It’s not satirical in any sense that Stein is sending up ID. He’s dead serious about that. It’s evolution and the scientific establishment that are the butts of the film’s imagined “satire.”
I saw no appreciable difference between the status of that in the late 1990s and in the last two visits I made to the area, one in January last year and one this January.
I grew up in Dixie. I visit Dixie on a regular basis. I still hear incredibly bigoted comments from people there, educated people who have been exposed to life in other areas of the country. Did you not notice that I put the latter term in quotation marks? That’s because I don’t consider minorities to be undesirable but because I have encountered, recently, community leaders in Dixie who use that very term with that meaning. In short, I was quoting.
When the community leaders quit saying stupid things like “The robin doesn’t mate with the blue jay,” I’ll happily jettison my jaundice. Actually, I pray often for that to be the case. My choice of those words was to thow it in the face of those in the South who still hold to those ridiculous viewpoints. Sadly, those individuals can still be found quite easily, and in prominence, in the South.
For reference: I’m referring to Atlanta and Cartersville in Georgia, Bay County in Florida, and various places in Virginia. None of those places is a backwater.
I’m not so sure Ben Stein is that smart. Nice guy, good command of many bits of trivia suitable for game shows, but not necessarily great at working things out logically. I’d like to see him hold his own here.
We’ll never know, and it’s not relevant to the main point here, but I wonder how many of the folks he worked with in this endeavor secretly think of Jews as Christ-killers? Strange bedfellows.
I would say that the South gets at least a little more ridicule than it deserves. Plenty of stupid school boards in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
I was just thinking that this story would be a lot funnier if it read:
Schools being forced to offer bribes to kids to see Ben Stein’s Creationism movie
So we should teach kids a non-dangerous lie to keep them from the dangerous truth?
Don’t laugh. There’s plenty of people who believe this is the proper course to follow.
There are a lot of provisions in the original Canadian constitution (the BNA) that are specific to the individual colonies that were merging into the new country.
The colony of Canada (and Newfoundland when it joined later) already had an existing school system that was church-run, and wanted to to guarantee that the minority group (Catholics in Upper Canada/Ontario and Protestants in Lower Canada/Québec) would continue to be entitled to run their own systems without being forced to merge with the system run by the rival church. Québec later moved to a secular province-run French/English school system, and Newfoundland to a single secular province-run system, through Constitutional amendments, but Ontario has not yet chosen to do this (largely because the Catholic system is seen as better than the Public system, IMHO).
(My school for Kindergarten & Grade 1 in Newfoundland during the 1950s was Gander Amalgamated School. Why Amalgamated? Because it was a big new school run by an amalgamated group of Protestant churches that replaced separate United Church, Methodist, Baptist, Anglican and other schools.)
I don’t know, maybe. There’s something to be said for that. I guess it depends how dangerous the truth is. I personally don’t think that the theory of evolution is that dangerous, but…
Conservative Judaism accepts evolution. I think most Orthodox Jews do, too, though some don’t. Religious Jews who do accept evolution generally tend toward something like the position “God created the world using the mechanism of evolution”.
There’s not a strong tradition of biblical literalism in Judaism. There is a very long tradition of rabbinical interpretation of the Bible.
As far as I know, most Orthodox Jews are either young or old earth creationists.
Look at the hostility to Slifkin.
True, but the difference in this case is that probably the majority of those picking on “Christians” are Christian themselves (or at least, claim the label). In the case of gay kids, fat kids, and black kids, it’s likely most of the kids doing the teasing aren’t gay, fat, or black.
I think whether Jews are creationists depends on how you define creationism. If you define it as including any belief that God had a role in making the universe the way it is, then most religious Jews (myself included) are creationists.
That’s among Haredi or ultra-Orthodox rabbis. There are Orthodox Jews who are not Haredi.
And of course creationism in and of itself (if defined as above) is not inherently opposed to the idea of evolution. Abiogenisis (did I get that right?) is the study of How Life Developed On Earth. Evolution is not.
(Anne, you just posted last, not trying to pick a fight.)
Pretty much. Generally speaking:
Cosmology is a science which deals in part with the origins of the known universe–its creation, if you will, which comes before and is entirely separate from
abiogenesis, the empirical/scientific study of life emerging from nonlife, which comes before and is entirely separate from
evolution, which refers to the change of organisms over time.
Creationism, however, usually combines the creation of the Universe, the emergence of life from nonlife, and life’s formation all into a single Prime Mover. It posits that God made everything ab initio, both life and non, and set the shapes and forms of all things. It is in this sense that Creationism and evolution are contradictory.
Most people who believe that God was/spoke/ordered/signed for/initiated the Big Bang and then let natural processes take their course (with perhaps some divine guidance, per Theistic Evolution) do not consider themselves Creationists. Accordingly, and since Abiogenesis they are much more likely to be treated with respect
.
Catholic schools were my refuge from a very violent public school system in the 70’s.
The technical term for the first two actions by dope smoking, fornicating Christians would be called “hypocritical,” by both Christian, (breaking the law, damaging the bodily temple, and immoral behavior) and non-Christian (for failing to practice what they profess they believe in ). As for varsity football…
A Google search of persecution of Christian varsity football players turned up about 1500 hits; whereas the entry, persecution of dope smoking, fornicating Christians turned up only 600 hits. The entry for persecution of dope smoking, fornicating, varsity football playing Christians turned up only 73.
And the reason is obvious: What group of persecutors could resist the temptation of going after a non-cannabis consuming, non-fornicating Christian varsity football player? Clean-cut, white teeth, free of STDs–what’s not to like? Throw in a little dope, and someone to do the nasty with (male, female–what does it matter now?). Pfff, where’s the drama in that?
As for the movie, I was wondering what a poster of Ben Stein was doing in my church. Silly me because I thought, “Ben Stein, huh? Maybe some funny, inspirational message for the youth about adolescence–sure, that’s what it’s about. 'Cause he would never do one of those anti-evolution screeds…He’s Ben Stein!”.
Oops