This video from Kent Hovind starts out weird and then gets incredibly boring. Apparently he’s got a VBS class or something (I am so sorry for those kids), and then he tries something that might have been interesting. Each kid has a paper cutout of the face of some atheist or evolutionist (I’m one of them: skip ahead to 3:45), and he sets it up as if he’s going to debate us, via his students as proxies. It might actually be pedagogically useful, for whatever end you have, to try and have students take the role of a critic of the instructor’s position — It was strange to see my face waved around on a stick, but I was actually looking forward to seeing how they would present my views, especially since Hovind says he wants to debate me (ain’t happening).
But he does nothing with it. After mentioning the names of some evolutionists, he drops the whole game and just reads from the Bible for 20 minutes. That’s all.
This is just terrible teaching. It gave me flashbacks to my long-ago confirmation classes, in which I was supposed to memorize Lutheran dogma and repeat it back to the pastor. Eww, I just literally shuddered.
Come on, Kent. Your ideas are batfucking wacko, but I expect a little freaky dynamism to go with ’em, and you can’t even manage that.
PZ, I didn’t picture you being the type to sit in the back of the classroom. You did get a couch though.
It’s obvious: the children behind the masks kicked his A** in the debate so he had to find some way to fill the 20 min of humiliation that he deleted.
On a side note, his son Eric is trying raise another $350,000 to release his Genesis movie and apparently Kent’s new wife may have left him.
Even among creationists, Hovind’s dense. He flat out refuses to process or absorb any information about evolution given to him by real scientists. Even if he did try to represent your views, he would just revert to entry-level creationist straw men, like saying that evolution says we “came from rocks”. At least other creationists have learned to misrepresent science in more complex ways.
This could backfire on him. If any of those kids happen to get access to the internet and do a little real research on the scientists and atheists that they were introduced to they might actually learn something. It could start them on the path to becoming skeptical of what they have been taught, as real education so often does.
Maybe he’s just having an off week. Give the guy a break; it must be hard to be bat-shit insane all the time, every time.
Magistramaria: That’s what happened to me at an advanced age. I was Assisting Minister, Head Reader, Choir Member, Worship and Music Committee Member and more when the Associate Pastor recommended “The Q Gospel” to me. I read “The Lost Gospel” (Mack) and that lead to “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent,” “The Origin of Satan,” “The Origin of Sin” and much more including the Gnostic Gospels, the Torah, and pre-Christian pagan systems. I left the active practice of religion. I still study religion and its effects as it played and plays such an important role in human affairs. But, I’m no longer a believer.
Got me. I read VBS as he was teaching Visual Basic and wondered how that fit in.