I Miss All the Good Stuff…

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Guest Contributor

I go away from my computer all weekend (putting posts on autopilot), and as soon as I leave, PZ Myers gets into another Expelled kerfuffle.

If you haven’t heard, the Expelled folks held a one-way conference call, and PZ managed to acquire the code which allowed two-way conversation… Good times were held by all. (Except the liars behind the movie.)

Rebecca has the audio/transcript.

I’m going to be away from the computer this Thursday when I speak at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities).

PZ, do me a favor and wait until Friday when I can see this stuff happening live instead of two days after the fact!


[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

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  • Derek

    If only you were going a few months from now, I’d drive up to see it. I watched the video of you speaking to the Minnesota Atheists. That was great.

  • Andrew

    Yeah… great stuff.

    The PR guy for the film, Paul Lauer, said this to end the ambush PZ was throwing their way:

    …Mr. Myers, as you’ve done previously with trying to sneak in to the film, you have come uninvited to this call…

    Anyone who has been following this incident could tell you that not only did PZ, Dr. Dawkins, and their various entourages register ahead of time on the film’s website, they used their own names to do so. They also provided photo IDs to get into the theater. Sure, some seats were saved for people invited to the screening, but the rest of the seats were first come, first serve on the website. Nothing “sneaky” about it by any standard.

    I guess self-deception is human nature. I’m just as guilty as everyone else when it comes to that one. But this guy Paul is a PR rep, and I’m sure he does this for a living. The other men behind the movie, mainly the producer who threw PZ out of the screening, these men have fallen far.

    I can only imagine the optimism that the people responsible for this film felt as they watched their project go from an idea with so much potential (in their eyes at least) into actual production. But I wonder if they have actually taken a step back to look at what they’ve done and what this film is costing them and their naive but understandable “cause”.

    These Christian men behind the film are actually lying publicly about an event that has been well-documented. They expelled a man from their movie about so-called ID theories being expelled from scientific debate and research. The hypocrisy is almost unbelievable if we weren’t all so intimately familiar with how people can be.

    I think that somewhere in the making of this film, the lack of anything provoking to say lead them (possibly without any conscious will to do so) from an honest attempt to address an issue to the fear-mongering tripe that made it out of the editing room. An honest person, a person say with a strong rational grounding in the scientific method, could tell you that the reason their film went the direction it did was because there is no “issue” over intelligent design in science.

    A simply explanation of the Scientific Method was enough to satisfy both my father and a cousin (both strong Christians) who had believed and stated that scientists were dishonest when it came to the idea of a deity. “They want to be god” was the argument to explain this. Science uses hypothesis, theories, and experimentation to explain evidence gathered any number of ways. There can never be any way to prove the basic tenants of Intelligent Design… therefore it is not scientific… therefore any scientist who doesn’t understand this is a fool and is treated as such by the community.

    This is why they couldn’t make an interesting, thought-provoking film about the self-inflicted hindrances scientists put on their work by being arrogant know-it-alls… Wait, someone already did that film Flock of Dodos, but the guy who made it was an evolutionary biologist… guess that wasn’t good enough. An honest person would have understood the basic scientific problem with ID and hung up the hat before getting too involved. But the men who made this film were not honest, and after throwing Nazis into the film, it’s no surprise they have thrown inhibition and reason to the wind. They are going to get everything they have made for themselves here, I just hope some of them can actually learn from it.