About 50 years ago, my commie sympathizing grandfather, bless him, told me how the commie's preferred Lysenko over Darwin because believing in Lysenko meant believing that man was perfectible.
I'm really embarassed that Ben Stein, one of my heroes, has made this movie. There are uncountable examples out there of academic censorship and bullying. So, what does Ben do? Instead of exploring the topic in a general way that would garner widespread sympathy and agreement, he narrowly focuses on evolution, a subject he is not qualified to have an opinion on.
The result of Ben's bad judgment is to create arguments, such as the one here, on evolution, instead of on academic freedom. So the important point of academic freedom, that might just save future generations from all kinds of indoctrination, is lost and buried.
Furthermore, this movie sets the cause of liberty and the conservative movement back 50 years because it pits science against faith unnecessarily. For evidence of that I submit the discussion here.
So what we have now done is allow the leftists, socialists or whatever you want to call them, to claim that reason and science are their domain while freedom and liberty are based on superstition and faith. Way to go.
I can see it all now, in the face of Al Gore's "scientific" charts and graphs showing how Marxism is the cure for what ails us, we will choose, instead, to holler "Down with Darwin" and sing "Give me that old time religion." Very persuasive.
I think most people, when presented explicitly with the argument that the Theory of Evolution has to be discredited or destroyed by any means necessary in order to prevent another Hitler would seriously quetion that proposition. But set them up with some carefully chosen "facts" and push the right emotional buttons and they take up that banner without ever realizing they've done it.
That is an interesting point; and why I so much enjoy FreeRepublic.
Thanks for being here.
I agree with your reply and it was very well presented. However you said that Stein wasn't qualified to have an opinion on evolution. I think you may have meant that he does not have the qualifications to pass himself off as an authority on the subject.
You're going to feel really stupid when Expelled wins best film for 08.
——So what we have now done is allow the leftists, socialists or whatever you want to call them, to claim that reason and science are their domain while freedom and liberty are based on superstition and faith. Way to go.——
The leftists, socialists or whatever you want to call them have claimed science and reason and logic as their own domain for decades. Witness the ID trial as evidence, way before this movie came out.
What is happening more and more is that people are not so convinced by “science” that is not looking for truth, rather is used to purport dogma while excluding other approaches to advance the knowledge of truth.
Science is a fluid moving target that shifts in the direction that men push it. Truth is never changing and will always stay where it is waiting for people to finally look at it.