Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Removing the "intelligent" from "intelligent design."


Over at Pharyngula, PZ points out how Ben Stein's evolution-bashing cinematic atrocity Expelled is taking a whole new approach to pre-release screenings:

"There were nondisclosure agreements to sign that day, but Mr. Moore did not, and proceeded to write perhaps the harshest review "Expelled" has received thus far. The film will open April 18, but has been screened several times privately for religious audiences. Mr. Moore deplored what he perceived as "loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts" and accused Mr. Stein of using a "Holocaust denier's" tactics."

Yes, that would be Expelled -- a film claiming to document the heavy-handed, inflexible censorship of certain views in scientific academia, engaging in, well, heavy-handed, inflexible censorship of certain views of its invited reviewers.

Given that Canadian IDiot and whackjob Denyse O'Leary is still all a-gush over the film, one suspects that the word "irony" is simply not in Denyse's dictionary.

Nor, I imagine, is the word "gullible." Really. You can look it up.

4 comments:

The Seer said...

Once and for all, I'm going to explain the reason we should use government funds to preach intelligent design and defeat the myth of global warming.

The most important thing God has given us is The Bible.

Since the Protestant Reformation it has been agreed that you do not need to be a trained theologian, or to have any academic background at all to understand The Bible. All you need to mnaster The Bible is the ability to read. Once you can read, you can dispense with all these educated ministers. Of course, believing what you read helps.

Now — stay with me here — if God made The Bible so simple that anyone who can read can understand it as well as the people who spend whole academic careers in actual accredited academic institutions studying revelation and theology, why would God make something less important than The Bible — say like "science" — harder to understand than the most important thing in the world?

I say, have a national referendum on intelligent design and global warming. That would settle it once and for all.

Ti-Guy said...

if God made The Bible so simple...

If God had wanted the Bible to be simple, He would have had It Written...I mean, written...in English, or quite possibly have had it produced in picture form for the vastly illiterate populations who lived at the time its various parts were written.

I'm amazed at these holy people using the low-brow tactics of hucksters and con-men to control this debate. And Ben Stein is a liar; this kind of thing is exactly like Holocaust denial, preying on the ignorance of people to enlist them in conspiracy thinking.

The Seer said...

Call me flummoxed!

Just when I thought I had things all figured out, ty-guy does me again with the observation that if God really wanted us to understand The Bible, He would have written it in English.

If I can think of an answer to this objection, I will share it.

Jay said...

I thought I might go over there and have some fun at her expense, but then I got so lost in all of the self-referential links that don't really prove a thing that I started to believe that rabbits could dance, but as soon as I tried to salsa with one it bit me and I passed out.

Thank the FSM I woke up in time, the bleeding was horrible. Took 2 bandaids