Thursday, April 24, 2008

Expelled Exposed

The most recent anti-science, anti-evolution attempt by the horribly misnamed Discovery Institute is a trashbag of a movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. For those who do not know, The Discovery Institute is an organization in the U.S. that aims to further fundamentalist religious propaganda, more specifically, Creationism.

The deception and dishonesty starts even BEFORE the movie was being produced. First it sets up a shell company called Rampant Films to hide the real company behind it, Premise Media. Then they proceed to lie to the scientists they wanted to interview for the movie, saying that the movie was entitled "Crossroads", and that it was an unbiased look at evolution and creationism. They later claim that it was during filming that they changed the title of the movie. However, when the website of Expelled went up, it was found that they registered for the url MONTHS before they started interviewing the scientists. I guess lying and deceiving are sins unless they are done in Jesus' name huh?

What's even worse, they EXPELLED biologist and Intelligent Design critic PZ Myers (who was one of the scientists duped for an interview in the movie) from attending one of their screenings in Minnesota. The film does all it can to appeal to free speech, freedom to dissent, and freedom of thought (yeah religion sure values those things). How ironic then, that they go through every effort to keep critics out of any public screenings; and they suck at it too!

The movie was chockfull of logical fallacies, disinformation, and just plain bad taste. It was so bad, they had to PAY people to watch it! Rumor has it though, that they've already started on a sequel. :)

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