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Imax Theaters Demur On Controversial Science Films
circletimessquare writes "The New York Times is reporting that a number of Imax theatres are passing on science-themed films that might provoke controversy among a handful of religious fundamentalists. Films that are having their distribution impacted include '"Cosmic Voyage," which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor.'"
According to the article (did you even read it?), several IMAX theatres cancelled the movie because of religious objections. So that you don't have to take my word for it, here's a quote:
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence."
I find it somewhat sad that several people seem to have taken your "an editor theorizes it could be because religious people might get upset at these films" as fact instead of reading the article.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
Just so the rest of the world doesn't think that it's a small minority of Americans who are doing this, a set of polls on evolution vs Creationism. The majority of Americans believe that we were created by a god in 6 days 10,000 years ago. The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. The same scientific ignorance causes Americans to abhorr homosexuality as a sinful path chosen by evil people rather than realizing it's a natural mindset encoded into the brain before birth. My only hope for the science in this country is that someone in the government will realize that we should spend money on education instead of war before the median scientific knowledge of our "first world" country falls below that of "third world" countries.
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Wired article as proof
Rather than respond to a bunch of similarly themed posts I would simply like to point out that Religion and Hard Science are compatible. For example:
a tican_observe_000716.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/v
"This is our way of finding God," said Consolmagno, author of Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist, published in February by McGraw-Hill.
The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world and the only research group directly supported by the Holy See. The church funds the observatory to the tune of about $1 million a year, leaving its operation to the Jesuits, a religious order whose "charism," or special gift to the church, is scholarship.
"1. Doesn't seem to be a very good support for evolution.
2. What evidence?
3. What tests?
4. Evolution hasn't put forth any predictions that have survived real world tests.
5. Maybe."
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1. To you, maybe so.
2. Fossil record, myriad techniques for establishing age of relics & fossils, size of the universe, temperature of the earth, background cosmic radiation, observed evolution (particularly in micro-organisms), the twin hiearchies (to name just a few pieces amongst literally millions of pieces of coroborating evidence).
3. Tests such as breeding new species of bacteria by placing them under environmental stress.
4. The major successful prediction that the original theory of evolution made was that there must exist a mechanism of inheritance whereby partents pass on their attributes to their offspring. Many years later - hey presto, DNA was discovered.
5. Definately.
Your job would not be so frustrating if you simply treated your theory as it is - a theory.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but evolution is a fact. Well, and a theory. The fact is that evolution happened. The theory part is how that evolution happened.
A good quote:
"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun.
The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution."
- R. C. Lewontin
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