I did not realize until recently that Ben Stein has taken it upon himself to be a spokesman for the "Intelligent Design" movement. I confirmed this by watching _Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed_ last Friday.

The film starts off trying to make the case that speaking in favor of the idea of a "creator" in scientific or academic circles is cause for dismissal. I don't think that Stein did a very good job of proving that, as his focus was in portraying the fired science and academia people that he interviewed as victims of censorship. He never made any serious effort to show that these people were doing competent scientific work.

Toward the end of the movie--and this is especially dedicated to Herb--Ben Stein tries to link evolutionary theory to eugenics, the Holocaust, Planned Parenthood, Communism, and Atheists. In my opinion, none of the cases that he made were very good, and there were many places in which the film's attempts to evoke certain emotions from the viewer seemed very campy.

I think that I was the only skeptic in the theater that night. A large segment of the audience reacted--almost as if on cue--in a very visceral way to the film's emotional appeals.

I have a more detailed review of the movie that I can post, if anyone is interested.

Thanks Alfredo. I would like to read a bit more about your experience. What you have relayed so far confirms many of my suspicions about this picture.

Ditto.

This movie has received poor reviews and some people are questioning whether Ben Stein is a Holocaust denier. Personally, I think he's nuts. And it doesn't surprise me that the theatre was filled brainwashed robots.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24239755/

Though I have not seen the film, I prefer this Ben Stein in the classroom to the one of today. He has always played on his typecast as the droll and uninspiring educator. He was the same guy whether he was shilling for eyedrops or sardonically giving away money when he was stumped by a question. I remember that he got really pissed and flustered when he was wrong. In this case, he is very wrong.

Ben Stein is not a Holocaust denier. Like the worst squirming angry moments of his game show, he is just plain wrong. Unfortunately, his explanation of the Nazi racial cleansing does nothing but confuse the issue, and that makes him even more wrong. Forgive me for saying this, but a prominent Jewish-American ought to be focused on promoting the facts with every opportunity. When I combine this misstep with his seemingly unending love for Richard Nixon, an anti-Semite, it leaves a Goy like me wondering what the hell Stein is thinking.

Ben is either unaware or blindly pretending that there is no difference between two distinctly different theories. It is an established fact that the Nazis were strong believers in Eugenics, an artificial selection practice used on the human population from the time of Plato, and continued extensively in the southern United States during slavery. Charles Darwin penned On the Origin of Species, a 19th century book about natural selection in biology as a whole. It was first published in London in 1859, just before slavery was abolished in the United States. As a scientific work, it did not reflect a nationalist or racial agenda.

Ben Stein went to Columbia and Yale and he has been a professor at UCSC and Pepperdine. He is an accomplished author. It is not like he couldn't check his facts. He is loudly and publicly confusing the very ancient roots of racism based on conjecture with the results of modern scientific method. Science has finally proven that all humans regardless of race share the same gifts, and now he wants to confuse another generation. Perhaps, as some suspect, he has simply lost his marbles.

"he has simply lost his marbles."

Something that has been happening a lot in this forum too.

All creation SHOUTS the there is a CREATOR GOD!!!
Does a building build itself...does a car created itself...does anything make itself to existance??? Look at the pictures that the Hubble telescope displaying our universe to the creation of the human body and all it's systems had to be created by someone!!!

Psalm 14:1 Foolish people say in their hearts,
"There is no God"

*mumbles under his breath* Dear God, please save us from your followers ...

Spot on, Broadway.

Design betrays a designer.

Plus these atheistic Einstein's can't even get their theory of evolution to jive with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics [entropy].

It's all about man making himself God.

It doesn't work. Communism tried it. After many decades and millions slaughtered, it failed abysmally.

Foolish people claim something to be truth that can't be proven! What kind of fool comes to the conclusion that for a lack of a better answer, god created it? A first grader could come up with that kind of theory.

Fools, brainwashed fools!!

Littlesongs's observations are spot-on with respect to what I saw in the movie. Specifically:

1) Ben Stein tries to connect the natural selection of evolution to the artificial selection of eugenics by saying that the proponents of eugenics believed that they were "helping evolution along." Of course, this doesn't account for the possibility that eugenics would very likely be biased by politics and economics, thereby not necessarily selecting the most *biologically* viable humans.

2) Ben Stein uses Hitler and the Holocaust in his movie to get a visceral reaction out of the audience. He goes out of his way to say that this is personal for him because he's Jewish. However, he builds up the case that Hitler was trying to "help evolution along" by getting rid of physically inferior people but never explains how Jewish people ended up becoming one of his biggest targets.

Who's the real fool:

http://members.aol.com/BaxterInstitute/Fool.html

Who's the real fool? The chump that believes the link you posted.

It's OK for you to put down religion and Christians in your posts, but not OK for Herb to promote and spread it in his?

Ya gotta love the leftist LIEberals double standard.

(Thanks Missing for giving me this idea. Since you mentioned you'd post a donation link every time Herb posts an "anti" Planned Parenthood link, I think I'll post this every time Vitalogy attacks someone for posting a pro Christian post or link! At least until I get bored with it!)

Skybill, remove your blinders and read the thread. The first attack came from Herb, accusing us "atheistic Einstiens" of being fools and comparing us to communists who slaughtered millions. This is not a "pro-religion" post. There's nothing religious about it. Both you, Herb, and Broadway could stand to take some notes from our friend Chris Taylor.

Personally I think Ben Stein looked at Michael Moore's success and decided to get in on the deal, from the right side. Unfortunately for Ben, you still have to entertain.

