Expelled

[Zambimaru]

This is a new movie about Darwinism made by Ben Stein. I don't know that much about it, but jugging by the preview, it seems like it focuses allot on how people who don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution are persecuted. I find that a little hard to believe considering that the majority of people believe in "god" and creationism. link  

[Fenky]

Awesome. This is exactly what I've always wanted. People with religion being persecuted for their beliefs by atheists and finally being punished. Not in the way of mass genocide like they've done to others but this is good.

Don't ******** with atheists. We got it all figured out. This is the best Christmas ever!  

[PhaedraMcSpiffy]

Gah, the more I hear about this, the more scary and crappy it sounds. (Also, I've known for a while now that Ben Stein is a nut. It's sad, really. He's got that hilarious voice and all....)

Fenky

Awesome. This is exactly what I've always wanted. People with religion being persecuted for their beliefs by atheists and finally being punished. Not in the way of mass genocide like they've done to others but this is good.

Don't ******** with atheists. We got it all figured out. This is the best Christmas ever!

Awesome. This is exactly what the fundies have always wanted. Atheists blatantly bashing and persecuating religious people so that their pitiful strawmen can finally come to life.

Ooh, arrogance, too. Thanks for making it a merry Christmas for them!  

[Sanguvixen]

I think we should remind ourselves that two wrongs don't make a right. It only makes you feel good for a little bit.

So in response to Fenky, the last thing we as Atheists should want for theists such as Christianity is for them to be persecuted by us for their beliefs.

Let me tell you something about theism and atheism. I remember a very important lesson from an old friend on Gaia who was banned a few years back. He wanted to show other people on Gaia that Christians are not what they make themselves out to be. They are not what they say they are. To prove what he believes they really are he did an experiment.

He created a thread in the GD called "Jesus is not your savior" or "JINYS" for short. It was one of the few threads in that time that ever reached 1000 pages, although there were at least two other threads that rivaled it in page numbers.

He posted something telling theists that "Jesus" is not their savior and why. Not once did he ever call into question the validity of religion. But, he provoked them like crazy. Many theists fell into the trap of reacting in a way that showed off their true colors. In this thread they were everything that they claimed not to be.

Many mods didn't get it. Many people who entered the thread and stayed for the ride didn't get. I was one of the few, among a few others who did. That is how I befriended him because once I recognized his clever little trap, we ended up sharing PMs.

Now, many of them acted in anger. Many of them said things that I know they are probably still ashamed of. The bottom line is he managed to make them show their true colors without attacking their religion and claiming the whole thing as false.

There is a big lesson to be learned by all people from that thread. It deals with how you treat the people you are against and how you should act towards those who are against you. Provoke your opponent, and they might take the bate. Your action then becomes fodder for their side.

Keeping that in mind, the last thing Atheists need to do is become fodder for the Christian/theistic side by persecuting them, or becoming very vicious. We know what we are and what we are not. So we should not sink to the level of taking the bait of the theists.

Theists are pretending to be victims. Rather than take advantage of that (possibly becoming fodder for fundies and other loud mouthed theists) we should ignore them. Let them hang themselves on their own rope, because when they do, we'll gain more acceptance. Part of acceptance is learning to tolerate your opponents. It is to become tolerant yourself.

 

[PhaedraMcSpiffy]

Well said, Sanguvixen. Very well said!

Conservative atheist-bashing blogger and author Dinesh D'Souza likes to do the same thing as the guy you mentioned, but to atheists. He insults atheists, and when one of them replies with something that is stupid, violent, and crazy he parades it around as if it's an example of ALL atheists.  

[Tenth Speed Writer]

Fenky

Awesome. This is exactly what I've always wanted. People without religion being persecuted for their beliefs by Christians and finally being punished. Not in the way of moral corruption like they've done to others but this is good.

Don't ******** with Christians. We got it all figured out. This is the best Christmas ever!

 

[PhaedraMcSpiffy]

Fixed!

For those of you who don't know... Wikipedia on Ben Stein

Yes, Ben "Bueller... Bueller" "Dry eyes?" Stein.

If I ever won this show, it'd all go to donations to pro-choice groups and groups that sought to educate people about evolution. biggrin  

[Lunar Falcon]

Linking the theory of evolution to the Holocaust is ridiculous and insulting in itself. Stein's proposal that scientists believe we came from mud struck by lighting is also incorrect. The origin of this is from experiments run a while back by taking gasses thought to be present in the early Earth's atmosphere and by introducing sparks/lightning into the system which did produce amino acids which are a building block of life. This experiment has been expanded upon since then and I believe over 20 kinds of amino acids have been produced using the same methods. However, there are flaws here as the experiment proved that amino acids can be produced in such a matter, but the composition of the atmosphere is now thought to have been different than what was originally believed in the experiment. So in a nutshell scientists still aren't really sure where life came from. Evolution isn't an attempt to answer how life came to exist or how it got on Earth, rather it's an answer as to what happened to that life after it did appear and how it changed through time to become what it is today. And come on, is lighting and mud worse than being made from dirt and a rib?  

[Dronning Dagmar]

I don't believe in berating, beating, or jailing people for believing in stupid things, including creationism/ID. But I also don't believe in hiring such people to be science teachers. I don't believe in publishing faux-scientific papers in real scientific journals. That's the "persecution" that's being talked about in this film.

This is spin. Did anyone else notice in the trailer how one of the scientists (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was Dawkins?) was cut off mid-sentence? He said something like, "as a scientist I'm hostile to any opposing doctrine…" By the tone of his voice, it was obvious he was not finished. If he finished that with, say, "that is not based on any real evidence," that wouldn't sound so good for Stein's cute little trailer.

