Showing posts with label Kent Hovind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kent Hovind. Show all posts

Human Giants over ten feet tall? No solid evidence. Kent Hovind and other creationists aren't even curious enough to research the tall tales they help spread.

Human Giants over ten feet tall?

Human Giants

A “Human Giant” Unearthed in Early Nineteenth Century Sicily?
Creationists, Carl Baugh and Kent Hovind never expressed any curiosity as to where Burdickʼs “photo” of a “human skeleton over ten feet tall” originated, neither could they tell me when I [Ed Babinski] asked them. I kept asking around the internet until someone who knew Burdick before he had died sent me information concerning the photoʼs origin. The photo was taken with improper focus, and it is not a photo from the 1800s but a blurry photo of a hand-engraved illustration that was specially created to appear in a book from the 1800s, a book of unsubstantiated tales.

Giant Animals in the Past and Giant Human Being over Ten Feet Tall
(I cite cases of very large and very small animals co-existing in past ages, even today, and I cite an article on the topic of both the “Nephilim” and “Goliath” from a conservative Southern Baptist publication).

Biblical Giants and Dinosaur Bones

by Michael S. Heiser, Evangelical Christian and Scholar-in-Residence for Logos Bible Software. (Logos is the leading creator of software for research in the original languages of the Bible and digital library collections for biblical studies. Heiser is responsible for reviewing academic content and creating digital tools for classroom use or independent learners. Heister is also Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies, Liberty University Distance Learning Program; Lynchburg, VA), and he is the author of “Giants—Greco-Roman Antiquity,” in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 10 (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2015), and, “When Giants Walked the Earth,” Bible Study Magazine 1:4 (May-June, 2009).

According to Heiser:

“Nephilim are clearly cast as giants in the Old Testament, though I do not believe any such people were taller than unusually tall people of today, see

Additional pieces by Heiser on “human giants” are on this page. See also his blog entry, “Dinosaur Petroglyphs and a Lesson in Intellectual Dishonesty”

In two books to be published 2015 Heiser tackles the question “Who were the Nephilim?” and many more questions.

Dinosaurs & Humans Co-Existed?

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A Tall Tale Still Repeated by Everyone from Creationists (like Kent Hovind) to Velikovsky-ists

A Tall Tale Still Repeated by Creationists

A tall tale I ran across over the years concerns the alleged discovery of a Ninety-foot tall plum tree found frozen in place above the Arctic Circle with green leaves and plums still on the branches, that everyone from creationists to Velikovsky-ists claim was discovered by Baron von Toll, and which proves every hypothesis from The Genesis Flood story, or a 9,600 BC Earth Crustal Displacement, to catastrophic tilts of the earthʼs axis, that caused “instantaneous freezing” in parts of the world.

Today I discovered that someone built on my investigation, taking it to new depths!

He ended his article with…

“Even though Babinski wrote his debunking almost twenty years ago, the myth of the ninety-foot fruit tree is still alive and well. As a plum tree, Tollʼs tree continues to appear in creationist literature usually as evidence of the Noachian Deluge. Among secular catastrophists, the tree usually appears among supporters of Hapgoodʼs crustal displacement, such as Graham Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath (yes, thatʼs his real name). Babinskiʼs debunking gets linked to and copy/pasted into online fora again and again to no avail. Cut the tree down in one place and it pops up in another. Recycling is an essential part of fringe writing. The writers comb through each otherʼs works for anecdotes to use as evidence for their pet theories. Many writers never leave the echo chamber nor look for any new information that might challenge their anecdotes or even add a couple of interesting new details. Leaving the echo chamber would expose them to actual authorities and those are to be avoided at all costs; theyʼre out to suppress the truth. For fringe writers, other fringe writers, even those with competing theories are better sources than actual experts. For that reason, we can expect to see Baron von Tollʼs giant fruit tree again and again into the future.”

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The Failure of the Search for Evidence of Human Giants Over Ten Feet Tall, The Nephilim, et al. A Creationist Story of Obsession

What creationists (like Carl Baugh and Kent Hovind) “see” below is “photographic evidence” that human giants over ten feet tall existed.

Big Skeleton

The source of the “photograph” turns out to be an engraving from a book that contains an unsubstantiated story

Source

One finds endless pages of bunk on “human giants” (over ten feet all) on the web, a hodgepodge of photoshopped images (people neglect to even google the words, “photoshop human giant,” or check Snopes and other urban myth tracking sites to see the evidence that such images were photoshopped.

