Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film raises hackles
Did Darwin's theory of evolution provoke the Holocaust? That's the claim being advanced by actor/economist Ben Stein in his new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Called "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time" by the New York Times, the film, which debuted last week to dismal modest* box office response, proposes a direct correlation between evolutionary science, Social Darwinism, "godlessness," and Nazism.
Stein's assertions about the evil intentions of evolutionary biologists have some in the scientific community crying foul.
"Unfortunately," John Rennie wrote recently in Scientific American, "Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks—all recycled from previous pro-[Intelligent Design] works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."
Indeed, by Stein's logic, Reb Gedalia Nadel z"tl, an esteemed pupil of the Hazon Ish who advocated reconciling Torah with modern scientific knowledge – particularly on the subject of creation and evolution, would have been a Nazi sympathizer.
Such absurdities aren't preventing Jews from taking the bait, however. On Friday, April 18, the day of Expelled's premier, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a vocal opponent of Intelligent Design theory, received a hostile email from a Jewish viewer of Stein's film, stating: "You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. [...] We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!"
Shermer forwarded the email to famed geneticist and author of the 2006 atheist manifesto The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who penned a public response to the email, refuting Expelled's claims and informing the email's angry author that "you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others."
Likewise, in an op-ed published by MSNBC, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, called the film "immoral," adding that,
To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end.
*[Update] The article I had cited for box office figures has been updated since my initial writing of this entry and now shows that the film performed better than originally anticipated.
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just saw Expelled, it’s thought-provoking at least. it would seem the movie is designed to promote free thought, especially more thinking about the underlying motivations of American academia and a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff we should not take for granted.
Variety is reporting that Expelled came in at #10, earning under $3 million for the entire weekend. Compare that to Forgetting Sarah Marshall which, debuting at #2, earned $17,725,330 this weekend. Expelled didn’t even earn 18% as much.
Hell, the last Veggie Tales movie debuted at #6 and brought in $4.2 million its first weekend. In other words, a cartoon about talking vegetables did better than Stein’s film.
It takes something pretty drastic for me to stand up with that media whore, Arthur Caplan, but Ben Stein has created something so outrageous that silence is impossible. For those of us who are used to thinking of Stein as a harmless clown, this serves as a wake-up call to remind us that Stein was a speechwriter for Nixon and still thinks Dick got a raw deal during Watergate. Stein is a really smart guy with some really hinky ideas about how the world works —in the words of Queen Elizabeth the First, “a man with much wit and very little judgement.”
Jews have no argument with evolution and even the late Pope considered it to be well within the realm of acceptance as only fools who accept an ancient collections of writings as the absolute word of God believe in Adam and Eve as an exact event..It is laughable that this ignorant claptrap called Intelligent Design even gets ink in newspapers or that a movie theatre would show its foolish propagandist views as worthy of their screen space. It goes to show us all how poor scientific education has become in the US that people can watch this idiocy and not see something ludicrous in its assumptions, its inaccurate conclusions and its no knowing rhetoric. Freedom of Speech comes with it the idiots and flat earth theorists along with real understanding and scientific conclusions. Believe what you want but I am very angry that this Stein character tries to rub excrement upon what he does not personally believe by trying absurdly to tie Darwinian Evolution to the Holocaust. To use the deaths of my entire European family during the Holocaust to affirm his mischievous beliefs makes me want to upchuck. He is using Nazi tactics himself to tar scientifically sophisticated people with a eugenics tag. Eugenics as a movement by the way started amongst religious farming people in areas such as those of North America and Canada and in fact, Hitler used the policies for sterilisation passed by the former Social Credit Governemnt in Alberta as a starting point for his Nuremberg Laws. The head of that government was the equivalent to a born again minister. The Holocaust was promulgated by church going bigots who likely believed in Biblical accounts of human origins. The only government that actively attacked Darwinian Evolution was that of Stalin. Darwinism in the distorted form of Social Darwinism was not of his making, is not an acceptable belief amongst any scientist and is, if anything, a fascistic distortion of science and is a leftover from the 19th century as a pseudo science argument for brutality and racism. It has nothing ,whatever, to do with the great Darwin nor of the billions on this earth that know where THE human race came from and where all the animals and plants originated. MOST OF US ARE NOT FOOLS AS STEIN WOULD THINK. I SAY FOR SHAME TO HIM AND HIS SUPPORTERS. FOR SHAME.
