When I was in my late teens, a popular prank was to use the payphone in a packed bar or cafe, call its number and hope that a female member of staff would pick up. If one did, you then said there was an urgent call for someone called Mike Hunt.
Invariably the employee would then bellow: “Is Mike Hunt here” or better still “urgent call for Mike Hunt” and patrons would fall about laughing.
It was stupid and it was crass, and today I cringe at the memory of having pulled that prank myself on several occasions.
I remembered this after reading that an equally dumb trick is being played on fast food restaurant staff – not by some immature college kid but by a 36-year-old “college graduate” who heads Pensacola-based organisation in Florida called Creation Today.
What Eric Hovind does is enter an establishment and tell staff that his name is “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
When his order is ready, a staff member then has to shout those words out loud and thus become a pawn in Hovind’s grand scheme to compel people to inadvertently “witness” for Jesus.
All you gotta do is sit back and let them witness for you.
So proud is he of this juvenile prank that he made a video – Taco Bell Gospel – showing just how well this tactic works.
Commented Friendly Atheist Hermant Mehta:
It’s not clever; it’s just a dick move. Hovind never thinks about how he’d feel if he were behind the counter and someone asked him to say ‘Allah is Lord’ or ‘God doesn’t exist’.
Because the methods don’t matter to him as long as the end result is that his God gets a shout-out. He also doesn’t care about the other people eating there. At best, this is just a pointless annoyance. At worst, he’s putting workers in a very uncomfortable position.
Here are a few things you should know about Hovind, courtesy of Rational Wiki:
Eric Hovind is an uneducated huckster who has followed in the footsteps of his father Kent Hovind, a convicted felon and creationist wingnut.
After his father’s ten year prison sentence in 2007, Eric took over Creation Science Evangelism and renamed it Creation Today in 2012. Hovind uses YouTube to sell nuggets of wisdom, like his home-produced DVD Creation Today series and is now asking for a million dollars so he can make Genesis 3D and then sell it.
Eric Hovind attended Pensacola Christian Academy, a kindergarten to grade twelve Christian school operated by Arlin Horton that teaches young Earth creationism, finishing in 1997.
Hovind’s one attempt at completing a credential in higher education was Jackson Hole Bible College in 1999, which is not a real college.
Jackson Hole is an unaccredited, one year Christian school at a campsite that offers a “Diploma in Biblical Foundations” (not to be confused with real credentials such as degrees that take years of study complete). Unlike real college classes that are taught by people with PhDs for several weeks, Jackson’s classes last only a week, such as its “backpacking” class.
This means Hovind has no education or credentials in science. He has admitted that he has never taken a class on evolution at a secular college and judging from Hovind’s own biography he hasn’t even spent one day in any science class at an accredited community college.
This is despite him operating a million dollar store that specializes in DVDs that accuse scientists (people who have spent decades in classes and labs) of being wrong.
In 2013, Eric Hovind served as a “teacher”, if one calls it that, at Jackson Hole Bible College, where he taught “Presuppositional Evangelism in the 21st Century” for a week. This is the same argument that got publicly torn apart by a child in 2012.
Apparently, the students and operators of the “college-camp site” aren’t as smart as the child and can’t see the flaws in Hovind’s arguments as he was invited back to teach “Presuppositional Evangelism in the 21st Century” in 2014.
Hovind’s Creation Today Facebook page warns:
CUSSING, BLASPHEMY, MOCKERY WILL BE BANNED
Hat tip: BarrieJohn