"A Blood Libel On Western Civilization"

When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise.

I haven't posted anything on the creationist Expelled movie, mostly because the whole thing bores me really. The movie presents no new arguments (no surprise); and that creationists can be a bunch of deceitful, amoral hypocrites is century-old, arguably millennia-old, news.

However, I gleefully post this link to John Derbyshire's deliciously vicious National Review...uh, review..of the movie, since it's a conservative harshly criticizing the movie. It's unique so far of all of the reviews I've read, as Derbyshire points out that Ben Stein is betraying the Western Civilization Stein seems to think scientists (ie, liberals) are destroying. Best part (emphasis mine):

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

All of the arguments made in Expelled are debunked here, should you want to take a look. I find it telling that my local theater only showed it for a week. Bring it home, Derbyshire...

Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!