Something nasty seems to get passed on with the name “Hovind”, anyway. Eric Hovind’s latest stunt: He’s ‘taking back’ Earth Day with a silly, misguided campaign to replace tree-planting with Christian evangelism, and with selling t-shirts to benefit his lunatic ministry. There’s nothing in his plans about conservation or protecting endangered habitats or species — he’s only hijacking the holiday as a pretext for more god-babbling.

His father, Kent Hovind, gets out of prison in 2015. Then there will be two of these scumbags fleecing the public and lying in the name of their god.

Amazingly, a gang of ignorant young-earth creationist crazies who are running fundamentalist home-schooling conferences decided that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis were just too crazy even for them, and they have formally banned AiG from appearing at any of their conferences. This wasn’t a dictate from irate scientists or atheists, either: this decree has come down from his own people, fellow creationists who also believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that God shuffled every kind of animal on the planet into a big boat before drowning everyone else. Here’s the official letter they sent to AiG:

After much prayer and deliberation over the weekend, Great Homeschool Convention’s Advisory Board has unanimously decided to disinvite Ken and AIG from all future conventions, including the Cincinnati convention next week. The Board believes this to be the Lord’s will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision. The Board believes that Ken’s public criticism of the convention itself and other speakers at our convention require him to surrender the spiritual privilege of addressing our homeschool audience.Please know that our Board is 100% young earth and we largely share AIG’s perspective from a scientific standpoint. That is why Ken was originally invited and treated so graciously and extremely generously in Memphis and Greenville (far beyond what we do for other speakers or their ministries). Our expression of sacrifice and extraordinary kindness towards Ken and AIG has been returned to us and our attendees with Ken publicly attacking our conventions and other speakers. Our Board believes Ken’s comments to be unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst.

One of the core values of our convention is that we believe that good people can disagree and still be good people. We believe that Christians do not need to personally question the integrity, the intelligence, or the salvation of other Christians when debating Biblical issues. Ken has obviously felt led to publicly attack our conventions and a number of our speakers. We believe that what Ken has said and done is unChristian and sinful. A number of attendees are demanding explanations from our board and we must respond to them.

We believe that Dr. Ham is very intelligent and deliberate and that he decided that publicly slandering our conventions and defaming a number of our speakers is what he wanted to do. Whereas Ken chooses to conduct himself in a way that we believe to be unscriptural, we cannot countenance that spirit as we believe it would not honor the Savior whom we serve.

A public statement will be prepared for distribution at the convention explaining our Board’s decision. Anyone who inquires regarding Dr. Ham or AIG will be referred to that statement. We have no intention to defame or publicly slander Dr. Ham, the Creation Museum, or the work of AIG. Our Board would respectfully request that Dr. Ham and AIG prayerfully consider doing the same. Our Board takes seriously the admonition of Jesus in John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Sincerely,

Brennan Dean
Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc.

Ooooh, burn. These people are deranged, but there they are, chastising Ken Ham for being beyond the pale. It’s got to sting when all the other inmates in the asylum shun you.

I really should stop linking to these bozos, since they don’t ever bother to link to any sites outside their incestuous coterie of jebus-wanking apologetics sites, but I cannot resist. Ken Ham is bragging about his web traffic, and it’s rather pathetic.

• In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main website had more than 10 million visits for the first time (10,225,465 visits, previously 8,726,503–a 17% growth) from more than 5 million unique visitors (5,445,617 unique visitors, previously 4,650,206–a 17% growth).

• The Creation Museum website had more than 1 million visits for the first time (1,079,290 visits, previously 899,890–a 19.9% growth).

• The Answers Vacation Bible School (VBS) website had more than 100,000 visits for the first time (110,767 visits, previously 34,231–a 223% growth), with almost half a million page views (476,551 page views, previously 122,301–a 289% growth).

Oooh. Millions are big numbers. But just to put it all into perspective, some random low-ranking non-entity of a godless college professor in the most rural part of Minnesota gets about 25-30 million visits per year, and yeah, it’s growing every year. And his site links regularly to AiG, meaning a lot of the visitors to Ham’s precious empire are there to laugh at him.

And I’m not bragging — I know I’m dwarfed by the really big players, and that web hits are not instruments of self-validation. You can get lots of traffic by being one of the dumbest punching bags for national stupidity on the web, after all, just like Answers in Genesis. That his traffic isn’t even close to a mere blog tells you that biblical literalism possibly isn’t all that popular a draw.

