Posted on 05/23/2005 8:07:42 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
The Kansas City Star could not restrain its sarcasm. “In Topeka, Kansas,” the paper announced, “they’re getting ready to stage the 2005 revival of [the Scopes Monkey Trial], also known as the Kansas Board of Education’s hearings on evolution.”
It was a reference to the recent hearings, held by the Kansas State Board of Education, to decide whether to adopt new science standards that would allow students to study scientific criticisms of Darwinism.
Many reporters could not resist comparing the hearings to the famous trial that took place eighty years ago. But what most people don’t realize is that almost everything they think they know about the trial is false. That’s because most of what they learned about it was through a film that caricatured the trial called Inherit the Wind.
These myths were exposed a few years ago when a Pulitzer Prize-winning book took on the vicious fictions perpetrated by this motion picture. The book is called Summer for the Gods, and the author is Edward Larson, a history professor at the University of Georgia and a Christian. Larson says that Inherit the Wind has become a “formative myth” that has all but replaced the actual trial in the nation’s memory.
For example, in the real-life Scopes trial, the ACLU advertised for a teacher willing to help challenge a law that forbade the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public schools. A teacher named John Scopes—who had never even taught biology, let alone evolution—stepped forward, and the case was started. But in the film, the case begins when a mob of fundamentalist Christians, led by a fire-breathing preacher, barges into a biology classroom, arrests the teacher, and throws him into jail.
Another distortion: According to Larson, Inherit the Wind playwrights were determined to make the trial’s Christian prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, “look like a senile, doddering old man.” They have the Bryan character making absurd claims, such as that God created the earth on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C.—at 9:00 a.m. According to Larson, the real-life Bryan acquitted himself well: He clearly articulated his social and religious concerns with Darwinism.
And how does the ACLU lawyer, Clarence Darrow, come off in the film? As the defender of tolerance and reason. But in reality, Larson writes, Darrow was a deeply intolerant man, a “crusading agnostic” who was determined to take Christianity out of the public square.
The playwrights who wrote Inherit the Wind acknowledged that the play—and later the movie—was not meant to reflect what actually happened in Dayton, Tennessee, but for many Americans it’s the only version of the trial they know. Some of our cultural elites seem determined to keep it that way.
If your kids have not seen Inherit the Wind at school or on television, why not rent the video, and then compare this version to the real-life account in Ed Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. And think of donating a few copies of Summer for the Gods to your local schools and libraries.
The book will equip you to set your kids’ science teachers straight and show them what really happened in that sleepy southern town eighty years ago—and it will help you learn how to bring down the curtain on some of those anti-Christian stereotypes
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Make no mistake about it - Darwinism is inherently incompatible with theism.
You're added! Is your freeper name an A-10 reference?
No, it isn't, but if it were, then that would be the equivalent of saying that reality is inherently incompatible with theism.
Neither the Scopes trial nor the character and motivation of the participants has any bearing whatsoever on the validity of evolution. Reality is what it is notwithstanding whether anyone or everyone recognizes it for what it is.
What? Movies don't accurately portray real-life events? What!?!?
But.. but.. what about "Rudy?" Or "Catch me if you can?" Or "The Ten Commandments?" Or "Schindler's List?" Or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre?" Or "Fried Green Tomatoes?" Or "Lean on Me?" Or "Ray?" Or "A Beautiful Mind?" Or "The Aviator?" Or "Erin Brokovitch?" Or "The Miracle Worker?" Or "Seabiscuit?"
Don't we need another book for all of these movies pointing out in excruciating detail about how all those are inaccurate, too?
A book could be done on the films of Mel Gibson alone.
Now, I'm not playing games with you...obviously Colson and I are against Darwinism...but read the piece again and tell me where in it Colson says "This debunking of this movie proves that evolution is false" or even "This movie shows us how today's evolutionists play fast and loose with the facts." All I can find him saying in here is that the movie is an anti-Christian propaganda piece, which it is.
And though the film has no bearing on the validity of the theories it portrays, I find it very interesting that you don't seem to care that the vast majority of Americans have been fed a pack of lies about a major event in the history of science. What's up with that?
What's the matter with creationists?
It is the 21st century, afterall.
> Darwinism is inherently incompatible with theism.
Tell that to the devout, born-again Christians who recognize the fact of evolution.
> They have the Bryan character making absurd claims, such as that God created the earth on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C.—at 9:00 a.m.
While this claim is indeed absurd, it is hardly out of place. The "Bishop Ussher" dating system to the creation of the Universe is used even today by a great many people who think that the world is less than 10,000 years old (so-called "Young Earth Creationists"). If many creationists believe that today, it's hardly unlikely that many more believed it 75 years ago.
Completely, utterly, incorrect.
bump for reference.
> obviously Colson and I are against Darwinism..
Are you also against electromagentism? How about gravity? "Down with Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion!"
> I find it very interesting that you don't seem to care that the vast majority of Americans have been fed a pack of lies about a major event in the history of science.
Yes, ideed. They've been fed the lies that humans just popped into existence a few millenia ago, and that evolution never happened, and that somehow the flightless and nearly defenseless Kiwi bird managed to walk all the way from Turkey to New Zealand without leaving any offshoots along the way.
Make no mistake about it - Darwinism is inherently incompatible with theism.That's right.
God has to be 'bottled up' to the point that man's limitations are imposed on him.
That, after all, is just what you're doing when you tell Him how He created the world given your interpretation of the Bible ...
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