Fond as I am of the guy, I can’t fault people for being critical of Kent Hovind. David Edwards of Raw Story has gone over the line though in his recent post on Hovind.

I declared an end to L’Affaire Kent Hovind as a tax story back in August when his co-defendant Paul Hansen received a below-guidelines sentence.  I did mention Kent on forbes.com in my annual round-up of high traffic posts. Standards on Your Tax Matters Partner are a little looser than forbes.com, though, so I have something about Kent that I want to share that is really not tax related.

There was a post on Raw Story – Creationism evangelist: God put contradictions in the Bible to ‘weed out’ the atheists. Apparently David Edwards has been watching Kent Hovind’s thriving youtube channel where he mainly answers bible questions.  The first sentence of the story is:

Young Earth creationism evangelist Kent Hovind asserted this week that God had purposefully put contradictions in the Bible to “weed out” non-believers.

They include a clip.  That runs 1:21.  I didn’t notice it the first time I saw it, because I am old and slow-witted but forewarned is forearmed.  Watch closely at around 0:35.

At any rate, the reason I knew to look for that break was that I went back and watched the whole video from Kent’s channel (Well the first fifteen minutes anyway)

The section that Raw Story excerpted from starts around 4:56 and runs to around 8:00 for a total of over 3 minutes of which Raw Story included less than half.  The part that Raw Story left out was Kent explaining why he did not think the particular passages from Acts under discussion were contradictions.  Kent’s riff, included by Raw Story was about what purpose apparent contradictions might serve.  There is a bit of Hovind grandiosity there as he indicates that the heavenly father is doing things much as Kent would if he were the big guy, but Kent Hovind is not saying that there are contradictions in the bible,

You might want to stay for the next two sections.  There is a question from someone who wants to tithe to Kent’s ministry and Kent’s soft sell approach to donations is very refreshing.

Next comes a flat earth question.  The flat earther attacks on Kent Hovind are really interesting.  I discussed them some here. What I find really intriguing is that Hovind responds entirely with scientific arguments that the earth is not flat..  He mentions that there are scriptures twisted to support flat earth, but he does not get into that.  He also theorizes that atheists started the flat earth stuff, which is classic Hovind conspiracy thinking.

Peter J Reilly is a tax blogger who has been following the Kent Hovind story for over three years.  He is one of the few people who have managed to piss off both Hovind supporters and Hovind detractors with his coverage.  It’s a gift.