Your point? That's an entirely different claim from the one Brain tries to refute. See below.
Zamis1 wrote:The belief that God himself wrote the Bible is very strong among fundamentalists.
No, rather it is the belief that God inspired human authors to write an error-free Bible that is very strong among fundamentalists and many other Christians.
Zamis1 wrote:All "young-earth creationists" believe that the Bible is literal truth -- otherwise they would not believe that the creation story is literally true.
This isn't entirely true. Most young-earth creationists still take figuratively the prophesies in Daniel referring to beasts, for example. It is true that young-earth creationists, like most other Christians, do believe significant portions of the Bible to be literally true. This is different from the claim that God directly wrote the wording.
No, he's just an easy guy to attack because his views are so poorly supported. Even
Answers in Genesis, one of the most prominent young-earth creationist organizations today, agrees that many of Hovind's claims are unsupported.
Zamis1 wrote:There are so many creationists that they can steer science curriculums state-wide in places like Kansas.
There are quite a few creationists, but it was actually the intelligent design people that had an effect on the science curriculum in Kansas. Most in the ID crowd are not young-earth creationists. For instance, Michael Behe (author of
Darwin's Black Box) is a theistic evolutionist who believes that God used evolution to create life over billions of years, but had to intervene to do so.
Zamis1 wrote:Brain also has this interesting discussion on the authorship of the Bible:
Brain had an interesting chance to reference some scholarly sources, and then didn't. Perhaps because the scholarly sources disagreed with his views...
For instance, perhaps if he had ever taken an ancient history course at any point of his life, he would know that slavery in the ancient world had important differences from American slavery in the 1800s. If he actually read from the Bible itself and not just quotes from other skeptics, he would know that ancient Israel had a "year of Jubilee" every 7 years in which all slaves were freed. I've actually just scratched the surface in terms of immediately obvious errors in this part of Brain's work, but I don't see the point in writing a substantial refutation of a work for which the author has obviously done too little homework.
I guess another obvious error worth mentioning is that Brain completely ignores passages in the New Testament about how the law no longer applies to Gentiles. We can safely ignore parts of Old Testament law which were only applicable to ancient Hebrew culture. Reasoned study is needed to know when this is the case. A library of peer-reviewed theological journals can be found at many Christian seminaries, and would be a good source for further information.