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Expelled - Why does Ben Stein hate America?

JEROME DA GNOME said:
Interesting, the majority of your words belie this conclusion.
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Not at all. The claim of "Deists and non-Deists" is correct, as I have already pointed out to you using Christians as an example.





ETA: Remember?

Jerome, please falsify the claim that the United States was founded by Deists and non-Deists.
 
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IchabodPlain said:
Jerome, please falsify the claim that the United States was founded by Deists and non-Deists.
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Ah, forget it.

George Read, signer of the DoI from Delaware, was an Episcopalian. Benjamin Franklin, from Pennsylvania, was a Deist. See? Deists and non-Deists.
 
National Review's John Derbyshire, who a number of smug, superior people here enjoy sneering at, has what I believe to be the most trenchant view:
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

(...snip...)

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

(...snip...)

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.
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ETA: I like the simile to the Apache seeing his first locomotive. The difference, of course, is that the Apache had the excuse of never having seen a locomotive before. The ID fools and fraudsters have no such excuse; they've seen how evolution works, and still want to claim there's a ghost in the machine.
 
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Elind said:
I think it means the same as you do, but we seem to have a distinction here as to who "the rationalization" applies to. This is really Mycroft's call, but as I interpreted it he was suggesting that some people are attacking Stein for being an ID woo, and others are attempting to soften the critique by saying that's not what it is; it's about free speech and discussion.

My point is that it is actually the "wedge" strategy, where IDers don't focus on ID, they focus on free speech issues and the ID part, for now, is the red herring.
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And again I'll ask, if it is really about free speech and discussion, then they will of course be upset at the "expelling" of Norman Finkelstein from DePaul, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein
 
IchabodPlain said:
Ah, forget it.

George Read, signer of the DoI from Delaware, was an Episcopalian. Benjamin Franklin, from Pennsylvania, was a Deist. See? Deists and non-Deists.
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I'm thinking Jerome read it originally as "Theists and non-Theists," and won't fess up to it now.
 
BPSCG said:
I like the simile to the Apache seeing his first locomotive. The difference, of course, is that the Apache had the excuse of never having seen a locomotive before. The ID fools and fraudsters have no such excuse; they've seen how evolution works, and still want to claim there's a ghost in the machine.
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Yet, no one has seen how evolution works! You analogy is incorrect.
 
pgwenthold said:
And again I'll ask, if it is really about free speech and discussion, then they will of course be upset at the "expelling" of Norman Finkelstein from DePaul, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein
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I'm not sure that they actually use the term "free speech". Free speech is in fact not allowed in schools, legitimately. They are more devious than that, and remember that your example relates to universities. What they want is the young uns, in middle school and high school, and tomorrow, K1.
 
Elind said:
I'm not sure that they actually use the term "free speech". Free speech is in fact not allowed in schools, legitimately. They are more devious than that, and remember that your example relates to universities.
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But all of their "expelled" examples refers to college people. Gonzalez, etc

Finkelstein was "expelled" from DePaul because he is anti-Israel. Gonzalez was "expelled" from Iowa St supposedly because he was an ID supporter.

Now, although they may not exactly say "free speech," recall that Ben Stein has been promoting "viewpoint discrimination" bills in Missouri. Unwittingly, I'm sure, such bills, if enacted as laws, would also protect people like Finkelstein.
 
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pgwenthold said:
But all of their "expelled" examples refers to college people. Gonzalez, etc

Finkelstein was "expelled" from DePaul because he is anti-Israel. Gonzalez was "expelled" from Iowa St supposedly because he was an ID supporter.

Now, although they may not exactly say "free speech," recall that Ben Stein has been promoting "viewpoint discrimination" bills in Missouri. Unwittingly, I'm sure, such bills, if enacted as laws, would also protect people like Finkelstein.
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I doubt that any "free speech" legislation will allow woo in a college setting, outside of the religious ones who already do that. It's too easy for someone to be proven simply incompetent, such as a researcher dealing with aspects of evolution who clearly has a fundamental bias that goes against all principles of science.

However their real goal is to get that principle into schools, where they want young people to "make up their own minds" as opposed to being taught what is known. They want science to be reduced to viewpoints, and they could easily succeed given the number of morons we have in the legislator. We have a prime one called Rhonda Storms from Florida, and she got all but 4 courageous Republicans to vote with her.
 
Elind said:
I doubt that any "free speech" legislation will allow woo in a college setting, outside of the religious ones who already do that. It's too easy for someone to be proven simply incompetent, such as a researcher dealing with aspects of evolution who clearly has a fundamental bias that goes against all principles of science.

However their real goal is to get that principle into schools, where they want young people to "make up their own minds" as opposed to being taught what is known. They want science to be reduced to viewpoints,
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Umm, that's why I brought up the "viewpoint discrimination."

And Finkelstein is just an example of a different viewpoint.

So where is Ben Stein in his case?
 
JEROME DA GNOME said:
Yet, no one has seen how evolution works! You analogy is incorrect.
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If what you mean by this, is that no time lapse footage was taken over millions of years of evolution, then yes. No one has seen how evolution works.

Until a Youtube video appears of said footage, I think that there will always be quite a few people that will make such statements.
 
JEROME DA GNOME said:
Yet, no one has seen how evolution works! You analogy is incorrect.
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Gate2501 said:
If what you mean by this, is that no time lapse footage was taken over millions of years of evolution, then yes. No one has seen how evolution works.
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Pardon me for using inexact language in the service of an analogy. The IDers obviously haven't seen how evolution works (except v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y...), but they've certainly seen the overwhelming evidence for it. And yet they still cling to their ghost in the machine mythology.
 
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