Ben Stein
A former speech writer for Richard Nixon, Ben Stein has remarkably managed to top working for Nixon on the list of reasons to dislike the man. He’s the presenter in an apparently shambolic new film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which I guess is supposed to do for the creationists what Michael Moore did for the anti-war movement - though not having seen the film yet, its uncertain how many receptionists Stein harasses on camera.
The film, which derives its name not from the space between creationist’s ears, but from the treatment of people who “dissent” from Darwinian natural selection, centres around the argument that “evolution isn’t true because it hurts our feelings”, which is a logical fallacy as moronic as if I were to claim that Ben Stein doesn’t exist because he makes me incandescent with rage.
Obviously, the film has been debunked and proven wrong (using evidence, a concept unfamiliar with the creationists behind the film), by approximately 150 years of scientific progress. Considering that they started putting together the evidence for evolution by natural selection before the film makers were even born, that’s some considerable foresight on the part of the scientists.
What makes this film and Ben Stein a particularly acute target for hate, rather than just the gentle derisive mocking that the creationists on YouTube tend to receive, is that the film repeatedly links “natural selection” to the Nazis, and has Stein essentially trying to do some Holocaust-revisionism, trying to link Nazi atrocities to Charles Darwin. Obviously this is appallingly wrong, and because there’s not the time or space to explain why, here’s a link instead.
Its possible to sum-up why I’m so full of hate for Ben Stein in one anecdote. When the film was released, Stein appeared on a Christian chat show, where he claimed that “Science leads to killing people“. Really.
The only mitigating thing about this film is the hilariously poor way that they’ve promoted it - during one early screening, evolutionary biologist and one of the people interviewed in the film (apparently under false pretence) PZ Myers, was kicked out by the director - that’s right, he was expelled from Expelled, for having a contrary opinion. Irony is clearly dead. What makes this even funnier is that the director failed to notice and kick out PZ’s guest who he’d brought along for the ride… a man called Richard Dawkins.
Picture credit: here.
Posted on May 17th, 2008 at 22:13Categories: Political Figures, Religious Figures |