Source

Even a video showing you how). One can also find ancient reports that simply talk about the bones of human giants being found but lack any bones to back up the talk (we don't know if the bones were human, since in the 1700 and 1800s plenty of such misinterpretations existed due to discovering large mammal and dinosaur bones that people supposed might be human). The “solid” evidence for human giants over ten feet tall consists of carved giant human-looking statues. One such statue can be seen leaning up against a train in Great Britain:

Source: “The Living Moon Forum”

Both raked in money for their owners who put them on display. See the full story below.

A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America

The “discovery” of the “petrified Cardiff Giant” in the 1860s directly preceded the “discoveries” of both the “petrified Irish Giant” and even a “petrified Revolutionary War soldier” in the 1890s.

The “discoverer” of the “petrified Irish Giant,” Mr. Dyer, said it had been dug up in County Antrim, Ireland, in the 1890s. We'll see below why that claim itself is part of the hoax. Dyer, after showing the “giant” in Dublin, came to England with his find and exhibited it in Liverpool and Manchester at sixpence a head, which was exactly what happened in America in the 1860s with the “Cardiff Giant,” the parallel hoax. P.T. Barnum made loads of money displaying the Cardiff Giant, which probably gave Dyer the idea to carve a giant in a similar posture, though with a modest covering for its naughty bits, because after all, Ireland was a Catholic country, though Dyer made his carving two feet taller than the Cardiff giant. (The “petrified Revolutionary War Soldier” apparently was also carved in a somewhat similar position, but was not gigantic, though it didn't need to be, it's draw was its southern heritage.) Note that the county in Ireland where Dyer allegedly “discovered” the “Irish Giant” also was home to the mythologically named “Giant's Causeway,” i.e., County Antrim in Ireland.. But the “Giant's Causeway,” has as little to do with actual giants as does the carving that Dyer put on display to make a buck. But by making such a claim Dyer set up a mythological connection in the minds of Great Britain's ticket-buying public.

A different mythological connection existed in the U.S., reaching back to claims by prominent Puritan settlers in New England that fossilized mammoth bones belonged to “human giants.” Such connections helped feed the Cardiff Giant hoax. See the article, “When Giants Roamed the Earth: In the Golden Age of Hoaxes, Petrified Men Came to Life” by Mark Rose, Archaeology, Volume 58 Number 6, Nov./Dec. 2005

Google: “Cardiff Giant” to see how the posture of the first carved hoax was recreated in the “Irish” Giant, plus a couple feet added in height. The hoax grew, literally. And google some pics of the Giant's Causeway sites below to learn more about the myth that “giants” created it:

Another “petrified man” claim from the 1890s was that of a “petrified Revolutionary War soldier” on display in South Carolina. It was an easy way to make a buck back then, simply by charging a small amount to allow people to take a peek at your “discovery”

Another image I often see is based on unsubstantiated tales of Patagonian Giants. The Patagonian giant frenzy died down substantially when some more sober and analytical accounts were published. For instance in 1773 John Hawkesworth published on behalf of the Admiralty a compendium of noted English southern-hemisphere explorersʼ journals, including that of James Cook and John Byron. In this publication, drawn from their official logs, it became clear that the people Byron's expedition had encountered were no taller than 6-foot-6-inch (1.98 m), tall perhaps but by no means giants. See these pieces:

  1. Giants
  2. Patgonian Giants

Speaking of research on human giants, see this piece on Men Over Ten Feet Tall that I wrote years ago.

Years after the above piece was composed someone sent me the exact origin of the so-called “photo” of an 11’ 6” skeleton. The image was originally an artist's engraving from The Tongue of Time, a book published in 1838 (before the invention of permanent non-fading photos, so books at that time did not even contain photographs). This link for the original artist's engraving.

A creationist took a blurry photograph of the above engraving and other creationists claimed that the blurry photo of the engraving constituted photographic evidence! But one can see, all the images in the book are engravings created just to accompany the stories.. The story has remained unsubstantiated to this day, and also mentions tales of “Cyclops” in ancient Sicily. But archaeologists have noted that the ancient Greeks probably confused mammoth leg bones and their skulls for the remains of “human giants.” The huge skull of the mammoth has as a large “socket” in the middle which would have been for the mammoth's trunk, but the Greeks probably pictured that “socket” as the eyehole of a human giant, not knowing about ancient mammoths once roaming Europe. Check out this photo.

And see this book:

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