Posted on 04/09/2008 7:27:17 AM PDT by js1138
After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.
Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely "character" for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," is released.
Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.
To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in "Expelled" that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and "intelligent design" — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. You see, Stein, like some other celebrities, finally has shown his true colors and they aren’t so pretty.
The gist of Stein’s involvement is: He’s outraged! He believes in God! God created the universe! How can we not avail our students of this theory? What do you mean we’re just molecules? What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That’s because it’s being marketed by the same people who brought us "The Passion of the Christ." They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution ...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
It would seem this author doesn’t know very much about Ben Stein.
The author has a well-honed BS detector. Stein sent it off the scale this time.....
Roger Friedman’s outrage may persuade me to buy a ticket to see this movie. His outrage proves the point Ben wants to make in the movie.
I disagree, but that’s okay.
It would also seem the author is in line for an eye opening experience after death.
Looks to me like Stein rankled some anti-theists with this movie.
At least, he exposed their inability and reluctance to have open discussion on the topic.
If evolution is true and there is no Creator,
wouldn’t we be required, “ethically”, to kill the unfit?
Bueller... Bueller...
The best part is the description of the film’s distribution pattern (executive summary: the marketers figure that the South is full of dumb goobers who will fall for their line of malarkey).
Fox News has some dumb writers. To suggest that this movie has an anti-Semitism theme is absurd. Exactly the opposite is true.
Me and Micheal Medved, too
You and Michael Medved what?
Evolutionary theory is not about who created the universe.
Some of the claims in this movie (e.g. that George Mason U fired a dissident biology professor) are just plain BS. She was a part-time instructor and her contract wasn't renewed. She went on to a full time position with another school in the state university system.
IMO, GMU would have been well within its right to fire her, but they didn't.
My opinion of Ben Stein will never be the same. Either his research skills are inexcusably bad or he is nothing more than an ideologue with no interest in facts.
Oh! Never mind. I’m a little slow this morning.
What a snarky article. I’m planning on seeing this movie the day it opens.
Once again, ladies and gentleman, I present The Left: Telling you exactly what you should be allowed to believe, while they are pillorying you for not accepting them.
One either abandons reason and the Scientific method or one goes to hell? What Jack Chick comic did you glean that little theological gem from?
Most Scientists in the U.S.A. are Christian. Most know that I.D. is not Science but a religious philosophy. Many of them are named Steve apparently.
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Christian, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Evolution being true is not incompatible with the existence of a Creator.
For the record, Darwin was adamantly opposed to killing the "unfit." I believe his words could also be interpreted to indicate that he was appalled by abortion, which he considered "perverted."
I can put up some quotes if anyone is actually interested in what Darwin thought.
amen
On the other hand, I do think this: I think that the people – and I know why they're doing it, but I still think that it's a little bit disingenuous. Let's make no mistake. The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals because it ostensibly does not involve religious overtones, that there is just some intelligent being far greater than anything any of us can even imagine that's responsible for all this, and of course I don't have any doubt of that. But I think that they're sort of pussyfooting around when they call it intelligent design.
'Sicko' Shows Michael Moore's Maturity as a Filmmaker
Sunday, May 20, 2007
By Roger Friedman
Filmmaker Michael Moore's brilliant and uplifting new documentary, "Sicko," deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.
A Better Advisor for Florida Students: Albert Einstein or the ACLU?
by John Armor [3 April, 2008, 623 words]
Bills have been introduced in the Florida legislature, and are now pending, which would include the concept of “intelligent design” in the high school science curriculum. Predictable groups of religious, political, and teachers union representatives have lined up on both sides of the issue.
One side says this is “anti-evolution” and would be an “embarrassment” to the State of Florida. The other calls this “good news” and “common sense.” The real fight here is between Albert Einstein and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In January of this year, the ACLU wrote a letter to the Florida State Board of Education, threatening to sue the State if intelligent design was included in the science curriculum for high school students. It was a long letter with elaborate legal arguments, but its real point was in a footnote on page three. There the ACLU noted that it extracted (excuse me, “agreed to accept”) $1 million in fees from the Dover School District in Pennsylvania in an intelligent design case. ACLU lawyers added coyly that the actual fees were “more than $2 million.”
Boiled down to the essentials, the ACLU letter was the demand from a school yard bully that his victim fork over his lunch money or get beat up. But $2 million or more in attorneys fees is a lot of lunch money.
Since the subject concerns what philosophies should be presented to beginning students in science, who better to consult than the greatest scientist who has ever lived, Albert Einstein. In his famous essay, “The World as I See It,” he wrote:
“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”
Elsewhere, he wrote that genius consists of becoming an adult “without losing a child’s sense of wonder.” And he wrote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Einstein made it clear that he belonged to no religion, and did not believe in “a personal God.” Still, to the end of his days, he marveled at the intricate design of the universe.