I'm just going by what I saw in the trailer. I haven't seen the movie. Maybe they show people being tarred and feathered, tear-gassed, or hung by their toenails, but I doubt it. It looks like the "persecution" they are talking about is that people aren't willing to accept ID as science. Well, guess what? It's not science. Dover trial. BTDT.  

[lizzah]

Yes, Dronning Dagmar is absolutely right - they quote edited/mined the hell out of the interviews and were apparently deceptive about them from the start.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula was one of the scientists interview-then-quotemine-edited by the Expelled filmmakers, though I think he eventually wound up with a small part.

He's blogged on the movie, its makers and the many deceptions and deceptive tactics employed.

This is one of the first posts on the topic, where PZ announces that he was interviewed as part of a film called "Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion", which, after the interview is over, mysteriously morphed into..."Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed".

I won't bother rehashing the whole thing here, but a quick trip through Pharyngula's archives (and other blogs) should more than establish Expelled as the load of bunk it is.  

[PhaedraMcSpiffy]

*sigh*

Ya know... typically when you're the one claiming to be the oppressed minority and that your opposition is unfair and close-minded, you don't want to lie about what your opposition believes or edit what they say. It makes you look kind of like a pack of liars.

How wrong can your opposition be when you've got to quote-mine the crap out of them to make them look bad?  

[lizzah]

PhaedraMcSpiffy

*sigh*

Ya know... typically when you're the one claiming to be the oppressed minority and that your opposition is unfair and close-minded, you don't want to lie about what your opposition believes or edit what they say. It makes you look kind of like a pack of liars.

How wrong can your opposition be when you've got to quote-mine the crap out of them to make them look bad?

[sarcasm] But the Evilutionists don't have GOD on their side, and it's all fine so long as it's lies for God, because then it's Truth! [/sarcasm]

But seriously, the whole fight against evolution has an element of the absurd to it. Anyone who stopped to think about it for a moment would realize that the mechanisms and process of evolution are far more intricate and elegant than merely pulling mud out of the earth and saying "poof you're a dude", and so in many ways, it "glorifies God" to attribute science to being his creation than to try to shoehorn him in as a replacement.

That's what makes the whole battle against science and education so sad, in my eyes. They're ruining their kids' education and understanding of the world because of some fear that God is less glorified by a conceptual Michelangelo (evolution) than a crayon scrawl (creation). Sub a theistic God in for the origin of the Big Bang then carry on teaching science and voila, theism without the anti-education faux persecution complex. Everybody wins.

But I guess some people just love to cry martyr.  

[Steel-Avatar]

Sanguvixen

I think we should remind ourselves that two wrongs don't make a right. It only makes you feel good for a little bit.

So in response to Fenky, the last thing we as Atheists should want for theists such as Christianity is for them to be persecuted by us for their beliefs.

Let me tell you something about theism and atheism. I remember a very important lesson from an old friend on Gaia who was banned a few years back. He wanted to show other people on Gaia that Christians are not what they make themselves out to be. They are not what they say they are. To prove what he believes they really are he did an experiment.

He created a thread in the GD called "Jesus is not your savior" or "JINYS" for short. It was one of the few threads in that time that ever reached 1000 pages, although there were at least two other threads that rivaled it in page numbers.

He posted something telling theists that "Jesus" is not their savior and why. Not once did he ever call into question the validity of religion. But, he provoked them like crazy. Many theists fell into the trap of reacting in a way that showed off their true colors. In this thread they were everything that they claimed not to be.

Many mods didn't get it. Many people who entered the thread and stayed for the ride didn't get. I was one of the few, among a few others who did. That is how I befriended him because once I recognized his clever little trap, we ended up sharing PMs.

Now, many of them acted in anger. Many of them said things that I know they are probably still ashamed of. The bottom line is he managed to make them show their true colors without attacking their religion and claiming the whole thing as false.

There is a big lesson to be learned by all people from that thread. It deals with how you treat the people you are against and how you should act towards those who are against you. Provoke your opponent, and they might take the bate. Your action then becomes fodder for their side.

Keeping that in mind, the last thing Atheists need to do is become fodder for the Christian/theistic side by persecuting them, or becoming very vicious. We know what we are and what we are not. So we should not sink to the level of taking the bait of the theists.

Theists are pretending to be victims. Rather than take advantage of that (possibly becoming fodder for fundies and other loud mouthed theists) we should ignore them. Let them hang themselves on their own rope, because when they do, we'll gain more acceptance. Part of acceptance is learning to tolerate your opponents. It is to become tolerant yourself.

This made me have second thoughts about screwing with theists. I'd try it myself, but I put too much money into my gaia. Thanks for posting this, I could imagine it's very true. Sounds very typical of your average theist to say, to expose their blind spot an leave a plethora of evidence. The bastards.  

[Tenth Speed Writer]

Hush. Too many atheists do it as well.
I'm quite spent on seeing "angry atheists" claiming the moral high ground only to fall into bickering like children.





Sangu, do you suppose that if someone were to make a thread much the opposite, indirectly provoking atheistic views, there would be as much fervor?




I swear... It's saddening to see people attacking each other over all of this. We refuse to sit down to reason; all of us. We just attack what's not of us, and more often than not, claim it in self defense. Entire wars launched in "self defense."

Honestly, I'm tempted to embrace the three-fold irony of quoting the Christian Bible. It's mentioned throughout many books in the new testament to approach others with reason instead of attacks, and with compassion and respect regardless of whether one is "a believer."


And as for atheists... it would seem those who attack "the hypocritical theists" would at least strive for the morality they claim they hold superior to the them.  

[Zambimaru]

I recently read a small article about this movie in Newsweek and it said in the movie Been Stein compares Darwinism to Nazism because Hitler believed in Darwinism and the belief of servile of the fittest. I've now lost respect for Been Stein. stressed