Apr 24 2008
Ben Stein’s horrible joke of a movie
Those of you who follow the neverending assault on science and reason known as “Intelligent Design Theory” are probably familiar by now with the new movie out now about it by former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. PZ at Pharyngula has been writing about it quite regularly, so if you need some background, go over there and poke around.
The long and short of it is it’s an hour and a half of pure bullshit, persecution complexes, faulty logic, and something that will appeal to the incredibly ignorant. Arthur Caplan eviscerated the movie in a review at MSNBC. The worst thing about the movie, though:
Then, and most culpably in terms of the downright immorality of the movie and everyone associated with it, we are presented with what will happen if we keep teaching Darwinism in our schools. The logical consequence of Darwinism is Nazi eugenics: the state directed murder of the handicapped, mentally ill, political dissidents and racial “inferiors”!
No, I am not making this up. The core of the movie consists of a sequence in which Stein visits the former German psychiatric hospital at Hadamar where the mass sterilization and murder techniques were first perfected that were later to be used in the concentration camps. Then Ben heads to Dachau, the first concentration camp, where 35,000 people died. These excursions are followed by a visit to Down House, Charles Darwin’s country home outside of London where Ben looks warily at the memorabilia of Darwin’s scientific work that led him to posit the theory of evolution. Stein finishes this sequence by bravely visiting a statue of Darwin where he stares the long deceased now marbleized evil-doer down while making it clear who is directly to blame for Hitler, the sterilization of tens of thousands of German children, the death of 6 million Jews and the deaths of countless other millions of victims of Nazism and those who died fighting the Nazi regime.
This frighteningly immoral narrative is capped off with a lot of shots of the Berlin Wall, old stock footage of East German police kicking around those trying to escape through the wall to the West and some solemn blather by Ben, who calls upon each one of us to rise up in defense of freedom and knock down a few walls in order to get creationism back into the curriculum at Iowa State, Baylor, and other dens of American secular iniquity.
I suspect this movie will rake in a lot of Christianist bucks, no surprise considering how much money they give away to other bullshit-spreaders. And of course, anyone with even a cursory understanding of evolution (sadly, too few Americans) either won’t waste their time with this garbage, or will come away with even more ammo against the IDiots.
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