Ben Stein’s Expelled-Mega Trailor

It’s long, but worth it.

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8 Responses to “Ben Stein’s Expelled-Mega Trailor”

  1. Silke says:

    The reviews of this movie aren’t very good.

    This is from Time Magazine:

    More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can’t therefore argue that the net doesn’t exist. Just ask the fish.
    …
    It’s in the film’s final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and–wait for it–Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We’ve always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729703,00.html

    This is a review in Scientific American:

    The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a “great chain of being.” The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word “pogrom.” Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, “We are at fault in not slaying them.” I don’t think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but whose ideas were most Lutheran Germans of the 1930s more familiar with: Darwin’s or Luther’s?

    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie

  2. Well, with all due respect, did you honestly think either of those sources would give it a good review?

    PS: Darwins theories were, in fact, a big influence on Adolph Hitler and National Socialism.

  3. Silke says:

    I won’t deny Social Darwinism (which is different than the theory of evolution) may have played a part, but anti-Semitism had more to do with the Holocaust than anything else. Hitler used far more religious rhetoric to justify his hatred of the Jews than any reference to Darwin. Do you know what the motto inscribed on the belt buckle of German Wehrmacht soldiers said? “Gott mit uns” (God with us)

    Here’s an article from the Salt Lake Tribune:

    Every semi-knowledgeable moviegoer and reader of movie criticism knows what the words “not screened for critics” means: The movie is a dog.

    Now, I have no idea whether “Expelled” is a good movie or a bad one. Like a good critic, I will reserve judgment until I actually see the thing. But I can’t help but be struck by the irony of Stein’s own words in the movie’s introduction (which is also on YouTube):

    “In my experience, people who are confident in their ideas are not afraid of criticism. So that tells me the Darwinists are afraid. They’re hiding something.”

    What, pray tell, are Stein and the “Expelled” producers hiding? And what are they afraid of?

  4. The Wehrmacht wasn’t buying into the secular Nazi propaganda. One of the ideas of National Socialism was to replace belief in God with belief in The State as the religion. They were trying to do away with belief in God.

  5. darthcrUSAderworldtour2007 says:

    TIME sucks and Teach shoots and scores in Zach Parise fashion! Ben is superb and Frau Vader and I can’t wait to take our 9 kids to the matinee to watch a quality and patriotic ACTOR and a movie that GOD endorses! These secularists and humanists and atheists get… emotional over the existence of GOD. WHY for GOD’S sake? After all, in their minds, GOD doesn’t exist so why even bring up the fact that HE does? Let them cling to their Big Bang Theory but we know who initiated the Big Bang, and who CREATED the cells, atoms, molecules and galaxies and universes and INFINITY itself!!! Speaking of God… here comes Pope Benedict XVI matey!!!!

  6. Silke says:

    Anti-Semitic violence against Jews can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages, at least 7 centuries before Darwin. As Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, they distorted and abused anything they could in their despicable campaigns to intensify hatred of Jews and others they stigmatized as “asocial.”

    For anyone interested this site gives some interesting insight into Expelled:

    http://www.expelledexposed.com/

    Darth, there are many people of faith who find no conflict with the theory of evolution – this includes the Catholic Church.

  7. dorkafork says:

    PS: Darwins theories were, in fact, a big influence on Adolph Hitler and National Socialism.

    In Mein Kampf Hitler does not mention Darwin at all, in fact he rejects common descent, one of the key concepts of Darwin’s theory. In Mein Kampf he also endorses The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that describes Darwinism as a Jewish plot. The Protocols were required reading for German students, whereas Darwin’s work was banned.

    You have been lied to, I hope you will investigate the matter further. Mein Kampf and the Protocols are easy to find online.

    (Apologies if this double-posts, I didn’t see anything about comment moderation in a quick look.)

  8. The high quality original trailer can be found here.

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