Even in this, Einstein refuted what the ACLU argues today. He was not religious. He was not an enemy of the theory of evolution, nor any other theory of science. Yet he believed in intelligent design. According to the arguments of the ACLU, the First Amendment to the Constitution would bar Einstein’s ideas from the classrooms of impressionable students.
This author, whose practice in the US Supreme Court has consisted mostly of First Amendment cases, argues the exact opposite. When the Amendment was written, “established religion” had a clear meaning, namely state imposition of a particular religion. Intelligent design is not a religion, and talking about it does not “impose” it. Then there is the last point, that the Amendment refers to freedom “of” religion, not freedom “from” religion.
The people who wrote and ratified that Amendment had no intention of eliminating all public mention of any aspect of religion. For any judge to rule in that manner is to rewrite the First Amendment, a power no judge legitimately possesses. The power to amend the Constitution belongs to the people, in Article V, not to any judges.
Just ask yourselves this simple question, a “thought experiment” as Einstein used to say: Who would be a better model for students just starting in science in the State of Florida? Albert Einstein, or the best and brightest of the ACLU attorneys?
Perhaps the ACLU should do a little homework on “a child’s sense of wonder.”
- 30 -
About the Author: John Armor practiced 33 years in the US Supreme Court. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu This was written at the behest of the American Civil Rights Union. www.theacru.org
I’ll be going to see Expelled.
No.
Ah... but you dismiss the INTENT behind those that insist that evolution DISPROVES the Creator.
Some on here may deny that that is the whole point of pushing evolution and "disproving" ID, but that's what it's all about.
Rush is right. Let’s not “pussyfoot” around. Just say it like it is. All things were created by God, end of story.
Cool. Now I’m looking forward to seeing this even more! I plan to go opening weekend.
“If evolution is true and there is no Creator, wouldn’t we be required, “ethically”, to kill the unfit?’
Perhaps that was Adolph Hilter’s conclusion and excuse for murdering millions of people.
The critic likes Mariah Carey albums!
Does any more need to be said?
TRUE. But it depends on which of the several theories of evolution you're talking about.
You say this without seeing the movie? You are precisely guilty of that which you decry. Which I find amusing.
Really, the intellectual dishonesty of claiming that Einstein “believed in intelligent design” makes you the moral and intellectual peer of a typical “Congressman”.
Darwin was not a “nature red in tooth and claw” kind of guy. Moreover we are a successful species because we are a highly social and cooperative species. Many of the most successful animals are highly altruistic, social, and cooperative. Why did the most successful human societies all domesticate animals? Wouldn't strawmanevolution require “ethically” that we kill all other species?
No “perhaps” about it.
That WAS his justification.
Two reasons for vehemently trying to deny the existance of a Creator:
One - party hardy! No consequences!!!!
Two - your rights come from the government, not the Creator, and we can take them away with a simple majority vote.
I thought that the ACLU was funded by you and me - the taxpayers of this country. Where do they come off accepting $2 Million of the School District’s funds? Was the money given back to the taxpayers?
I am very confused.
Wading-through-the-Michael-Moore-wannabe-swamp-of-Agitprop-BS Bump.
“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 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 against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. “
Adolf Hitler
It's cute how this Roger Friedman thinks he's so damned intelligent, and certainly much smarter than folks who went to see The Passion or who will go to see Expelled. I will have seen both.
I don't know much about Mr. Friedman, but I would be willing to bet him $10,000 per point on a standard IQ test fairly administered on the difference between our scores, or alternately $100 per point difference on the SAT suite.
He may have evolved but I was intelligently designed.
ML/NJ
He does have a point, after all, since evolution made not just Nazism possible, but also Communism... If everything is just matter, what does it matter if you "break a few eggs" to bring in Utopia for the masses? Fundamental to rationalizing the massive murders-to-the-10th-power of both ideologies was atheism, and atheism in western society historically only became respectable with evolution to back it up. Every serious ideology has its own made-up history, and the myth of Darwinism is foundational to both of these barbarisms.
Stein will get all the usual critics that don't like religion, but he will get very little support from Christians to counter it. I.E. Stein will fail big time.
Amusing anti Christian and anti semtic nonsense.
Freedom from religion - the latest penumbra...
As does every rational person.
But people are being misled if it's not made clear to them that there is a major difference between (small case) "intelligent design" and "The Intelligent Design Movement".
One points to God.
The other points in every direction - including "space aliens".
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