Why such a nasty rejection of Stein’s documentary? Why such vilification? Why such gloating at its modest box-office take?
You would think that he has “desecrated” the secular Jews’ “dogma,” and maybe he did. As for myself - not a synagogue-going Jew and hasn’t seen the film - who lives in the real world, his thesis may not be so far off the mark.
When one looks at the enemies of Israel, they seem to come either from the poisonous swamp of fanatical Islam or from SECULAR and “enlightened” Europe. Who are its largest pool of friends in America?
Surely you all know.
Why they rather than the “free-thinking” university professors?
What group of Americans supports the destruction of the yet-to-be-born? Religious zealots? What Americans tolerate and defend pornography and its incidious and destructive impact on our children’s lives?
Are these people informed by religious faith and morality or are they products of “man is but a flesh-and-blood culmination of evolution” devoid of the divine?
Hitler was not a religious fanatic. Only those who embrace Darwin’s theory can easily embrace without guilt feelings the status of Super-man and their “duty” to clear the earth of “inferiors.”
A religious concept?
I don’t think so.
The only disturbing thing that came out of Ben’s movie is the now unveiled fact that there is no freedom within the schools and general scientific community to discuss honest scientific evidence if it threatens to pull the rug out from under the vain, and dishonest “professors”, and “scientists”. It is a slap in the face to every honest, true, scientist, and teacher in the past, to treat legitimate evidence in the shameful way portrayed in this movie. If Darwin would have had access to what we now know about the absolutely amazing, internal workings of an organic cell, he would have lept at the chance to “follow the evidence”. These cowardly “professors”, and so-called “scientists” of today are shamefully trying to protect their status, grants, personal reputations, careers, and egos..... all at the expence of legitimate science. Newton, Gallileo, and Copernicus would be screaming at these lazy bums for not opening up their eyes and seeing what is obviously in their faces....but willfully being ignored. “The heavens proclaim the glory of the Lord....the earth beholds His handiwork”. Wake up scientists and professors!! Bring honor back to your chosen professions. Seek the truth wherever it leads you......have some guts!! Ralph Gaily
Mr. Ben Stein can be equated to David against the giant Goliath (Intelligent Design vs. Darwinism) What a Man! God bless him, his family and his Mission!
Dan
There is plenty of freedom in schools and universities to discuss the nonsense of intelligent design- in courses covering comparative religion or philosophy. What many supporters of this silly movie fail to comprehend is that ID fails one of the basic tests of science--it proposes no useful, testable hypotheses. This is why scientists view ID as a complete waste. It is not that professors are afraid to discuss evolution, they simply are not interested in wasting time on a belief that proposes no experiments and has no supporting evidence. Science is about the testable, real world, not the fabricated world of fairy tales, gods and imaginary designers.
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Megan
04/22/08 02:03 PM
Sieradski is exposing his known lefty bias & sleazy unjournalistic tactics by selectively quoting the article about how well “Expelled” has done at the box office.
He distorts truth by saying it “debuted last week to dismal box office response” linking this fabricated “analysis” to this article http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Ben_Stein_shows_hes_no_Michael_0420.html
which says notyhing of the sort.
Sieradski conveniently leaves out the very same article’s further description of the film as a “modes hit” hardly a “dismal failure” -
from the article:
“Despite Finke’s initial prognosis, Monday’s media reports pegged the Stein documentary as a modest hit.
The Guardian observed that “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed surprisingly gate-crashed the top 10, opening in ninth place with $3.1m.”
“In a bit of a surprise, Ben Stein’s conservative documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed did reasonably good business in its debut ($3.1M),” LAist noted.
MTV pointed out that a documentary coming from what could be construed as the other side did even worse: “Among other new releases, intelligent-design-supporting, Ben Stein-starring documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed created $3.1 million out of thin air for a ninth-place finish. And the terrorist-hunting, Morgan Spurlock-starring documentary Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? tanked, earning just $143,000 in 102 theaters.”
According to the website Box Office Mojo, Exposed already has earned enough money to garner it #26 on the list of all-time top grossing documentaries in the United States. With its weekend earnings of $3,153,000 which puts it $25,000 behind #25 on the list, Expelled is poised to pass the critically acclaimed Grizzly Man sometime today.”
Beware of anything written by Sieradski - always fact check this amateur lefty’s blobs, I mean blogs.