Mar 22 2008
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PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins talk teh stoopid
The most important thing to note in this video of PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins discussing the Expelled nonsense is not the actual story, but that squids can have hairy faces.
I think the most important part is that religion is just like knitting!
Whoops, the knitting bit’s in this video, excerpted from Expelled:
http://sheeptoshawl.com/blog/index.php?itemid=289
My irony meter has been pegged since Friday!
This is just -TOO- cool! Thanks, Phil!
Teh stoopid indeed!
Religion = organized ignorance usually, but it might be disorganized ignorance in this case! Whooo hooo hooo hehehehe huh! puff pant… [my sides hurt!]
Rich in Charlottesville
It was an act of God that they remove the wrong person. How many people heard about the movie how? Because of this, who wants to see it out of curiosity?
The fact Dawkins gave it a bad review makes it even better.
This movie just became a best seller and with Dawkins help!
They said it right in the video. He was expelled from Expelled. Rarely have I heard of a more short sighted marketing move! Classic!
WoodGuard:
You’re wrong, I’m afraid. This stinker of a film will -NOT- become a hit. I still don’t want to see it. Propaganda isn’t particularly interesting to me. There is no such thing as an act of god because this god you refer to doesn’t exist.
There -IS- however, a subculture of truly bad films getting viewed purely because of their badness. For example “Plan 9 From Outer Space” is truly stupefying in it’s ineptitude. But it’s tolerable as a comedy because it doesn’t at least try to pretend to be truthful, it’s still obviously a fictional story.
These mooks, on the other hand, think they’re the mouthpiece of the creator of the universe! What hubris!
Rich in Charlottesville
Praise Darwin!
Phil -HAS- a real astronomer’s job. It’s called EPO, Education & Public Outreach. This blog reaches the public and they get educated by reading it. His books also reach a broad swath of the public and by reaching out to them he does us all a favor.
What sort of astronomer are you?
Rich
Praise Darwin some more!
Here is the link to the Harvard Multimedia Production site and the cell video
——–> http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/
In their own words, they set the record straight. Myers was denied access by paranoid ideologues, much like in the oft-viewed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPol_m8wm8Y&mode=related&search= where a power-tripping rent-a-cop, backed up by a police officer, bars an independent videographer (in this case from a public street) during a so-called Scientology “street fair”. Yeah, sure the film was a “private screening”, but if they had nothing to hide and were proud of their efforts and their “beliefs”, there was no reason for the reaction to the mild-mannered professor (unless they recognized his hidden super powers).
Exactly Richard! I’m a high school student, and Phil is one of my biggest and greatest influences.
Good for you, Zeke! Keep your mind open and let science show you -HOW- to think, not -WHAT- to think. Then you can think for yourself. The producers of “Expelled” want to tell you what to think and close your mind off from the real world.
It’s time for our species to outgrow these superstitions.
Currently reading Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World”, BTW… Taking my time and savoring each sentence. He died much too soon.
Rich
I watched this vid on Dawkins site. Expelled deserves to disappear into obscurity. It has no credibility or integrity. And Rich….Demon Haunted World is a must read ( along with Bad Astronomy of course : )
I’m loving this whole debacle. It’s showing, very clearly the hypocrisy of the cdesign propnentists.
Oh, and Demon Haunted World is my favorite book. I’ve read it many times. Definitely a must read.
I think they just found out he didn’t have a spine. That can be quite off-putting, you know.
I’ve been following this story with much interest (and hilarity).
Last night, I was a bit bored and in trawling around the net, I found a link to this video set from Nick Gisburne’s website which was quite amusing:
“Why do people laugh at creationists?”
Part 1: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5vid4GkEY
There are dozens of other videos which can be accessed from this user’s account. Worth a look!
Thanks for being in our film. Now leave.
http://www.twincities.com/ci_8657674
Richard B, I don’t think you are look at this movie thru the eyes of a believer. As a recovering Believer, I have some insight into this. Religion people don’t use logic to make decisions; they use emotions to make them.
This movie is for Believers not skeptic or logical people. In addition, when you see one of the biggest anti-religion writers said your movie is not good, that just helps. If no one said anything about this movie, it would have just died.
An “It was an act of God” is the same as a lucky break, just looking thru religion coloured glasses.
Here’s an idea; these trained seals are barking that biology teachers should “teach the controversy” regarding evolution, right? I say, “let’s do it!”
