A Young Student's Encounter with Kent Hovind

The following is an account of a young student's reaction to a lecture given at his school by "Dr" Kent Hovind.   It is a source of considerable sadness to me that more children, when exposed to Hovind's lies and pseudo science in the classroom, are not as perceptive as John D. 

Hello Mr. Stear,

My name is John and I am seventeen and come from Canada. I would like to thank you for offering a wonderful web site.

I love your page dedicated to creationist frauds.  Last year, I had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Kent Hovind. He talked at a local church and one of his extremist followers is a teacher at my school.  He is in charge of the school's Christian society.  He arranged for Kent Hovind to come and do two lectures at our school.

I was very interested in the topics but amazed by the arguments used.  It opened my eyes to a whole new realm of stupidity.  First of all he called Charles Darwin, "Chuck"!  He also made sure that everyone knew that evolution was the cause of Socialism and The Communist Manifesto of 1848.  This was rather funny to me because I know that The Manifesto was written a decade before The Origin of Species. I questioned him about this and he gave me a brief answer that was complete nonsense and then quickly moved on to another topic and completely ignored me.

I believe he impressed a lot of people though.   These are fifteen and sixteen year olds that haven't researched the evil that is Kent Hovind.  He used the tree in rock argument and also showed us many examples of times where, he claimed, carbon dating has been wrong.  He made sure that we knew that the three of his children were so incredibly smart, and a chip off the old block, and how he loves them, although he is quiet willing to beat the hell out of them to show it. 

I asked many questions and not many of them were answered.  After the second lecture was done I was standing in a group with three of my friends, and he told me that I was an awful person and that I am going to burn in hell for all eternity.  I didn't mean any disrespect to the guy, but I busted out laughing -  I couldn't believe it.  I was very upset at the school for allowing him to come and speak because there was no one to protect the reputation of the other side, except a couple of high school kids.  However, because of Kent Hovind, I find myself dedicated to researching this topic more and more.

I want to know everything about evolution, and I want to be able to answer bogus questions that my friends ask me.  Thanks to the knowledge that I acquired through your web pages, I can now do this.  Over the last few months I believe I have done a pretty good job on this.  I am right now considering starting up my own web pages.  I have a friend who is willing to help me out.  We do believe this is a good thing to fight for. 

John D.