The adventures of Kent Hovind, a/k/a Doctor Dino, in Tax Court and other parts of the legal system have gotten me involved in following developments in Creation Science. Tax bloggers have all been breathlessly following the saga of the IRS Cincinnati gang that couldn’t sort straight and the topic of who else the IRS might be picking on has come up. Some people think that Kent Hovind was being persecuted for his creation science beliefs. I have been skeptical about that and now I have a little more evidence that such was not the case. The Creation Science Hall of Fame announced that it just received its recognition letter from the IRS. Retroactive to its incorporation CSHOF is a 501(c)(3) public charity. So your donations to CSHOF are deductible.
The Creation Science Hall of Fame inducted Kent Hovind a few months ago. The discussion of Dr. Hovind’s legal struggles in his CSHOF bio, if you will excuse the expression, evolved over time. At one point there was a fairly elaborate characterization of him as a tax protester, but Hovind himself denies that he is a protester. So ultimately discussion of Dr. Hovind’s tax problems in his CSHOF bio became extinct.
The most charitable view is that Dr. Hovind misunderstood the nature of tax exemptions for religious entities.
Churches do not have to apply for exempt status. This does not mean that some churches are 501(c)(3) organizations and others are not. Churches are, per se, 501(c)(3) organizations while all other organizations have to apply for the status. Churches apply for the status, even though they do not have to, in order to have certainty about their classification.
Professor Edward Zelinsky has explained that there is inevitably a problem when it comes to taxes and churches. You either have entanglement from the government getting caught up in how the church runs in order to apply the tax law to it or you have the boundary problem. The other thing is that not every “ministry” is a church. At any rate, I am glad to learn that CSHOF now has its exempt status.
Nick Lally, Chairman of the Board, of CSHOF has issued an appeal to creationists to appeal to Dr. Hovind to stop fighting the IRS:
The message to Dr. Hovind from us Creationists would be simple: We want to convey to Dr. Hovind to give up his Tax Fight with the IRS and concentrate on “Creation Science” where we need him the most.
CSHOF has one other recent piece of big news up on its website. Walter T. Brown, Jr has arrived at a pretty firm date for the Great Flood. There’s a lot to it. Astronomical observations, some fancy math, historical research all combined, of course, with Scriptural scholarship.
The most-likely date for a “cluster of perihelia” is 3344.5 BC. That is, January of 3344 BC, and six months further back in the past from then. That would put those comets at perihelion in the summer of 3345 BC. Dr. Brown estimates 96 percent confidence for this date. He further estimates an error of about one year.
Maybe next he’ll tackle the other mystery about the Flood – What’s a cubit ?
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Originally published on Forbes.com May 25th, 2013
