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Originally Posted by mlurp
I like Ben Stein's dry humor... But this is for all of you not just me to express my ideas. The story has links in it if you want more.
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Ben Stein is taking Michael Moore's playbook and attacking evolution with it. This isn't an honest, reasonably considered approach to the question, he has an agenda, and he's willing to lie to people in order to make them look as awful as possible.
The guy is a goddamn idiot, and a lying sack of **** to boot.
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I confess that when the producers of Ben Stein's new documentary "Expelled" called, offering me a private screening, I was less than excited.
It is a reality of PC liberalism: There is only one credible side to an issue, and any dissent is not only rejected, it is scorned. Global warming. Gay "rights." Abortion "rights." On these and so many other issues there is enlightenment, and then there is the Idiotic Other Side. PC liberalism's power centers are the news media, the entertainment industry and academia, and all are in the clutches of an unmistakable hypocrisy: Theirs is an ideology that preaches the freedom of thought and expression at every opportunity, yet practices absolute intolerance toward dissension.
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Evolution is not a political position. It is a scientific position. Painting it as a political position admits outright that you cannot attack it from a scientific perspective.
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Evolution is another one of those one-sided debates. We know the concept of Intelligent Design is stifled in academic circles. An entire documentary to state the obvious? You can see my reluctance to view it.
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Intelligent Design isn't acceptable in academic circles because it's fundamentally ****ing stupid. Moreover, anyone stupid enough to try to champion it is probably too stupid to teach at a professional institution. My understanding is that most of the people who support intelligent design in academia were fired because they were incompetent. No surprise there.
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I went into the screening bored. I came out of it stunned.
Ben Stein's extraordinary presentation documents how the worlds of science and academia not only crush debate on the origins of life, but also crush the careers of professors who dare to question the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution and natural selection.
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What debate?
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Stein asks a simple question: What if the universe began with an intelligent designer, a designer named God? He assembles a stable of academics — experts all — who dared to question Darwinist assumptions and found themselves "expelled" from intellectual discourse as a result. They include evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg (sandbagged at the Smithsonian), biology professor Caroline Crocker (drummed out of George Mason University), and astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez (blackballed at Iowa State University).
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Ben Stein, like most people, is too stupid to differentiate between abiogenesis and evolution. Darwin said nothing about the origin of the universe or the origin of life. It's a different concept entirely.
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That's disturbing enough, but what Stein does next is truly shocking. He allows the principal advocates of Darwinism to speak their minds. These are experts with national reputations, regular welcomed guests on network television and the like. But the public knows them only by their careful seven-second soundbites. Stein engages them in conversation. They speak their minds. They become sputtering ranters, openly championing their sheer hatred of religion.
PC liberalism has showered accolades on atheist author Richard Dawkins' best-selling book "The God Delusion." But when Stein suggests to Dawkins that he's been critical of the Old Testament God, Dawkins protests — not that Stein is wrong, but that he's being too mild. He then reads from this jaw-dropping paragraph of his book:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Dawkins has a website. Its slogan is "A clear-thinking oasis."
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I think he's too easy on god. Have you
READ the Old Testament? It's a slaughterfest. By all means, though, hold that up as a standard to aspire to.
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It's understood that God had nothing to do with the origins of life on Earth. What, then, is the alternate explanation? Stein asks these experts, and their very serious answers are priceless. One theorizes that life began somehow on the backs of crystals. Another states electric sparks from a lightning storm created organic matter (out of nothing). Another declares that life was brought to Earth by aliens. Anything but God.
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Not only are all of these more probable than a deity supposition, one of them has been verified by experiment dozens of times, dating back to the 50s. But I'm sure that won't stop this ignorant douchebag from presuming it's absurd.
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The most controversial part of the film follows Stein to the Dachau concentration camp, underlining how Darwin's theories of natural selection led to the eugenics movement, embraced by Adolf Hitler. If there is no God, but only a planetary lab waiting for scientists to perfect the human race, where can Darwinism lead? Stein insists that he isn't accusing today's Darwinists of Nazism. He points out, however, that Hitler's mad science was inspired by Darwinism.
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Now
this is utterly inane and inflammatory, with ZERO basis in anything resembling reality. To the best of my knowledge, Hitler never mentioned Darwin anywhere in Mein Kampf. He was, on the other hand, a devout Roman Catholic. More to the point, neither Darwin nor any modern theory of evolution has anything whatsoever to do with
how human societies should be conducted, and eugenics is
UNNATURAL selection, the precise
OPPOSITE of Darwin's theory. These two things are fundamentally unrelated. Nice smear, though, Stein, you ****ing blowhard.
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Now that the film is complete, the evolutionist prophets featured in the film are on the warpath inveighing against it, and the alleged idiots who would lower themselves to watching it. Richard Dawkins laments how the film will solicit "cheap laughs that could only be raised in an audience of scientific ignoramuses." Minnesota professor and blogger P.Z. Myers predicts the movie is "going to appeal strongly to the religious, the paranoid, the conspiracy theorists, and the ignorant —— which means they're going to draw in about 90 percent of the American market." Myers and Dawkins now both complain they were "duped" into appearing in the movie (for pay).
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Prophets? I've never heard of an evolution prophet. And if they were so open and honest with PZ Myers, why did they kick him out of the pre-screening of the film when they found out he was going to show up?
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Everyone should take the opportunity to see "Expelled" — if nothing else, as a bracing antidote to the atheism-friendly culture of PC liberalism. But it's far more than that. It's a spotlight on the arrogance of this movement and its leaders, a spotlight on the choking intolerance of academia, and a spotlight on the ignorance of so many who say so much, yet know so very little.
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What this notion boils down to is that we shouldn't ever tell people that their religion isn't more important than academics. Which is bull****. You want to spout religious crap, do it in church. If you want to present a scientific argument, find some evidence. Religion is and should be exactly as welcome in biology classrooms as astrology is in astronomy classrooms.