My high school introductory biology class did exactly that, alongside the “controversies” around vitalism and the Great Chain of Being… as our introduction to chemistry taught the “controversy” of phlogiston, and introduction to physics taught the “controversy” of ether. The “controversies” were taught just before covering, for instance, the Michealson-Morely experiment, Lavoisier’s combustion experiments, and Darwin’s Galopagos observations and Volta’s galvinism experiments.
Teach the mistakes. Teach how they were found to be mistakes. Teach how the scientific process led to successively more accurate and useful theories, how these theories were tested by the *predictions* they made and measured by how close they came to matching the predictions in the real world… and point out the deficits in the older theories’ predictions and why they’re no longer viewed as credible.
Even if the details don’t stick around, at least the process will have been taught many times… and it’s the process we want to make stick, because it’s the process by which foolishnesses like ID and phrenology get shot down.
And we won’t even be “expelling” anyone’s point of view.
— Steve
Oh man, do I agree with Steve above. It takes less than a day to show how the thinking presented in ID and such - isn’t.
We need to not just not go see this turkey, we need to get the patently, honestly religous to not only not see it but to decry, debase and devalue it. We need to get those of moderation to pan it, protest it and have the world see it’s idiocy.
It won’t matter one whit to the mindless that would follow it anyway, but it will help from gaining new converts.
JC
Nope, it will be known as a boring propaganda movie. It will polarize the fundies all right, while preventing some non-fundies to ever get near such a hell hole of religion.
Science and education is a long term project, and if religious fundies threatens it and other part of free society, it is important to prevent recruitment. This movie and its exposure will do exactly that.
If you are such a pareidolia conspiracy junkie as your reasoning from chance events imply (”an act of God”), you might want to consider why Dawkins was helpful…
Obviously that last few posts were done by “christ like” fundies.
Here be some more stoopid.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=540453&in_page_id=1811
Let’s celebrate Christ… BY BEING NAILED TO SOMETHING!!!!!!!! Wheeeeee!
Thank goodness the electric chair or firing squad wasn’t sound in Christ’s time.
Happy Easter, believers.
And now… Easter Bunny Cat!
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/bunny_cat.jpg
Easter Bunny cat sez, “GAZ IN2 MA EYEZ ANDS BELIEVE!!! BELIEVE!!! NOW FEEDS ME!”
As for the movie: if you are a skeptic thinking of going to see it, remember that every ticket sale will be counted as a success for the movie. We’re deep into the information age. There are other ways to see it.
QD: exactly! Go to a church, see it for free, and provide antidote to the congregation afterwards.
Wow! What kind of a person uses such language on a public site? How does such awful, incoherent ranting make a point? What happened to the gutter language filter, Phil?
Will. M
QD: exactly! Go to a church, see it for free, and provide antidote to the congregation afterwards.
Actually, I was thinking BitTorrent or a Netflix rental which you rip, burn and pass around to other skeptics. Didn’t even think that churches might show it.
One near me had a special weekday evening get together to discuss the Da Vinci Code when that whole thing was going on. I was actually going to go sit in (hey, they announced free refreshments right on the banner) but I wound up working late that day. I think the same church had a special event about the Harry Potter “problem” as well.
I drive by it every day. I’ll keep my eyes open for a banner.
Quiet Desperation: “Thank goodness the electric chair … wasn’t around in Christ’s time.”
Imagine if that had been the case, Xians would all be wearing little electric chairs round their necks!
Damn, I missed the Xian rant, that’s what I hate about taking down posts especially when other people have already commented on them. I missed out on a good laugh. Oh Well.
I don’t think I will go see the movie, I will wait until I go back to China and buy it on DVD there, “One Dollar, Cheaper for you!”. It will be fun to barter with the seller to see exactly how cheap I can get it for.
Elwood Herring,
How ’bout a gas chamber around your neck! that would be fun.
Doug Little, you didn’t miss much. There was no originality or humor in those posts, just uninspired rudeness.
.. sigh …. just like the moon issue, I don’t know who I hate more, God loving extremists, or God hating extremists.
I’m sure this joke has been made before, but it seems that the movie is accurately titled:
Expelled, ‘no intelligence allowed’.
Woody:
I get ya now! Yer prolly right. We have to think the way they think to understand where they’re coming from. I especially -get- your “Religio(us) people don’t use logic to make decisions; they use emotions to make them.” I’ve heard it said (possibly on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast) that you can’t use logic to help someone out of a situation they didn’t use logic to get into in the first place.
