Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

How did Ben Stein become famous in the first place?

I think this monotonous drawler should go back to his clear-eyes commericials.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

The thing the creationist don't understand (and Greg's video did a great job at this) is that Intelligent design is not a Scientific theory. It is an opinion. What is taught in schools is not just the opinion of some whack job scientists it is theory that has been tested with hard evidence.

The other thing that bothers me about teaching Intelligent design (other than the fact that it is an opinion) is that there is a separation between church and state for a reason, you open up a whole can of manure when you start discussing this in school. So who's God was it that created it all? A Christian god?

You look at the biggest proponents for ID and they are all MOSTLY Christian. I have a major problem with this not only because they feel like they are persecuted because ID isn't taught (lots of real religious persecution going on in the real world, wanna take a stand against that go to a country where Christians are being killed for being Christian don't give me this b.s. that not teaching ID is persecution) but also the fact that America is not made up of ONLY Christians yet most of them seem to think this.

List I went to Catholic school, and you know what? I had tons of science classes not ONCE was ID discussed in the Science class because it is NOT SCIENCE. We talked about Creation in the Religious Studies classes where it was supposed to be taught.


You know whats the funniest thing about all of this? Ben Stein isn't going to cause a Academic revolution just by people seeing this, no he is just going to make lots and lots of money. So go see this and give Ben Stein money!

In defense of the film, when you give Ben Stein money, you actually get a chance to win it back =o

[Dim of the Yard]

How did Ben Stein become famous in the first place?

I think this monotonous drawler should go back to his clear-eyes commericials.

It was either his being a speech writer for Nixon, or his fun little bit part in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Pick one.

[acoletterose]

L. Brent Bozell the Third liked it very much. .

Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering Atheists
Fri Apr 18, 3:00 AM ET


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.

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.

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.

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).

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."

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.

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.

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).

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.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

[torgosPizza]

Interesting that the movie goes (probably somewhat logically) to the origin of the universe, when that's something well beyond the scope of evolution, which (from what I have heard) they failed to explain clearly in the first place.

[GregMcduck]

Gay "rights."

Oh, fun.

[torgosPizza]

Wow, I didn't even see that at first. As soon as I saw "PC liberalism" I skipped it. But it's good to know that when talking about gay rights, the word "rights" should be surrounded by sarcastic quotations.

I also liked this part:
They include evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg (sandbagged at the Smithsonian)

Which, if you read the Scientific American website that BathTub posted, Sternberg's part of the story is fairly embellished.

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.

One section of Expelled relates the case of Richard Sternberg, who was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to the film, after Sternberg approved the publication of a pro-ID paper by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, he lost his editorship, was demoted at the Smithsonian, was moved to a more remote office, and suffered other professional setbacks. The film mentions a 2006 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report prepared for Rep. Mark Souder (R–Ind.), "Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian," that denounced Sternberg's mistreatment.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know

[acoletterose]

Gay "rights."

Oh, fun.

That's the one that bothered me. Here he is writing about the supposed persecution of people expressing their beliefs, yet he writes about someone else's rights as being "rights."

Ahh hypocrisy, where would the human race be without you?

[torgosPizza]

Well gays don't need "rights" just like slaves didn't have "rights" because of their skin color. And atheists should just shut up!

[SaucyRossy]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-conversation-with-mark-mathis

Wow this interview is great.

[jewishcarpenter]

Were you guys seriously expecting any better from Brent Bozell?

[BathTub]

Not someone I was familiar with.

With the movie being out now people are able to look at some of the details more closely, including the quote mining.

*Hah edited because it's actually even more selective that I initially read.*

"This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections emphasized in italics):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The producers of the film did not mention the very next sentences in the book"

"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil."

[ebeth]

One interesting side note that I don't hear too much about is "unnatural evolution".  It a thread of thought that is pushing the boundaries of evolution by introducing the theory that human interference, not biology, can create new strains of humans and animals.

I'm not necessarily talking about our impact on the environment through pollution or destruction which can surely cause genetic changes, but instead, I am talking about what scientists are beginning to do in a lab.  Certain scientists are starting to narrow down the obstacles pertaining to death from old age like disease, cell degeneration, and certain biological and genetic traits.  As science begins tracking these issues through experiments and actual physical observation of both the life cycle of humans and animals, it is likely that they will be able to de-construct aging and eliminate death by age altogether.

This is not to say death can not happen but imagine that by eliminating the process of aging naturally what the next step in our evolution as a species will become. 

It is something that proponents of Intelligent Design aren't always willing to discuss.  By asking people to believe that a "creator" established us as a species they are in effect, asking us to not to use what Darwin taught and instead, asking us to allow said "creator" to continue on it's course.  As science is beginning to understand human biology in a different light  thanks to the human genome project they are starting to work on ways to push human evolution forward and that is a scary prospect to I.D. supporters.  Because it means that humans can actually "create" and that would establish reason that a higher power could not exist as it has been explained.

An interesting idea that I thought I would share.

I promise to return to the funny on another thread.

[AmandaGal]

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.

And I'm going to blame 9/11 on the Christians! 

See, that's just retarded.  When someone says something like the above, it's obvious that they are trying to play on emotion rather than fact to back their debate.  You can't judge a theory or belief by the way it's been twisted to do evil.  If you could, religion would win anyway.

I have a degree in biology.  I took a class on evolutionary biology.  All of my professors that I got to know, though they didn't say it in class, were religious and not only believed in God, but also believed in a Christian God.  My evolutionary biology teacher was also a youth minister.  I guess they never brought up their religion in class because they realize religion and science are not equal.  Maybe those teachers got "kicked out" of academia because the don't understand what science is and therefore shouldn't be teaching it.

I know I'm doing exactly what that article said by saying these people are idiots, but I don't think Christians are idiots.  I don't even thinking not believing in "evolution" as a big theory makes you an idiot.  I can be convinced that perhaps it doesn't happen as we think it does  I can be convinced that there are reasons to believe in God and that some people have some personal proof of God.

It's people like the above that make that make the Christian side look like idiots, not the people on the opposite side.

[BathTub]

I promise to return to the funny on another thread.

Don't worry, for some of us this is hilarious.