Talk Origins' bid to poleaxe Expelled

The fine fellows at Talk Origins have a sprite new interest in film: they are bidding furiously to obtain the rights to Expelled.

As most of you already know, the production company Premise Media went bankrupt. Their execrable propaganda film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”, is on the auction block. The online auction is proceeding now, and will end on Tuesday, June 28th.

The auction promises that besides all available rights and interests in the finished film itself (there is an existing distribution contract), the winner will get all the production materials and rights to them. Want to know what was in the rest of the interviews with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers? I know I would like to have that material archived and made available to the public, among other things that Premise Media found inconvenient to include in their film.

There was talk among individuals on “After the Bar Closes” about the auction. Kristine Harley pointed out that, depending on exactly what is in the production materials, there may well be “Wedge Document 2” in there somewhere. When the “academic freedom” label on religious antievolution goes to court, it could be very handy to have those materials on hand.

But any one individual is unlikely to have the wherewithal to make the winning bid on this.

Today, the TalkOrigins Archive Foundation approved a resolution to use our funds on hand to put in a bid on “Expelled”. We hope to make many of the materials freely available and to collaborate with other groups seeking to produce rebuttals to claims made in “Expelled”.

I have a Christian friend who recently told me that she went with her college student son several years ago to a showing of Expelled at their local college Department of Evolution. The scientists watched mostly in silence, and then erupted in outrage when the film finished.

A senior scientist got up and quieted the room. He told the audience (paraphrasing)

'This is a catastrophe. An unmitigated catastrophe. This has set us back a generation, or two.'

Of course, the scientist didn't say 'this censorship and persecution of skeptics is a catastrophe...' or 'the conduct of science without free exchange of ideas is a catastrophe...'. No, he said none of that.

He said that Expelled was a catastrophe, but it was clear that he meant it was a catastrophe because of what it revealed. He offered no critique at all of the atrocious behavior of the Darwinists in the film.

Atheists understand what Expelled is doing to them.

Atheists have no intention of 'exploring' Expelled, or of making unedited versions publicly available, or of correcting misunderstandings, or of finding 'Wedge Document 2', yada yada. The perennial atheist tactic is: don't engage dissent when you can bury it. Expelled has been a catastrophe for atheism, because it tells the truth. To atheists, the suppression of this film is worth a lot of money.

They will bury Expelled, so it never again sees the light of day.