Truth
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 25 November 2007
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
The Christian and Jewish liars just never cease their lying. A film has been made with the title, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, by a man called Ben Stein, who seems to be famous for something in the USA, presumably lying! Look him up on he internet and you’ll find he is famous for precisely nothing, unless it is being a chum of Richard Nixon. He has written books, made films and appeared on TV, all of which is utterly forgettable, and indeed, has been forgotten. The man is a nonentity.
His film tries to make out there is an atheist conspiracy in the US, if not the whole world, against Christians. Jews and Christians have always been great at making victims into the victimizers, and vice versa. Almost everyone in the USA, faced with an overbearing Christian smugness amounting to intolerance, feels obliged to say they are practising Christians, though being Jewish naturally is acceptable too, and only a small percentage have the courage to say they are atheists. Yet this tiny minority of atheists is victimizing the 90-odd percent Judaeo-Christian majority! In the USA, it is Christians who are the oppressors, and this film is an example of it.
The film inverts almost every truth there is in America, hardly surprising, one might imagine, for a buddy of the worst president the USA had in recent history before Bush, and one who was rightly impeached, as Bush ought to be. The fact is that these supposed religious defenders cannot tell truth from lies, and could not distinguish God from Satan if they met him sitting next to them on a bench in Central Park.
Sociopathetic Stein claims that science has always included “the ability to inquire whether a higher power, a being greater than man, is involved with how the universe operates. This has always been basic to science. Always.” If it is so, then the failure of science ever to find an iota of evidence for God is a conclusion, he would not like, but science has always been concerned with the natural world, not that supernatural world occupied by God and his hosts of spirits for which no evidence has yet been found.
Standing by the adage that the old ones are the best, Stein makes the usual Christian claims that the best scientists are religious, when the opposite is the truth:
Some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, operated under the hypothesis that their work was to understand the principles and phenomena as designed by a creator.
Galileo lived 400 years ago, under the threat of the inquisition and being burned alive if he denied God or the Church. Newton lived 300 years ago when the baneful influence of Christianity was still strong, and the threat of the inquisition was just fading, but Christianity was still compulsory in British academia because tenure depended on it. The only modern great Stein can cite is Einstein who repeatedly explained that he was a pantheist not a theist, and did not believe in Jewish and Christian fantasies. Nature was Einstein’s God, and it is typically Christian chicanery to claim Einstein as a believer.
Stein likes to list scientific achievemnets, in addition to the three scientists he knows the name of, to make it seem as if they depended on what he is defending, belief in God:
There would be no modern medicine, no antibiotics, no brain surgery, no Internet, no air conditioning, no modern travel, no highways, no knowledge of the human body without freedom of inquiry.
Freedom of enquiry is, of course, what the Church did not want, and still does not want. Science follows its own clues and has found out what it has by so doing, not by listening to the prescriptions of preachers, pastors and rabbis. That is what narks these fundamentalist Republican Christian obfuscators. This film is really a defence of idiotic Christian fundamentalist claims that an ignorant book, which necessarily runs counter to the discoveries of science, was written by God. These people make God into an ignoramus and an idiot because they are appealing to the most ignorant and idiotic elements in society as part of their scheme to keep their power and riches.
Their philosophy, the philosophy of neoconservatism, openly admits that religion is to be used to control the mass of people who believe it. The controlling elite, needless to say, do not believe a word of it. They pretend to, simply to get voting fodder among the dimmest elements of the electorate, because it saves them jerrymandering by resorting to bent chads and judges.
Their claim is that science is threatening freedom of enquiry—even though it is founded on it and utterly depends on it—because it rejects religious claims like Intelligent Design, an alternative to Creationism—literal believe in the bible—that are not scientific and cannot be accepted into science if science is to remain what it is, and not become an aspect of theology. What is scientific is what is demonstrably true, not what a lot of religious crooks and shysters pretend is true to win sympathy from people unable to escape Dark Age mindlessness and superstition. They themselves are too stupid to realize that, if they succeed, they will bring back the Dark Ages, and the scientific knowledge that has given them world domination will be lost, and countries that are not ruled by donkeys will take over.
Anyone who values our modern achievements has to oppose this counter-productive fancy for medieval Christianity in the USA. The leading Christians have rarely been good, as any unbiased inspection of Christian history will show, and for much of its 1700 years it has deliberately and cynically kept people in abject poverty and misery. Support Christianity to get into heaven, if that is what you believe, but you had better be sure your pastor is a saint and not a devil. Mostly they have been the latter.