I’m still doubtful that it’ll become a hit, though. All the fundies will go, sure, but it’d take more than that to make it a true hit. I wonder how big the budget was. Several hundred thousand I’ll bet. They’ll have to make back their production budget before they turn a profit. Only later would it hope to come to “hit” status. I’m sure the backers of the project have deep pockets and don’t give a hoot if they make money on it, they’d see themselves as being (to paraphrase the Blues Brothers) “On a mission for Gahd.”
I did see some of the trailers on YouTube last night. It looked like a well produced film, dolly shots in the auditorium, careful lighting. I make DVD “industrials” for a living, so I know a thing or 3 about video & TV. Slanted and replete with bad journalism, to be sure, but good work otherwise. The production values of the show were more than adequate.
I was a little annoyed with the handheld work in one of the interviews (the researcher who claimed to have been discriminated against) but maybe that’s just my taste. There was an MCI commercial in the late 80’s that started a trend of restless handheld camerawork in commercials for a time. I’m glad that fad passed.
Thanks!
Rich
quasidog -
“.. sigh …. just like the moon issue, I don’t know who I hate more, God loving extremists, or God hating extremists.”
Yes… I caught that when you posted it in the other post. Seems to be a favorite question of yours.
So here’s a question for you: is it required for you to “hate” either? And in doing so, you accomplish what?
If you have a point to make, or a discussion to engage in, please feel free to do so… otherwise you are really just… noise.
quasidog,
Where’s the extremity in demanding a little proof, also you can’t hate something that has slim to none chance of existing in the first place. You and your ilk have an extraordinary claim that you will need to show some extraordinary evidence for before the majority of the skeptic crowd will stop laughing at you. And no you don’t say anywhere that you believe in god, it is implied in your statement, so don’t go and cry about me miss characterizing you.
Pieter, But that’s the amusing bit, it’s the same stuff over and over again.
“You and your ilk have an extraordinary claim that you will need to show some extraordinary evidence for before the majority of the skeptic crowd will stop laughing at you. And no you don’t say anywhere that you believe in god, it is implied in your statement, so don’t go and cry about me miss characterizing you.”
–
This is really childish writing. 4th grade playground level.
Gee,
I would have thought that it would have been at least worthy of a 5th grader. Doesn’t make it any less a valid statement. Sorry I’m not “PC” enough for you Mr. Watts, maybe I’ll steal your lunch money later on.
Woodguard writes:
[[Religion people don’t use logic to make decisions; they use emotions to make them.]]
Yeah. Just look at Augustine, Aquinas, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Rene Descartes, C.S. Lewis… oh. Wait. They all throughly understood and used formal logic. Maybe your thesis has a hole in it.
JackC writes:
[[We need to not just not go see this turkey, we need to get the patently, honestly religous to not only not see it but to decry, debase and devalue it. ]]
As one of those patently, honestly religious people, I agree with you, but you can see from the many comments above that your view is not widely shared. Most of the people in this blog use any mention of creationism to attack all religious people and all religion, period. Any thread on such a subject invariably has all the evangelical atheists come in and hijack it, so that reasonable discussion of the subject gets drowned out. I’d be posting a lot more against creationism here if I didn’t have to spend most of my time here defending my faith from bigots^H^H^H^H^H^H people like Richard Drumm and Woodguard.
I agree with you, Barton. The weakest link in the pro-science camp is the ad hominem name-calling by blog commentators, no matter what the topic under discussion is. I would have hoped for rational people to take the high road and discuss the main issue logically.
The ad hominems are used by all camps, and even by those who publicly lament it (I’m looking at you, Barton). It is indeed the weakest link in the pro-science camp. Funnily enough, it is not the weakest link in the anti-science camp…
I’m having trouble following Barton’s logic here, so please help me. Barton thinks that I’m an atheist bigot of some sort, and Cynthia may think I pursue ad hominem attacks of some sort, that I’m not taking the high road and using logic???
Man, where to start?
I thought I wrote a carefully balanced reply to my own mis-characterization of Woody’s post, now I’m a bigot?
Anyway, Barton has a point, there have been religious logicians, “Augustine, Aquinas, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Rene Descartes, C.S. Lewis” however they’d be the exceptions these days and not the rule. Would that it were not so.
I just don’t see Pat Robertson using logic the way those thinkers did. [Full disclosure: my brother had a paper route when he was a kid and he delivered the local Lexington paper to A. Willis Robertson’s house! Pat was probably grown up and in college by then, I dunno…]
But he misses the point that generally religions people these days use the emotions of religious experience to get into the mindset that we call fundamentalism. My response is that logical reasoning won’t help the fundemantalists see things our way, only an appeal to emotions of some sort. Not that I know what that appeal should be, of course, just that if there’s one that would work it wouldn’t use scientific logic but emotional resonances of some undefined sort.
