A couple of weeks ago, the anti-evolution documentary Expelled, a project of intellect-wannabe Ben Stein, was previewed to anyone who would sign up. Science blogger extraordinaire PZ Myers signed up and took science writer extraordinaire Richard Dawkins as a guest. Myers was IDed (no pun) and ordered to leave the premises before he could enter the theater; Dawkins, in what is now science blogger legend, was unrecognized and allowed in. Science blogs were beside themselves with the duplicity of it all: Expelled posits that anti-evolution professors are being blackballed from teaching. Academia being too terrified of being proven wrong, they expel opposing viewpoints. Myers and Dawkins had a good laugh and mocked what sounds to be an eminently mockable film. Geesh, the subtitle is "No Intelligence Allowed," so it's like they're asking for it.
I read, laughed, and assumed that this deceitful concept would die a death of isolation, believed only by the insulated hyper-Christian clique. Alas, I listened to Marketplace today and fear that the venomous Christian self-martyrdom that took a feverish hold in the Left Behind series, moved to the Xtian torture-porn of The Passion of the Christ, will now manifest its mysteries in this anti-science documentary. The backers of the film have pocketed marketing firms to match the purchased indulgences of Gibson's Passion: cash awards for churches that have the greatest attendance at the screenings and for the best song that sings a joyful noise against the evil scientists. Have you no fucking shame?
Wikipedia's entry on the brouhaha has more. PZ Myers' first post on being expelled. Video of Myers and Dawkins talking about their respective experiences at and not-at the screening. Google search on related articles.
So Mr Stein, dogmatic science and atheism leads to Naziism?
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited."
Ummm...that was Adolf Hitler (12 April 1922 in Munich_.
Is the premise of this "documentary" that easy to sink?
WTF?
Posted by: Mason at April 6, 2008 02:00 PM