Comment
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 [ 09:24 PM]BillZ (Believer) posted:
Mikey Magee my old friend. Long time no read. In reviewing your critique of Expelled No Intelligence Allowed, I see that age has not mellowed you. You are as funny as ever. One thing I find fascinating about you minimalist types, is an almost robotic reaction when confronted with criticism:
- Change the subject
- Go on the attack
- Become the victim
As always, you are true to form. The movie is not out yet. I havent seen it. It appears from your review that you have not seen it either. This is typical of your scholarship, ie sloppy screeds to prove a dearly held, highly emotional belief while either ignoring or diminishing, contradictory evidence. When the universe is not the way you want it be, make the universe you WANT, the universe that is, and then hold your breath until you turn blue like a six year old if anyone tells you otherwise.
Welcome back, Bill, though you do not sound any more reasonable for the break. Of course, I have not seen the movie, but what I have to say is about the maker of the movie who is online in a video clip from some TV network explaining the purpose and motivation of the film. I’ve never heard of him, but creationists and neocons seem to think he is Billy the Whizz. He agrees with them. You also seem peeved that Mr Stein should be citicized, but then, though you claim to be a Catholic, you sound like a demented revivalist, listening to the voices in his head instead of looking for evidence for what they tell him. What they tell you seems to be to accuse your critics of the tactics fundamentalist Christians like to use.
Lets diverge to science for a minute. An uncreated universe should be eternally old. Ours has a beginning, as Christians expected. So, make up all sorts of universes we cant see and can never observe and voila! The beginning is only apparent.
Aren’t these universes, that we supposedly invent, a bit like the God you have invented? You say we cannot see them and can never observe them. Why is a God with those properties all right, but the alternative hypothesis, one that has the advantage of some supporting evidence, not all right? Nor does a universe with a beginning have to be created, now does it? As for time, again it seems to be only apparent for God who can foresee the future, but not in general. You are intelligent enough to know that the surface of any sphere is unbounded. You can move around on it forever and never get to its edge, because it hasn’t one. Yet it is not infinite. Why cannot time be the same? You assume time must be eternal because your holy book, the putative Word of God, says it. Yet the beginning of time could be an illusion like the illusion that parallel lines meet at the horizon. The reason might be that time gets slower at tiny timescales compared with the scale we experience it. A man who can score a basket ten times in a minute on a basketball court, might need ten minutes to thread a fine needle. The parable is simply to show that scale matters!
Sunlight photodisassociates water into oxygen and hydrogen continuously. This would poison the earliest earths athmosphere with a small, but deadly from the point of view of spontaneous creation of life amount of oxygen into the REAL early earths athmosphere. Problem? Yes. What to do? Pretend the laws of chemistry are suspended for the early earth and claim no oxygen was present. Do the same for the chirality problem with proteins, sugars and nucleic acids. After all, when we properly adjust our lab conditions ie intelligent design we PROVE that no intelligent design is required for life to start! Got a problem with that darn 2nd Law of Thermodynamics being universally applicable? No problem. Little Chucky Darwin suspends it for biology and presto! Its gone. Does the evidence, as presented by Michael Behe Edge of Evolution contradict this by showing the 2nd law does INDEED apply to biology the biota is slowly deteriorating mutations, natural selection simply slows this process down? Attack Behe, all the while ignoring the truth of his argument and his evidence.
Most of this is your problem, not science’s. You cannot or will not listen to what is being said, or you hear it all right but pretend it is something else for your own propaganda purposes. Most of this is addressed on the pages, and can easily be found, if you are willing to read it, on the internet. Science has discovered more in three hundred years than Christianity, even with the help of God, in 2000. But science is not yet free of all problems, otherwise we would know everything and would be gods ourselves. You religious types criticize science for not knowing everything, yet you know nothing, and do not want to know anything. Scientists do not suspend natural laws. They try to discover them.
What you cannot seem to get is that laws are laws within a range of application. Outside the range, they might not apply at all, or in a restricted way. These boundaries are discovered by observation and experiment. The law of entropy says disorder increases, but order can increase when there is a source of energy. Since you are interested in chemistry and science try reading the book by Nobel prizewinner, Ilya Prigogine, called Order out of Chaos.
In reality, you have contempt for God, which can only mean that, as you believe in supernatural beings, you must worship the one that opposes God. If there is a God and He has made the world, He has made it the way we find it, not the way you imagine it, and He has made us in His image so that we can use our intelligence objectively to find out. It is not intelligent to believe, without proof, that an ancient book is God’s own work, but the laws of Nature are the devil’s, as you seem to.