Barton, when you say ” I’d be posting a lot more against creationism here if I didn’t have to spend most of my time here defending my faith…” you show me that you have a unique point of view. It looks like it’s the view of a person of faith who doesn’t support creationism. I want to hear more, not less, so I’m not sure why you think I’m attacking you personally. Lemme check back over the posts… Back in a moment…
I did say:
“Religion = organized ignorance usually…”
“It’s time for our species to outgrow these superstitions.”
So I expect that these are the statements that got you & Cynthia going.
That makes me an evangelical atheist? Wow… Maybe you’re right…
I’ll have to think this one over, this might be a good thing! I evangelize public outreach astronomy, waxing poetic about supernovae and all, but atheism? Maybe by evangelizing and singing the paises about science I’m automatically an evangelical atheist. There -has- been a war of sorts between science & religion brewing so maybe this is an offshoot of that. Probably couldn’t be avoided.
BTW, Cynthia, I just noticed that “Astronomer” has had his post yanked. He probably was not exactly amenable to reasoned discussion as his post was both an ad hominem and a personal attack on Phil. You might have missed his post, joining the thread after his post was removed. My post #164056 didn’t refer to “Astronomer” by name but it was a reply to his post. I should have put his name in it but I didn’t in my haste. It now looks more like an unfocused and rather disjointed remark instead of one that was directed at him. With “Astronomer”s post gone my reply is just left hanging and seems to make little sense. I asked him “What sort of astronomer are you?” to draw him out and see what kind of mindset he had, but he hasn’t been back.
You probably took umbrage at the “organized ingnorance” reference too, huh? Sorry ’bout that, but I’m just not PC a lot of the time.
I’m just amazed that we’re at a point in our evolution where we can look at an active galactic nucleus that’s billions of light years away and know what’s going on there on the subatomic level, yet still be fighting wars over whose “invisible sky daddy” is the most awesome! The cognitive dissonance is too much for me sometimes and my brain just goes “sproing”.
Doug Little is right, though, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. It’s really that simple. You hear someone say they saw a strange light in the sky and they jump to the conclusion that it’s a spaceship from another star and you demand proof. This is something the great thinkers of the past didn’t (and politically couldn’t) address and now it’s time somebody did. They left that refinement to us, so now we have to take up the tools of logic & reason and tackle the job.
Rich
Up until watching this clip, I had only seen still pics of PZ. As I watched this, my irony meter went into “Overdrive - Meltdown Mode.” He could be the twin brother of one of my Professors at the Christian College I attended in Edmonton.
To be fair, and I did make this comment in a previous post of Phil’s, Kevin Miller, one of the writers, who was NOT in attendance at this screening, did issue an apology for the mess up with PZ. He, in fact, stated, that PZ SHOULD have been allowed to view the screening, confirming Meyers’ claim that he did sign up as required on the internet. Miller could not understand why PZ was denied entry to the screening, and was dismayed.
This is a PR disaster. If I had appeared in a film of this sort, or any sort, I would hope I would not be turned away from the screening. Also to those that state that they do not need to attend this movie to make a judgment about it, while that may be true, it would lend credibility to your argument if you in fact, did attend it. This is the same argument that I have heard leveled against Creationists: They don’t look at the opposite side. Unfortunately, I will probably have to wait for the DVD, as I doubt this movie will make it to our 5 screen theater here in Squamish, I simply will not shell out the 60+ bucks it would end up costing me to see this in Vancouver, when I include all the added expenses of gas, parking and eats. (Not to mention the large quantities of alcohol after the movie, needed to help me forget…:) )
BPL -
“Most of the people in this blog use any mention of creationism to attack all religious people and all religion, period. Any thread on such a subject invariably has all the evangelical atheists come in and hijack it, so that reasonable discussion of the subject gets drowned out. Iâ??d be posting a lot more against creationism here if I didnâ??t have to spend most of my time here defending my faith from bigots^H^H^H^H^H^H people like Richard Drumm and Woodguard.”
Pure, unmitigated, generalistic crap, BPL. You are really in rare moody form today.
Generally I don’t have much of a problem with what you post as far as your Christian views… I’ve called you cranky before, but merely being playful.
However with that statement you go way overboard. I would measure the ratio of extreme “evangelical atheists” to “zealous Christians” that make appearances on this site as at least 50 / 50. And frankly, I’ve seen no-one here more tempestuously defensive of his belief system than you. Which is fine. It is your right, and apparently you feel your responsibility to set all us non-believing idiots straight. And I can live with that, because you generally present your arguments with some level of material to back them up, which can then at least be argued over.
