OK I obviously have not seen it yet. Expelled
So I will not critique the move itself. But I have seen. The Super Trailer
and
This is what I am pitting The Darwin Daze Sock Hop You will have to click on if from the link.
What the F*#k is that?
What am I watching?
What does it mean?
God hates fags?
Evolutionary biologists are {insert rude homophobic comment here]
Take a ganger around the site and don’t forget to check out “The Big Science Academy.”
Anyway even though I said I was not going to pit the movie. I think I will go ahead and do it now. It think the promotional material contained in the site tells me enough.
Well, I watched most of the trailer (the one with him writing his petulant “I will not question authority” on a blackboard) and had to turn it off after I encountered just too many lies and distortions.
OTOH, this is just one more attempt by the “bananas were created to be held in the hand” crowd and I doubt that it is going to actually become a blockbuster movie. It will be rented by the true believers and shown to their offspring whoi will either simply accept what they already believfe or they will mock it.
While it is frustrating to see such deception promoted by “name” people (as Stein), it is not worth getting upset over.
Among those the page lists as “Expelled” are Bono and Einstein. Did Einstein take a position on evolution? And actually, I could care less whether Bono did or not.
Oh yeah, and Galileo in on the list. IIRC he came along well before Darwin.
Somehow I think moderately well educated people are supposed to accept this crap as a sarcastic joke, and the baseline dunces are supposed to accept it as fact.
If I may ask, (and zero snark intended) what were the lies and distortions you heard? Also, would you mind giving the trailer in which he is on with Bill O’Reilly a watch. I’d be curious as to what he says there you might object to.
Einstein and Galileo are on the list, along with Newton, because they were theists (well, Einstein was kinda a theist, if you allowed views of God that aren’t much like the traditional Judeo-Christian view at all) and thus allowed their religion to shape their scientific views. Unlike generations of religious biologists, that is.
And you have to have pretty big balls to cite Galileo as a character witness when you’re stating that religious concerns should be considered alongside scientific evidence. I mean, I’m usually the first to point out that the Church tolerated other geocentric astronomers and Galileo was really being punished for being an asshole to the pope, not so much for his science, but still… Dude!
Okay, just checking. I thought you might be laying the groundwork for an alternative interpretation of Galileo’s work, which would then be shoehorned into the public school curriculum and taught alongside the establishment historical consensus.
“Although some evidence suggests that Galileo was a famous Italian astronomer, there is an equally valid hypothesis which proposes that he was instead a three-fingered cartoon mouse from Anaheim.”
Well, yes, but belief in a god is not at all related to acceptance of evolutionary theory.So having them on the list is just another among the many deceptions that these whackos are purveying.
In case anyone hasn’t visited cricetus’s thread there’s a great story about a “special showing” of this movie.
Must run as it’s my night to go around the campus where I work carrying the shillelagh marked DARWIN and knocking in the heads of any students or faculty who profess belief in God.
When he first starts talking to “scientists” whom he claims have been censored for “exploring new ideas,” he cites the editor of the Smithsonian-related publication who published a pro-Intelligent Design piece a couple of years back. As massively documented on this board at the time, his presentation does not correspond to the facts. The editor published as “peer reviewed” a piece that had nothing to do with the topic of the magazine when there was no legitimate peer review. It was rather as though a magazine devoted to sex life in frogs had printed a claim for cold fusion written by Pons or Fleischman and reviewed by a couple of astronomers. (I would agree that the personal reactions of quite a few scientists to that publication were emotionally over the top, but no sanctions were imposed on the author or editor that were inappropriate, based on their abuse of the magazine and the peer review process in order to slide their little propaganda piece into a “legitimate” scientific publication. He then quotes several actual scientists being dismissive of creationism and Intelligent Design, but using only clipped quotes that are taken out of context.
Just before that, he had visually linked Darwin to the Nazi death camps while claiming that “Darwinism” was a threat to society as he strongly implied that anyone who accepted Darwin’s theory, (apparently, even theists who do believe that God is the ultimate creator), was making the claim that everything arose by accident, (thus conflating the issues of cosmology and descent through modification that Creationists so love to confuse).
There are so many things that irritated me in the Bill O’Reilly interview clip (no surprise, of course, considering BO always irritates me), but Stein had some pretty irritating things to say as well. In response to Bill’s question as to why we can’t tell kids in biology class that there are two positions regarding how we came to be, Stein said it’s “because there’s so much fear out there in the secular community…”
This makes me mad because if I want my children learning about religious matters, which includes anything invoking a “divine creator,” I will send them to church or enroll them in a comparative religion class. If kids are learning about biology, teach them biology, not religion. Simple enough. How does this make me fearful?
The fact is you can *believe *in ID, but you can’t ever *prove *it, so don’t try passing it off as scientific though and not expect people to say, “Hey, that’s not science, that’s religion. Duh.”
There was a time when I respected the guy’s intelligence, as other than being a Nixon apologist he appeared to be a smart guy. Then he started in with the anti-secular stuff and it’s just gotten worse and worse over the last few years.