Sarcastro, superhero-in-training who combats evil with “the razor-sharp sting of sarcasm”(from The Tick)

How can following Christ's own challenge-riposte be “un-Christlike”? Have these critics actually even read what Christ said? There is nothing in the Bible demanding that we should be like [C]hrist only when He was gentle, but not when He used riposte.

1) Kent Hovind is a “Christian gentleman” who did nothing wrong and who now has been silenced by the Government.

2) Kent Hovind and all creation-believers are ignorant, backward, venom-spewing frauds.

Rarely does a “standard” Biblical creation advocate as myself enter the fray and suddenly acquire the appearance of a Moderate. Yet this is what has happened here. The Hovind-advocates have tried to ignore my questions, and criticisms of the now-convicted “Dr. Dino,” and the evolutionists merely offer their tried-and-trite ad hominem screeds.

The following are some highlights, with adjustments made only to formatting.

After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:

— Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.

— Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.

— Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.

Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers postponed her sentencing until March 1 to allow her defense attorney an opportunity to argue possible discrepancies in sentencing guidelines.

Prior to his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind, also known as "Dr. Dino" asked for the court’s leniency.

“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.

Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, was found guilty in November of 58 federal counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. He faced a maximum of 288 years in prison.

Facing temporary extinction

It was disappointing to me to see the way thousands of “Christians” and even quite a few preachers have believed the worst about me in direct violation of Proverbs 18:13. “He that answereth a matter before he hearth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” Oh well, not much has changed in the Lord’s church in 2,000 years.

Hovind faces a maximum of 288 years in prison. His wife faces up to 225 years. Her charges include aiding and abetting her husband with 44 counts of evading bank-reporting requirements.

[. . .]

Defense lawyers for the Hovinds rested their case on Wednesday without presenting evidence or calling witnesses.

Recommended Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church by Wade Rowland

There is a famous story that Galileo, during his second year of university, was watching a lamp swinging in the glorious Romanesque cathedral in Pisa one morning. (He was, we are to presume, bored with the cant and ritual of the service.) It suddenly occurred to him that the lamp always required the same amount of time to complete an oscillation, no matter how wide the swing. This insight led him to suggest the pendulum as a regulating mechanism for clocks. Even today, guides at the cathedral make an ancient bronze lamp hanging in the nave a feature of their tours. The story as it is usually told is a thinly veiled allegory highlighting the superiority of the scientific mind. While the rest of the congregation wasted their time in the protocols of religion, Galileo's scientific mind was alert to the truth. He did in fact experiment with the pendulum later in life, and suggested its use in timekeeping (though he was not the first to do so). But unfortunately for the story, the lamp that he is supposed to have been watching as a youth was cast in 1587, by which time his student days had ended.

We left [a well-known mega-church*]. Here is what transpired and pushed me over the edge (and out of that church).

I attended since 1982, but after a progressive creationist spoke at the church in 2005, I spent the next eight months confronting the elders and staff at the church. Sadness filled my heart to see them reject biblical truth.

There is so much to say about what happened. The bottom line was that I gave up believing there was any hope of the leadership holding a biblical view of the authority of the Word of God.

We withdrew our membership. They had the resident theologian call me to talk about it. The first 30 minutes went well but the last 15 made me angry.

(brackets in original)

[I]f all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, 25 the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.

2 Corinthians 14:24 (ESV)

AiG’s website (answersingenesis.org) spiked to unbelievable numbers! This also shows that the Creation Museum is going to create the interest we have been predicting, with estimated hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

However, the FOX NEWS version of the article (even though as someone once said, “It doesn’t matter what you say about me, just spell my name right”) does fairly blatantly exhibit some of the usual anti-creationist agenda we’ve seen from some of the secular media.

The AP article appeared in many other news sources across the nation and other parts of the world! And we’ve already had a number of different Christian media call for interviews! We are going to have a busy few days fitting in interviews (as I already did today) and making sure other commitments are not neglected! But, it is thrilling to be that busy anyway—it is thrilling because it means we have opportunity to tell the public the truth about God’s Word and the gospel.

A Pensacola evangelist was arrested Thursday and indicted in federal court on 58 charges that include income tax evasion, making threats against investigators and filing false complaints against Internal Revenue Service agents.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis handed down the indictment against Kent Hovind, who operated a creationist theme park Dinosaur Adventure Land, off Old Palafox Road.

Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, was also indicted on 44 of the counts and appeared in court alongside her husband.

Arraignment for the Hovinds is scheduled for2 p.m. Monday. The couple was released pending their trial but are not allowed to travel outside the Northern District of Florida.

Recommended The Revised and Expanded Answers Book: The 20 Most-Asked Questions About Creation, Evolution, & the Book of Genesis Answered by Ken Ham, Jonathan Sarfati, Carl Wieland, Don Batten

In the [cartoon's] courtroom, a stereotype is fueled: that there are no Christians who are real scientists. Although one expert witness for the prosecution claims to be a scientist and declares there are still missing links, his degree is shown to be from some Christian-based diploma mill.

While on the stand to argue against Lisa, anti-evolutionist Ned Flanders loses his cool when Lisa’s father (Homer) creates such a stir in the courtroom that Ned calls him a gorilla. It prompts the judge to wonder whether Homer might be a missing link himself. The case is dismissed when Ned admits the possibility that Homer could be related to an ape.

In an attempt to be serious, the cartoon has a moralizing (usually politically liberal) Lisa present the tired argument that religion should not be taught in schools and that scientists should not teach in churches. Ned, the evangelical, concurs, saying that a few more young people like Lisa should “evolve.” The program ends.

Recommended Refuting Evolution 2 by Jonathan Sarfati, Mike Matthews

Small damages to sequences in the human genome are causing evolutionary changes in our DNA, according to a group of Japanese geneticists.

Their recent findings prove that a common form of DNA damage caused by oxidation (called 8-oxoG) is a primary cause of mutagenesis, damage to DNA during the genome replication process that causes mutations in the resulting DNA molecules.

Succinctly, the human race is genetically mutating, and we now may know how and why--at least in part.

X-Men may be closer than you think

Google Inc. has come out with something that's a bit like Etch A Sketch gone 3-D.

The search giant's latest free software program, called Google SketchUp, allows users to use a basic mouse to drag-and-click their way to recreating their house, erecting a fantastic sculpture or sizing up a potential kitchen redesign.

“3-D is probably one of the most expressive tools to express dreams,” said Brad Schell, who founded Boulder, Colo.-based SketchUp in 1999, sold the company to Google last month and still manages the product. Most existing three-dimensional drawing software is highly technical and hard to use, he said, so it limits the audience to architects, structural engineers, graphics artists and the like.

By comparison, Google SketchUp, the free version of SketchUp's software available for download at http://sketchup.google.com/, consists of less than a dozen basic commands for drawing. Clicking and dragging a line creates a trapezoidal shape; another adjustment to the height creates a box. Using another tool, it's possible to rotate and pan around the created structure, so you can view it from any angle, including from below.

Curves, lines and texture can also be added, and the software comes with stock images of people, benches, trees and more.