But giving examples of a couple or even several people and their views and generalizing this site in that way is a complete mis-representation. And I think you know it. You want me to throw out the names of other regulars to this board who are WAY worse on the other side of that spectrum than anyone you mentioned? (Ahem, Mike J.). Shame on you, BPL.
Richard, as it happens, I didn’t even read your comment — I was thinking in general of the various name-calling comments on this blog and PZ’s blog, and some of the others I followed while reading about the Expelled expulsion. So I’m afraid you’re getting rather wrapped up over something imaginary.
When I read a comment which says something like “It’s time those fundie IDiots were exposed for the nutcases they are*” then it is clear it is a content-free comment, and I fear what it says to everyone else is that the writer likewise has a content-free brain, aside from the insult and profanity.
*synthetic example
cynthia -
Spend any time here reading through the posts and I’m quite sure you will find a much larger sample of the worst “content free, ad-hominem” posts are coming from the side in defense of religion, moon-hoax, etc, etc… please don’t generalize based on the small sample you’ve gotten from this discussion. And CERTAINLY not as a comparison to what you get at PZ’s blog. That’s a totally different animal over there then what Phil har tried to set up here. I’m not promoting one over the other per se (ok,ok… I am actually…
), I’m just of the opinion that maybe your sample size is a bit too limited to make such a generalization… especially one that is so very different from what I’ve seen in the many years I’ve been visiting this site.
Quiet, Easter Cat is cute, but the Papal LOLCATZ is the best ever! I think it was you that posted that?
BPL, I agree that there are a good number of Christian Thinkers. (NT Wright comes to mind at the moment), unfortunately their voices are drowned out by those other extremist voices. It is those voices (extremist) that the majority of people think of when they think about Christianity. That is far from the truth.
All great thinkers from the past. All hamstrung by the religious and philosophical constraints of their times to not take their philosophical thinking to the logical conclusion that there is no god.
Shane writes:
[[All hamstrung by the religious and philosophical constraints of their times to not take their philosophical thinking to the logical conclusion that there is no god.]]
Lewis, like myself, was a convert from atheism. It was because he was willing to see logical arguments through all the way to the end that he had to abandon his atheism, going first to idealism, then theism, then finally Christianity.
Barton, a truly logical route to Christianity would be akin to a proof of the existence of God. It is well known that there is no such thing.
Religion fills an emotional need. There is nothing wrong with that. But don’t dress it up as something that it is not.
Celtic_Evolution.
No.
Actually I make quite a few constructive comments. You have just happened to read 2 of them, which just so happen to be similarly worded.
Doug Little.
Me and my ilk? What the heck does that mean? Who are my ilk? Is that supposed to be some group I hang with? You don’t have a clue what I think or assume. I am also a skeptic, but a true skeptic is skeptical of other skeptics. ;p What I believe in doesn’t have any baring on my statement. Calm down.
If anything is to be derived from my statements about the moon landing (which I wholeheartedly believe in), or the ‘god vs science’ debate, is that I just think there is extremist points of view on both sides of both debates, and I find it frustrating and boring. That’s all I meant. Just needed to clear that up. Please don’t try to pretend to know who I am or what I think. It is just a couple of statements I made.
( I really should see what my (sic) ilk are up to )
Pieter you said “Barton, a truly logical route to Christianity would be akin to a proof of the existence of God. It is well known that there is no such thing.” You and every other atheist borrow from a Christian worldview to come to logical conclusions - that is the laws of logic themselves. They, not being material, can not be proven or explained from a purely materialistic point of view. There is a great debate between Dr. Greg Bahnsen and a Dr. Gordon Stein at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Bahnsen’s challenge to all to recognize the existence of the laws of logic without explaining their origin exposes a fatal error in any logical argument against the existence of a creator. If you argue a materialistic origin then whose logic to you accept? Christians rely on logic. Christians also have a reason to accept the universality of it. I’m not sure I can see how an atheist can accept the universality of anything that is not material.
I saw the movie and think all you who propose to be so solidly against it without seeing it should not be so naive.
link to transcript http://www.bellevuechristian.org/faculty/dribera/htdocs/PDFs/Apol_Bahnsen_Stein_Debate_Transcript.pdf
link to audio (there are many sites, this one will cost just a penny) https://www.cmfnow.com/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=23
So I’m guessing since you are saying this is not actually what happened, you indicate that you were there…. Is this correct?
Jessie, I don’t get your question.