Creationists make some crazy claims about fossils — Ken Ham, for instance, is adamant that T. rex was a vegetarian before the Fall. So let’s all laugh together.

Those fun-loving folks at Answers in Genesis have been revealing some of their spectacular plans for the Ark Encounter theme park. Would you believe that one of them is a ride celebrating the ten plagues of Egypt?

Oh, yeah, come on down! Nothing says fun like blood, boils, gnats, cholera, and dead children!

It was true in the Creation “Museum”, and it’s going to be true in this theme park: these creationists worship death and suffering.

A while back, I had a guest post here by Amy Peters; in it, she described taking her son to the zoo and being awed and choking up at the similarities between us and chimpanzees — it’s a nice moment of transcendance, when a person sees a deeper connection.

One of the creationist dim-bulbs at Answers in Genesis, Georgia Purdom, read that story (by the way, it’s kind of sweet that the creationists so regularly read Pharyngula — Hi, Georgia! Hi, Ken!) and took away a very different message, one that reflects a tiresome reflexive trope among those of very little brain, and also shows that for all that religious talk of a mystical beyond and senses beyond the mundane, believers have no poetry in their souls. Ms Purdom’s take on the story? “Mother Teaches Four-year-old That Humans Are Animals”. Her response is also a complete non sequitur.

How sad! I’m choked up, too, but not for the same reason. I wonder what this mother would think if her son grew up and murdered someone. I’m sure she would be horrified. But if the Bible isn’t true and humans are animals, then she wouldn’t have a basis for saying what her son did was wrong, because after all, he’s just an animal, and morality doesn’t apply to animals.

Huh? What? How does looking into a chimpanzee’s eyes lead to a comparison with her son growing up to be a murderer? There’s nothing in a chimp’s demeanor that invites a similarity with the pathology of murder — if it’s just the low brow and the hairy face, then Ms Purdom must get a fright every time she goes into the office and sees Ken Ham. If Peters had looked at a peacock, would Purdom be sad about how her child would grow up to be a Vegas chorine? If she’d spotted a parasitic fungus, would Purdom be enraptured because the kid might grow up to one day work for Answers in Genesis? There is no connection here.

I’m always astounded, too, at how a group of pseudoscientists can have such a petty, miserable view of life. “Just an animal” is a phrase a biologist can only use ironically; show me a worm, and I’ll tell you how grand and majestic a creature it is. It does not diminish us to appreciate the beauty of our fellow travelers down the long road of evolution.

And I’ve got news for Ms Purdom: the majority of people on this planet do not accept the ‘truth’ of the Bible, and morality is not restricted to Christians. Those people who have gone a step further and rejected all holy books, and those people who have recognized the truth found in nature and see our relationship to all of life, are not less moral than the small mob of prospering frauds, liars, and incompetents in a particularly backwards corner of Kentucky. Her whole argument is bogus.

Amy Peters herself has responded to Purdom, and Tantalus Prime has chimed in, too. One amusing thing about it all: Purdom’s article only contains links to Bible verses and the AiG store, and has not one link to anything anyone she opposes has written. Way to go!

Ken Ham really hates those weasely Christians who accept the phrase “millions of years” more than he does us atheists, I think. He really gets worked up over Biologos, but I only got as far as this paragraph:

If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. It would mean what God wrote through Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 for instance is plain wrong. If we are not all descendants of one man who sinned, then who are we, and why are we sinners?

Well, yes. You might as well throw the Bible away, Kenny boy, and it is wrong.

It really is that simple. Why can’t you see it?

Ham also has some highly twisted logic.

“The reason the age is such an important issue is, from a secular perspective, if you don’t have millions of years, you can’t postulate evolution,” Ham explains. “Think about it: if you believe in a young earth as we do — 6,000 years on the basis of adding up all the dates in the Bible — evolution is impossible. It can’t happen.”

To the creationists, what is true is whatever they want to be true, and they’re so limited in intelligence that they project onto us their attitudes: we don’t say the earth is ancient because we want it to be so in order for evolution to work, but because that is what the evidence tells us.

It’s too bad, too, since I would have learned weeks ago who our ascended master was.

It’s Stephen Hawking, of course: “Most of you know who Stephen Hawking is, right? He talks through a computer and that makes him even more bizarre. People sit with their mouths open, taking it all in like this is the gospel from the ascended master. That’s demonic!“

It’s also a surprise to learn that creationists are also trying to build a ‘life’-sized copy of Noah’s Ark in the Pacific Northwest. This is the first I’ve heard of that…anyone know anything more?