Output Stream of Consciousness

Ah, Expelled!

We knew it was going to be a propaganda-laden train-wreck from the start, despite repeated protests that because we hadn't even seen the movie, we were missing the point, or what have you.

Well, it's an intellectual farce, and there are those who will realize it as such, and those who will credulously lap up this profound exercise in truth-bending.

It can be written off as nonsense, but one of the many things for which they cannot be forgiven is their utterly crass race-baiting, tying evolutionary theory into atheism into the bloody Holocaust. When people are offered this crazy bullshit, some of them believe it. What is the upshot of tarring those who hold to evolutionary theory with this batshit-crazy brush?...

You get some "mild" cases like this, as with this comment on one of the Expelled! blog comments:

Excellent movie! I must see it again. I took my eight (8) year old son with me and he managed to get through 75% of the film before it started to become information overload. The cinematography was excellent and the means by which Stein communicated resided in my son’s brain that he even suggested introducing in a Christian Worldview Course if serve with. There was so much more that the movie could have verbally said, but they chose to show it visually which I believe had the greater impact. Especially, showing the reality that racism is an inevitable product of this violent ideology. Great job Stein and the rest of your crew; I look forward to seeing it again and buying the DVD.

Especially, showing the reality that racism is an inevitable product of this violent ideology.

Yeah, great job, Stein and crew, you liars.

Then you get things like this letter to Michael Shermer:

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Where could the writer in question have been inspired to such beliefs. Richard Dawkins asked the writer whether they had seen Expelled! This was the reply:

Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.

Ben Stein has betrayed his Jewish brothers.

Stein got his inspired readings about the links between Darwin and Hitler from Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler. Weikart is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, the Intelligent Design think tank, and his book, from the looks of it, a chain of links of varying strength, relatively light on the analysis to let the reader fill in blanks between actual historical snippets, as Stein apparently did upon reading it.

Klinghoffer offers a spirited defense of the movie and how it does not blame Darwin for the Holocaust:

Instead it shows the indebtedness of Nazism to ideas expressed in Darwin’s writing.

Oh, that makes it all okay.

No, wait. Why bring up the godforsaken concept in the movie in the first place?

That is a poor protest.

*sigh* The movie is an exercise in dishonesty from head to toe (with the sole and notable exception of the moderation of their blogs), including the pretenses of the movie's concept, the intent of their interviews, the actual circumstances of the "expelled" self-made martyrs of the movie, the ultimate Godwin of trying to tie Darwin to Hitler, to feigning innocence, to stepping on copyright, to their maneuverings in keeping critics out of previews.

The prohibition on bearing false witness against thy neighbour does not, it seems, include all that many neighbours, or it refers to witness in a legal framework as in Deuteronomy 19:16.

It's okay as long as it's for the greater good. Fully in the Hot Fuzz sense.