I won't actually post that every time you post yours. It was just an idea that came to me while I was typing. Sounded good to me as I typed it, but in retrospect it isn't.

I really don't have the time and I'm not into starting posting wars.

While I'm a believer and a Christian, I don't feel the need to proselytize on the internet. If it is a topic that I believe strongly in, I’ll make my position known and comment, but that’s about it.

But hey, if Herb and Broadway want to, more power to them and I'll certainly enjoy their posts!

I also really enjoy reading Chris's posts too!

By request, here is the review of _Expelled_ that I, a fool, wrote for the fools at the Beaverton Atheists' Meetup group:

I have just returned from watching _Expelled_, and I am sorry that I put more money into Mr. Stein's pocket. The movie is a boilerplate propaganda piece made with the assumption that the viewer believes that the universe was designed. Editing and mood music were used to elicit the desired audience reactions at various points in the film. The crowd at this Friday evening showing was larger than I would have expected, and from the level and unity of the audience reaction, I would assume that most of the crowd was sympathetic to the premises that Stein tried to develop. Furthermore, the various segments that were intended to mock Richard Dawkins got a big reaction.

The movie opens with Stein talking about how important it is to have freedom. He then starts interviewing various scientists and professors who claim that they lost their jobs when they promoted the view that intelligent design could have happened or when they referenced literature by other intelligent design proponents. This part of the movie was pretty dry. The movie was careful to draw a distinction between intelligent design and Biblical creationism, at least in the first hour.

The next segment of the movie uses a computer animated sequence and a discussion of the complexity of the internal mechanisms of the cell to cement the idea that biological systems are complex and orderly. Stein talks about the 1953 Stanely Miller experiment, which sought to reproduce some of the atmospheric conditions of the early earth to see if they would produce the ingredients required for life. The experiment is presented in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of way, and Stein says that it did not work. (Note: some years ago, I had read that the Miller experiment managed to synthesize compounds that were very similar to amino acids. I am inclined to call this an intentional misrepresentation on Stein's part, as he said nothing about what types of results Miller was looking for, leaving the audience thinking that the experiment was expected to generate living cells.) Stein then pops the "how did life originate" question to some scientists. The responses are presented, with the way of Stein's reactions, in such a way that they sound like unitelligible gobbledygook to the audience. The unstated conclusion is that the mainstream "science establishment" is folly because it misses an idea that is obvious to everyone but them.

After that, the film tries to compare the banning of intelligent design viewpoints from mainstream science to the cold war, communism, and the Berlin Wall. As was done throughout the movie, scenes of old black and white stock footage and clips from old propaganda films were spliced in for effect. However, the use of scenes from the opening of the 1961 film "The Challenge of Ideas," narrated by then head of the U.S. Information Agency Edward R. Murrow, was so campy that it made me laugh. It seems that nobody else in the theater found this funny. Stein ends up putting forth a conspiracy theory that says that academia (referred to as the Academy), pro-evolution/ pro-Atheism watchdog groups, the news media, and the courts are in cahoots to marginalize pro-intelligent design scientists and viewpoints.

Then Stein goes for the jugular, by trying to build up a case linking evolutionary theory to eugenics and the Holocaust. He visits an old concentration camp that has been turned into a museum. One of the curators walks him through, showing them where the victims were gassed, dissected, and cremated. In his conversations with the curator, who spoke very broken English and appeared not to fully understand some of Stein's questions, Stein asks whether the people operating the concentration camp believed in Darwin's ideas. She says that they did.
After the gruesome tour, he asks her whether she thinks that the concentration camp operators were crazy to commit such cruel acts. She says no. This was cleverly used as a setup to the next interview because one is left thinking, how could sane people act this way? This next interview is with an academic (I can't recall whether he was a scientist or a historian). Stein asks this man whether he thinks that Adolf Hitler was insane. The academic replies that Hitler was certainly evil, but he was not insane. Hitler, according to this man, took Darwinistic ideas to such an extreme that he thought that by exterminating "weaker" people, he was helping evolution along. "Hitler believed that he was doing mankind a favor," he said. Stein asks whether any eugenics proponents operated in the United States. The answer given is that many of the ideas co-opted by the Nazis had come from Evolutionist American scientists and that even Planned Parenthood was founded to promote its own brand of eugenics. For emotional impact, and possibly expecting that many in the audience will be Evangelical/Fundamen talist Christians, Stein mentions that he is Jewish. However, he never tries to explain why religious and political convictions landed otherwise physically desirable people in the Nazi gas chambers.

In the final (anti)climactic segment of the movie, Stein visits the Charles Darwin museum. The soundtrack here consists mostly of ominous sounding mood music and very few words. There are scary closeups of ape exhibits as Stein walks through the museum, and Stein finally finds himself staring at a giant statue of Darwin himself. This almost comes off as a scary nightmare sequence.

At the very end of the film, Stein is finishing up a speech and getting a standing ovation. Some shots of Ronald Reagan speaking about freedom come on the screen, along with patriotic shots of Washington, D.C., the crosses at Arlington National Cemetary, and the Declaration of Independence (yes, the "endowed by their creator" part). Right before the closing credits come on, Stein tells the audience that it is important to speak up about the loss of freedom in science, even if that means being criticized or losing one's job. It is almost as if he is asking the viewers to figuratively martyr themselves.

If you don't feel too bad about giving your money to this clown, I would recommend taking your children to this movie so that they can learn about propaganda techniques.

Ya gotta love the leftist LIEberals double standard.

They learned it from the EXTREME REICH neo-CONs.