Got a laughable half baked theory that the Persians made up the bible and that it was then subjected to heavy editing right up until the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Make sure if you do this, to, with total disregard for standards of neutrality or scholarship, apply hypercritical standards to the bible, while applying much lower standards to every other ancient document, particularly those that disagree with the bible. Otherwise, you throw out all of history prior to Gutenberg. Then ignore the fact that Persia c 400 BC would have NO MOTIVATION WHATSOEVER to do such a thing. Then ignore the fact that Hezekiahs tunnel is found and dated to right where it should be, 700 BC Im going to use the Before Christ instead of the Before the Common Era, because I love to annoy you. Ignore the fact that a quotation from the Aaronic blessing from Numbers has been found and dated 300 years prior to when the book it was taken from was originally written under your theory. Then ignore the fact that a large structure, dated from 600 years before your fictitious book was written, is found exactly where it was supposed to be, USING a supposed book of fiction! The recent find of Nehemiahs wall has now got your old pal Finkelstein adopting minimalists tactics of tap dancing. I could go on and on. But why would I want to imitate someone like you. Lets get back to the movie.
It sounds from your rant almost as if you have read some of these pages. As always, though, you immediately prove that, if you have, you have not understood. The specific points you mention are all dealt with in the pages, so need not be dealt with again here. You pretend they have not been dealt with either because you are typically dishonest as Christian apologists have to be, or because you cannot comprehend the written word when you cannot agree with it. Some things you do not explain and I do not understand, such as Finkelstein tap dancing. Otherwise you are blustering. As for neutrality, what are you talking about? How can scholarship be neutral, any more than science can. Scholarship leads the honest scholar wherever it leads. He does not jump up crying out, “I cannot go there, It is not being neutral.” Doubtless, the crooks who call themselves Christian scholars do it, and that is why you mention it, but it is not so. It is, however, the reason why ANE scholarahip is a pig’s ear. And, if you know that the bible is pre-Persian and unedited, then tell me how you do, or is it just a matter of faith?
The movies subject, I have read, is the persecution and job jeopardy in academia inconsistent with free speech and freedom of conscious for those who believe in intelligent design. Your laughable rants aside, academia in America is very much controlled by left wing secularists, such as yourself. Many of them are as totalitarian as you are. Given the history of such gentle atheist souls as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the current batch who spearhead the 22 million abortions worldwide every year, among other crimes, psychopathic genocide seems to go hand in hand with atheism. A few careers ruined hardly seems out of bounds for what atheists are capable of doing.
Who is the totalitarian, Dear Bill? I do not want to end any careers, and have no way of doing it, if I did. Liberalism is from the word meaning “free”, or had you not noticed? People should be free to think what they like. You will not do what God enjoined you to do, to be perfect and love your fellow men, something that would and should take up your whole being, Christ told you. Instead you want to make everyone think and be like you, a hypocrite and a dunce. I am not picking on you in particular, Dear Bill, as you know, but all of you ranting fundies. You are totalitarians, not atheists generally, who are mainly liberals and secularists keen to keep totalitarian religion out of political affairs. Totalitarianism is refusing all opposition, and the idea like that of propaganda was invented by the Church which made sincere attempts to kill everyone that disagreed with it long before any of the men you cite above. You lot want to bring it all about again, and can only do it by lying. Stalin and Hitler, as is common knowledge were both brought up as committed Christians. What Mao, and Pol Pot were brought up as, I have no idea, but it is unlikely to have been atheism, as you make out. The church would and did have people living in abject poverty for centuries because of its primitive birth policies—women had to have children until they dropped, and my own maternal great grandmother was one of them—dead at 28 after having seven children in continuous years. You people are the monsters.
The premise of Mr Steins movie seems likely. But Ill wait to see it before judging. Unlike you, I want to see if the real evidence supports my beliefs or doesnt. Im not going to force the evidence to FIT my beliefs like you do. So Mikey, did you disprove Mr Steins point? Where the subjects of the film NOT persecuted as stated? This is the thrust of the movie. Is it right or wrong? You never address that. You attack Steins character, all the while claiming YOU and your sweet, virtuous fellow atheists are the victim. But IS he wrong? It is good to see your website again Mikey. You are as inadvertantly entertaining as always. You missed your calling. You should be a comedian. But even in your scientific role, your rants are still a scream. Thanks. Bill Z
I covered the points that I had from Stein as I said above, and point out the absurdity of a powerless minority harassing a powerful majority is the Nazi Big Lie propaganda technique learnt from the Catholic Church. Welcome back, but do me a favour, keep the Blog Back for short replies, and pointers, if you wish, to a long reply you can do by email, on my almost ignored Wordpress Blog or Bravenet Forum. As always, I’ll reply appropriately.
