.

I am greatly amused.

Feel in need of a purgative? Watch this video of Michael Shermer interviewing a creation “scientist” at the Creation Museum. I could only make it halfway through before closing it in disgust.

Ugh. Georgia Purdom is a blind weasel: for example, she berates Christian evolutionists for “interpreting” the bible instead of reading it literally, and then says, “We know from scripture that the earth is no more than 6000 years old:. The bible says nothing of the kind. That is a product of peculiar interpretations of the book.

Then when Shermer presses her on what kinds of experiments she would do to test her assertions, she says, “We wouldn’t do that because we know there’s no point in doing that, because the Bible has the answer.” There’s no science there; that’s a plain admission.

Those creationists sure do love their hypocrisy: on one day, they whine about their version of “academic freedom”, which means demanding that creationism be given equal time with legitimate science in the classroom, and the next they throw a hissy fit because someone they disagree with is speaking, such as Barbara Forrest or Richard Dawkins. After failing to block Dawkins from speaking at OU, the Oklahoma legislature is looking for excuses to retroactively punish the university for spending money on his visit. They seem to have this idea that academics they dislike should always work for free, while the ones they like ought to be unquestioningly showered with honoraria.

That’s not the way the system works. Everyone in academia knows that student groups get small allotments of cash to use as they see fit to promote their organization and ideas; this usually works in the conservatives’ favor, because if you look at any university’s roster of student organizations, there’ll be a dozen or more Christian clubs at the trough and maybe one or two, if you’re lucky, freethought clubs. If they want to play that game, bring it on — let’s make Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ squeal when we apply the restrictions uniformly and cut them off. Or perhaps the Oklahoma legislators are intending to apply a religious bias to their disbursement of funds?

Likewise, academic departments have small pots of money for bringing in speakers. Is Oklahoma going to meddle directly in the decisions of every unit on a campus? Is their version of “academic freedom” just a fancy justification for micromanagement?

It’s all moot anyway in this case. Dawkins waived his speaking fee for the Oklahoma event. Meanwhile, recently Ben Stein billed OSU $60,000 to speak — where’s the investigation there?

Todd Wood teaches a creationism course at a bible college, and he has a creationism blog. He has one of the most promising introductions to his way of thinking ever.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into four main components: design, natural evil, systematics, speciation, and biogeography.

That sentence alone is just a marvel.

Read the whole thing, though, and you’ll laugh and laugh. He tries to justify all those “well-designed” predators like venomous snakes, and all he’s got is the usual creationist answer to all those nasty critters. The Fall. The Curse. God had to do an amazing redesign act after Eve bit that apple.

I may have to check into that blog now and then for the comic relief.

Thomsen is the Republican representative in Oklahoma who proposed several resolutions that would censure the OU zoology department and Richard Dawkins for not being nice to creationism. You really must see his justification for condemning views he finds religiously disagreeable.

I am trying to promote free thinking. I strongly oppose the Department of Zoology for their unwillingness to lead our state in this discussion and not have opposing views in this matter.

I do not believe Todd Thomsen even knows what free thinking is. The zoology department is not leading the state in the discussion of creationism because the members of the zoology department, as is true for biologists everywhere, have examined the claims of creationists and discovered that even under the most superficial scrutiny, they are transparently nothing but collections of incoherent, fragmentary superstitions clumsily tied together with a glue of lies, spit, and bile. As I’ve said before, you could ask biologists to speak out more about creation “theory”, but the results would not bring much joy to your local churches.

But do go read that article in the OU Daily, and in particular note the laudable comment from Michael J. Davis. Davis obligingly includes Todd Thomsen’s email, and I think that since Representative Thomsen places such importance on the communication of diverse views, everyone ought to take a moment and let him know exactly what his standing in the wider universe might be.

And remember, next election cycle, Mr Thomsen deserves to be unemployed.

It’s the obligatory annual newspaper article on creationists confronted with evidence. In this case, young ignoramuses from Liberty University are filed through the Smithsonian Institution to practice closing their minds, while a newspaper reporter echoes their rationalizations. I hate these exercises in bad journalism: there is absolutely no critical thinking going on here, either among the creationists or the reporter writing it up. An example:

“I love it here,” said Ross, who has a doctorate in geosciences from the University of Rhode Island. “There’s something romantic about seeing the real thing.”

Modern creationists don’t deny the existence of dinosaurs but believe that God made them, and all animals, on the same sixth day that he created man. In fact, Ross’s only real beef in the fossil hall is with the 30-foot lighted column that is a timeline marking 630 million years of geology. As a young-Earth creationist, he asserts that the vast majority of the rocks and fossils were formed during Noah’s flood about 4,000 years ago. Most paleontologists date the T-Rex to 65 million years ago.

You know, it is possible to be a Christian and still have a rational respect for the evidence. Take, for example, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, an opponent of evolution in the 19th century, but also someone who worked out details of the geological column and determined that the idea that there was a single, defining world-wide flood was untenable. Or Charles Lyell, who struggled with the idea of evolution because it conflicted with his religious beliefs, but who was a major force in bringing about the understanding of geology as a product of continually acting forces. Or the Reverend William Buckland, who believed in a global flood, but regarded it as insufficient to account for the wealth of geological complexity — he would not have looked at the timeline and tried to compress it into the product of a single biblical event.

These were people working almost 200 years ago. The question of flood geology has long been settled — it’s wrong. And the evidence has only gotten stronger since for an old earth and a complex history. Marcus Ross is a man standing among a collection of some of the best and strongest and most thoroughly vetted and cross-checked evidence that directly contradicts what he claims, and he is spluttering out ignorant uncomprehending gibberish. He has a doctorate in the geosciences, we are always told, but he learned nothing. That ought to be the story here, about the peculiar psychology of these purblind creationists, but the journalist just let’s it slide by.

How bad is the ‘education’ these poor students receive at Liberty University? This anecdote tells the tale.

Near the end of the “Evolution Trail,” the class showed no signs of being swayed by the polished, enthusiastic presentation of Darwin’s theory. They were surprised, though, by the bronze statue of man’s earliest mammalian ancestor.

“A rat?” exclaimed Amanda Runions, a 21-year-old biochemistry major, when she saw the model of a morganucodon, a rodent-like ancient mammal that curators have dubbed Grandma Morgie. “All this hype for a rat? You’re expecting, like, at least an ape.”

Morganucodon is a genus of early mammals that lived over 200 million years ago. 200 million years ago. We’re talking about the Upper Triassic, in the early part of the Mesozoic. She is expecting apes? She thinks the only animals worth getting excited about must be primates? She is surprised by the fact that paleontology reveals a succession of forms, with the only mammals in the early Mesozoic being small rat-like forms? Oh, dear, don’t introduce her to the Paleozoic, she’ll be shocked at the mere fish that represent our ancestors of the time.

The real story here, the one that the staff writer for the Washington Post ignored, is that Liberty University is victimizing young people like that woman and making them believe that they are biochemistry majors when they’re actually being intellectually abused by an anti-scientific propaganda mill. There was a time when investigative journalism was actually practiced, and this would be an opportunity to expose a disgraceful pseudo-academic fraud.