Thinking About Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

This week around the water cooler, I want to discuss Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. No, it won't be a full on review. If you'd like my official review, head over to Epinions. Or just follow this link.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the reaction to it.

Frankly, the reaction has been very predictable to me. It seems to fall into the love it or hate it camp. Those who believe in Intelligent Design (or Creationism, and they aren't the same), like it. Those who hate ID and believe in Evolution hate it. And there's name calling on both sides. Frankly, it saddens me. Have we really sunk to the point where we can't discuss anything without yelling or name calling? Are we becoming more or less civilized.

The media certainly came out swinging against it. If you look up Google's reviews, the ones from the official media sources are all negative. Okay, so they might be classified as neutral by Google, but they really are negative. The only positive reviews are the ones they've picked up from Epinions.

And watching the reviews over there has certainly been an interesting thing. We've actually had people joining the site just to write reviews for or against.

I had read an article about the film before I saw it, but not any reviews. While watching it, I knew the part that the critics would jump all over, and I have been right. At one point, Stein takes on Social Darwinism and Eugenics and follows them down the path they ultimately lead to, the Holocaust. Frankly, taking this part out and allotting that time to fully develop the huge amount to data in the piece would have made everything stronger.

The other issue people are using to write off the film is Stein's emphasis on how life began. "Evolution doesn't try to explain how life began," they claim. Then that's a flaw with the theory, wouldn't you say? And considering that is exactly what Intelligent Design is trying to answer, it seems to me to be a major point that should be discussed.

Some people are crying foul because the documentary doesn't prove Evolution false. That wasn't the point. While he does get into that a little, the main point was that people are being blacklisted for even mentioning Intelligent Design. Didn't you get that from the title of the documentary? It was called Expelled, not Intelligently Designed.

And, of course, there are the arguments about how we can't have religion taught in the science classroom. Um, guess what. Atheism is a religion recognized by the US government. Not only the Supreme Court, but also the IRS for tax write off purposes. And you know what one of their major beliefs is? That's right, Evolution. So, we already have religion being taught in the classroom. The problem is, another religion wants to be taught along side, and the dominant religion is throwing a hissy fit over it.

I actually had one person today tell me that Christians had no right to claim they were being discriminated against since they had been oppressing others for the last 2000 years. I didn't realize that two wrongs now made a right. Glad to know things have changed.

But you know the height of irony? Some of those who have joined the site to write negative reviews of Expelled have also voted my review Not Helpful, which would essentially hide it from view. And the point of Expelled was that Evolutionists are doing all they can to silence anyone who doesn't believe as they do.

Thanks for proving our point.