Friday, April 18, 2008

Movie Madness

Apparently, there are a few silly, comical, juvenile movies out this weekend. The one we chose for our date night tonight was Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was just the laugh we needed after an intense week. I have to say, I like this new brand of romantic comedy in which a basically nice guy ends up happy. Absolutely loved the silliness of this one. For those of you with sensitive eyes, I should mention that there is some random, gratuitous male nudity in the first and last minutes. And now I totally want to go see a rock opera about Dracula as performed by puppets.

The other juvenile choice out there which we did not choose to see is called Expelled. I've been doing my very very best to ignore it altogether in spite of its near omnipresence in the atheist blogosphere. Ben Stein got together with some unskilled, unscrupulous "film maker" to prove once and for all that "big science" is out to kill God. The poor, meek, "intelligent design" proponents are distressed that science-based science gets so much attention in school curricula while wholesome faith-based "science" is ignored in all but our nation's most enlightened cultural backwaters.

From what I understand, Expelled features extensive unlicensed use of copyrighted material. They're promoting it all over the place, so if you feel so moved feel free to click on every google ad you see for it. I love that they're shelling out to advertise on NPR as well-clearly an intelligently designed marketing strategy.

The thing that baffles me most about this movie is that nearly all of the opposition I've seen to it comes from scientists and outraged atheists. Where the heck are the theists? This film rather artlessly claims to speak for anyone with a religion. In doing that, it makes a lot of religious people look very stupid. If they were flying planes into buildings to accomplish this instead of making low-quality movies, all of the perfectly reasonable theists who can't bring themselves to accept nonsense like Jesus on a dinosaur would speak up.

The very fact that the bozos behind Expelled can't even seem to make a coherent movie would seem to indicate that they couldn't blow up a building if they wanted to and/or tried. But what other effects might a creationist extremist group have on our society? The one that is most obvious to me is a devaluation of science as a field of study. It's either not worthwhile because evolution is flat wrong, or the whole thing is just too controversial for normal people to want to bother with. Any guesses what happens to a technologically dependent society that falls behind in its scientific pursuits? Anyone? Anyone? Ben Stein? Ben Stein? We're already seeing what happens to the rest of the planet when the US wobbles financially. Anybody want to share responsibility for a collective brain wobble?

So, I'm going to go ahead and change up the words of Martin Niemöller in order to drive my point home a bit.

First they told lies about evolution, but I wasn't a biologist so I didn't speak out.

Then, they made up stories about flood geology, but I wasn't a geologist so I didn't speak out.

Then, they baited atheists so that they could get some attention, but I was too smart for that so I didn't speak out.

Then, they came after theists who didn't believe that Goddidit, and I didn't speak out because they were fellow Christians and we at least have that common bond so I made peace while privately thinking they were wacky.

Then, they came for me. But by then everyone else was so exhausted from speaking out without me that they didn't have the ability to speak out for me.

So, after all of that rambling, what I mean to say is that Expelled is perhaps the biggest affront to the people who are saying the least about it. Does being a good citizen of the world actually matter if one allows one's credibility to be co-opted by hangers-on for their own purposes? In the case of Expelled, I would expect respectable theists everywhere to bellow louder than the scientists and atheists about the attachment of zany intelligent design stories to religion.

In honor of the late, great, Edward Lorenz I encourage butterflies everywhere to get fluttering. If you're feeling like a real heavyweight champion, I'd encourage you to also sting like a bee.

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