Posted on 07/06/2010 4:27:40 PM PDT by Big Fred
The Scopes Retrial
Alleged, a new movie on the 1925 Scopes trial, reveals how the major media delivered a distorted view of the trial in an attempt to attack biblical Christianity.
At last: a Hollywood film on the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” that does not attack Christianity. Alleged, to be released in theaters soon, provides a counter to the anti-creationist play Inherit the Wind (1955) and its subsequent namesake films (1960 and after).*
Alleged stars a familiar face in Hollywood and on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning actor Brian Dennehy. He plays evolutionary attorney Clarence Darrow. Interestingly, Dennehy played William Jennings Bryan (the creation protagonist) in a recent Broadway production of Inherit the Wind. The other major costar is Senator Fred Thompson, who plays Bryan. Both Senator Thompson and William Jennings Bryan ran for president, Thompson for the Republican nomination in 2008 and Bryan as the Democratic nominee three times.
Producer and screenwriter Fred Foote told Answers magazine that, while the 55-year-old drama Inherit the Wind is well written, the actual court transcripts show how inaccurately the play and subsequent movies depicted the trial. Foote observes that even though he did not produce Alleged to be a direct rebuttal to Inherit the Wind, two thrusts of his film include showing how Darwinian beliefs can be used for nefarious purposes (e.g., to justify a purging of the human gene pool) and revealing how the major media delivered a distorted view of the trial in its attempt to attack biblical Christianity.
* www.allegedthemovie.com
I heart H L
That's fair enough, so far as it goes. The text Scopes used did indeed -- as I'm given to understand -- include arguments for positive eugenics. (BTW: "Positive" here doesn't mean "good". It means advocating more or less overt means of affecting the reproduction of undesirables. This is as opposed to "negative" eugenics, which is the "good" eugenics, and simply means providing people, at their own discretion, with testing and information, for example about genetic diseases.)
However, associating this particularly with evolution, as antievolutionary creationists customary do, is really a copout. It is damaging because it actually dumbs down our historical understanding of scientific racism, which was quite rampant in this period (the early decades of the 20th Century) and not tied particularly to evolution or Darwinian theory.
Scientific racism, unfortunately, spanned many scientific disciplines and, as compared to evolutionary theory, more particularly with respect to medicine ("hygiene" theories) and sociology (e.g. intelligence testing and related theories).
...or was that Fred Thompson?
Cheers!
Would "Darwinism" be subject to the attempt to use it to justify further eugenics, if not for the overwhelming PC attitude today -- just look at the response to Murray's The Bell Curve, which wasn't overtly racist.
And would the evolutionists (for being "racist") or the creationists (for "cheap shots") get more heat if someone did attempt to do so?
Cheers!
There were many factors which made the Scopes Trial into a spectacle, which solved nothing, both those two were not the least of the cause.
That’s not Abe Vigoda; it’s Peter Boyle.
I applaud your use of quotation marks around “Darwinism.” I wish every creationist used this construct when writing that word.
For, as we all know, it’s a recent construct of the creationist cause that means, to them, something sciencey and bad. It’s like “evolutionism.”
It’s as if they think nothing has progressed in biology since Darwin’s day, which actually speaks volumes about their intellectual curiosity.
media lawyers have not changed much since then...
the Tony Award-winning actor Brian DennehyThat's just good casting.
http://www.answers.com/topic/brian-dennehy#Early_years
[snip] Dennehy enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, actively serving until 1963. Although he said in numerous interviews that he had fought in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, even telling harrowing tales of his service there, it was revealed in the 1998 book Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett that Dennehy had never served overseas at all during his time in the military. Later that year, Dennehy admitted to the tabloid The Globe “I lied about serving in Vietnam and I’m sorry. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam. I started the story that I had been in ‘Nam, and I got stuck with it. Then I didn’t know how to set the record straight.” However, in 2007, he once again told a reporter tales of his service in the Vietnam War, this time to Joanne Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal.
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