If you’re trying to use that book as an example of oppression of Christians, it’s a pretty weak argument. One error made by one author in a book few people have read can hardly be considered oppression.

I think that from a strategic stand point what the IDers are doing here is pretty smart. I don’t know if it was a calculated plan but it reeks of PR spin. Just the idea of turning God into a “scientific theory” then writing some articles that have no basis in science, having said articles turned down because they have no basis in science and then claiming they were turned down because of a vast darwinist conspiracy is pretty good PR but then when you combine that with a society that as a whole has very little understanding of what science is or how exactly peer review works and you’re able to sow seeds of doubt into a lot of minds. Overall, if it’s intentional, it’s an underhanded practice but one that will work on a lot of people.

I agree. It also plays on the paranoid conspiracy theories that seem to be lurking just under the surface in a lot of less than rational people. Like, “ooh, Big Science is trying to hide something from us! The big bad ‘darwinists’ don’t want you to find out about their strangling dogmatic orthodoxy! They’re out to kill God! blah blah blah” It seems so easy to whip people up into a total frenzy over nothing. Add to this that a lot of fundy christians seem to think they’re oppressed anyway……

We haven’t taken any stance on the movie, we just note cultural trends that intersect with working with children and youth in the church. I did note Stein’s remarks about Social Darwinism but didn’t take a position on them.

All the best…

Ben Stein isn’t stupid, but (like many religious people) he has certain blind spots that interfere with rational thought. He cowrote the movie. I do think that he believes this stuff. He has said in interviews that he believes in evolution but doesn’t think it tells the whole story.

I’m not sure that Ben Stein is as stupid as his critics allege. He’s just found easier ways to make tons of money since his days as an opinion journalist and political speech writer. I’m not convinced that he himself believes this nonsense that he’s peddling.

Even if Darwin was a child-eating, monkey-raping, serial killer, wouldn’t change the fact that farmers have been proving evolution for centuries by selectively using only the seeds from plants that have the traits they want expressed more for the next growing season. Welcome to evolution.

Isn’t tying Hitler and eugenics to Darwin as an attack on evolutionary theory, uh, well, an ad hominem attack? You’d think as often as they do it, they’d know how to spot it in the ‘heated’ blogosphere.