Ben Stein Watch, Expelled Edition

Newbie First Class Joined: Jul 28, 2007 Posts: 37

Courtesy Portfolio.com
I went to a screening of Ben Stein's new movie this evening. My favorite bit, unsurprisingly, was when the film quoted Pamela Winnick thusly:

If you give any credence at all to Intelligent Design, you are just finished as a journalist.

Not at the New York Times you're not, clearly.

Winnick is presented in the film for all the world as a diligent journalist - a Jewish journalist, no less - who just happened to mention Intelligent Design, en passant, in one of her columns, and ended up getting fired.

Omitted from the film: any indication that Winnick is the author of "A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion," published in 2005 by Thomas Nelson. Or that in her journalism for the newspaper from which she was fired she talked of Darwin's influence on eugenics and Hitler, and "the serious people --scientists included -- who continue to challenge his theories".

I'm not going to even attempt a fisking of the film as a whole; I'll leave that to others more qualified than myself. (Update: Once the film is out, the most authoritative debunking site will be this one.) I will note, however, that most of the "movie clips" at this site are not in the cut that I saw (which I believe is the final cut). Those clips actually engage the subject of evolution, which is something the film really doesn't do, weirdly enough. The closest that the film comes is to attack science on the grounds that scientists don't know what the origins of life are, which is a bit weird since scientists happily admit that they don't know what the origins of life are, and in any case the origins of life aren't part of Darwin's (or anybody's) theory of evolution.

In general, the film (to a godless audience of New Yorker media types, at least) seemed to fall somewhere between the pathetic and the self-defeating. (Stein literally segues, at one point, from ridiculing the "directed panspermia" hypothesis to saying that science outright refutes any directed explanation for the origins of life. You can have it one way, but you can't have it both ways.)

But there's a large chunk of the film which is downright offensive, too - when Stein talks at length about the Holocaust and blames it directly on Darwin, who is called "a necessary condition" for National Socialism. And then, just to make matters worse, Stein extends that theme to include abortion rights in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular: he's basically saying that all pro-choicers are Nazis. Ugh.

Article with extensive Links Continues @ [url=http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/04/03/ben-stein-watch-expelled-edition] Sourced Site [/url] (Once there you may need to scroll down).


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