An Entry I Won't Be Able to Post

I was originally planning an entry complaining that the fundamentalist bioethicists in Vampire Domestication were straw men. After all, nobody could be that mind-bogglingly stupid …

I was wrong.

There was more to this stupidity than not recognizing Richard Freakin' Dawkins. As Orac (one of the few people to emphasize this point) pointed out:

Consider: The entire theme or "frame" of the movie is the suppression of alternate viewpoints by a "Darwinian orthodoxy" to the point where evolutionists are equated to Nazis (over and over and over again) or Stalin. The movie is nothing more than a long catalog of alleged incidents where ID "scholars" have been "repressed" (help, help, I'm being repressed!) by those evil "Darwinists." To those unfamiliar with the longstanding religious campaign to sneak the teaching of creationism (ID or otherwise) into science classes in public schools or, failing that, at least to deemphasize or eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools, it's a "frame" (albeit a dishonest and deceptive one) that has the potential to be compelling to Americans, particularly the religious, even if the movie is an inept piece of crap, as Richard Dawkins states. It plays to the natural American love of the underdog and desire to see "all sides" represented, at least when it is not clear to them that one side is pseudoscientific nonsense. It's a winning "frame."

In one fell swoop, the producers handed on a silver platter the perfect weapon to combat that frame by "expelling" Myers. In a single, misguidedly stupid act of fearful vindictiveness, they handed the "frame" of defending intellectual freedom back to the pro-evolution side. By "expelling" Myers and then dissembling and lying about it, the producers demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are nothing more than hypocrites, pure and simple, looking for an angle to push creationism. This becomes glaringly obvious particularly when one couples this "expulsion" of Myers with the producers' prior actions of trying to hold screenings for audiences made up of only the religious who do not believe in evolution and are sympathetic to ID creationism and the deceptive and disingenuous way that the producers obtained interviews with Dawkins and Myers. And don't even get me started on how Mathis has apparently used plants in audiences of these screenings to lob softball questions at him.

I suspect this point has been underemphasized because stereotypical antifundamentalists think such repression is just what religious people do. To us theistic evolutionists, this nonsense is peculiar and needs examining.