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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.'"
It really is sad that the documentation of the search for truth is so dangerous to some people. I understand in the need for belief and am a scientist that considers myself religious. However, I also believe that there are truths in the universe that need to be revealed and understand that those truths threaten some people and institutions. The task of the documentary film maker in many ways is similar to that of the scientist, and censorship or concealment of truth harms both of our missions. I also understand that businesses are in the business to make money, but it would be nice if businesses could have enough faith in what they do to stand up and be honest about it. That is unless money is your god, but if that is the case, be honest about it. The unfortunate truth is that money is the most important thing to some folks and they also know that if they revealed it, then they might lose business. You are known by your actions and I would encourage those potential patrons of these theaters who are refusing to show these films to boycott those IMAX theaters who are too scared to show a film that documents scientific discovery.
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Sort of what happened in Iran when Khomeini and his religious band of merry men took over the government. Don't worry, American friends, there are many people out there who can relate, and who you can stand beside to fight this scourge.
:)
They might look like Arabs though
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Well as a self-described fundie I don't really find anything wrong with any of the film titles/descirptions. I mean I suppose there is a slight, slight chance that they are horribly mislabled and are actually hardcore porn, but seriously, I kinda want to see these baised on those descrptions.
I guess some religious parents might object to their young children being exposed to evolutionary thought, which is my guess as to what they are objecting to. (I didn't say it was a great argument, just my guess as to what it is)
You'd be amazed how many fundies go straight into a planetarium show about the Hubble Space Telescope - in a SCIENCE MUSEUM - and are SHOCKED that it mentions that the Unverse is around 15 billion years old. Then there was the one who complained to the local paper that the show about the Moon mentioned lots of theories about where the Moon came from, but didn't mention how God did it.
The frustrating thing is that when we get complaints, we still have to be *civil* to our customers, not call them idiots, respect their beliefs, and somehow still defend your decision to run such programming. And it's hard explain your side of the argument while the guy making the complaint just keeps walking out the door with the rest of the audience. It might be natural for us in the science museum profession to want to hide away from the controversy and hope it goes away, but that won't make it get any better. This is a really, sad and frightening trend.
(of course the same argument could be used to say that "some thought it was well done" could mean as few as two also. I'm just saying that Murray's spin on the numbers feels smarmy and manipulative to me).
"I dont like these kind of people"
"one of these people"
"This is how these people are"
If the above comments/stereotypes were made against any group other than Christians this would have been -1 Flaimbait, instead it is currently +5 insightful.
The difference is that people are fundamentalists because they hold certain beliefs that they can change, and it is precisely these views that are objectionable. If you're black, however, you cannot change that (unless you're Micheal Jackson), and moreover it has nothing to do with the views you might hold or any other important qualities you might have.
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
Well, it's enough to say they should show the religious propaganda to be fair, but is the religious propaganda made for Imax? If, not, is it a film that warrants a large screen in order to ge a better representation of its photographed content? Or is this simply showing lots of text with interludes by actors. (Please inform me.)
By and large Imax films are those which are meant to appeal visually. On a personal note, some guy telling me he believes, that settles it and I (for not agreeing) am going to hell probably won't make for stimulating Imax viewing.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
And that's where you've made your first mistake. You've demonstrated that the principle you describe as gravity causes something to happen under a single set of conditions. This isn't a proof, there is no set of deductions from knowledge, and you don't even have enough points for an inductive conclusion (which isn't proof either)
And yet noone with a grasp of scientific history should go around crowing that we 'know' it works. People are inventing invisible matter and energy to try and overcome places where it doesn't work, and you think that's fine? You can't say what 'this sort of thing' is, definitively, but you insist that anyone who denies it is insane?
And after Newton we had 'things belong together', which the 'down' is merely a special case of, due to perspective. Newton himself was quite candid about his inability to explain any of his findings.
Take Newton's Laws of Motion. They're wrong. Oops. What do we do now? What happened to those 'Laws'?
Unfortunately, this is where you're wrong. Because evolution is all about rationalising what hs already happened, we are completely unable to perform (in reasonable time) controlled experiments to check any of it. Ergo, the ability for it to make falsifiable predictions is limited making it really only borderline scientific.
Yes, it's a useful perspective, yes, the Linnean classificationists get warm fuzzies, but 'scientific' might be a touch strong.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
I'm a professional astronomer and I teach astronomy at a state university. This ticks me off. I don't complain about The Passion of the Christ, or barge into churches to tell them what science has to say. Ignorant fundamentalists shouldn't have any power over what is available for the rest of the country to see, especially when it is educational. Cosmic Voyages is a wonderful film, and I could probably be driven to punch someone in the face if they were stopping it from being shown.
Flabbergasted.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I've been to Mt. Graham where the Vatican Observatory is. An astronomer is an astronomer, Jesuit or Atheist, both pursuing the truth of the magnificence of the universe.
The offended fundamentalists probably should be called idiots, often, loudly, where lots of people can here. This isn't a matter of respecting beliefs. This is a matter of setting things straight where it comes to lies and delusions.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
You may be treated like that in the south, but we're treated like that everywhere else!
Really? Interesting. I didn't realize that me and the other fifteen atheists in the United States were making it so hard on you hundred million or so religious folks. We'll try harder not to use our massive majority to oppress you.
I have no issue watching documentaries about other religions, or lack thereof (though, of course, it raises an interesting view..if you lack a religion..doesn't that become your religion? If you refuse to believe or acknowledge God, aren't you following a belief system?)
Wow, nice. You managed to come up with a really original argument that no atheist has ever rebutted. Please feel free to read more about atheism before you start redefining it on your own terms.
You complain about people acting that way, while you yourself seem to feel free to bash the other side in the manner you just mentioned offended you!
Erm... I thought we were complaining about religious wackos who think that evolution is evil and wrong influencing stupid businesses to avoid showing films that might offend their fairytale worldview, but I guess you're right, we're just 'bashing' religion with no justification. I mean, the destruction of science is no reason to complain, right?
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened. There must be some factor producing this particular symptom of future shock. I don't think Japan, which has had at least as big a shake up as the US, has seen the rise of a large religiously motivated subculture. In Europe the rapid changes over the past couple of centuries have undermined religiosity in the mass of people, rather than boosting it.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
My 4th grade schoolteacher asked me personally (he was the father of one of my friends, so we talked often outside school): "Do you really believe that we, humans, descend from such an ugly animal, an ape ?"
I explained him (a 10 year old, to a schoolteacher, no less) that no, we humans do not directly descend from the apes that are currently living, but that, according to current and widely accepted current scientific theories, humans and apes do share a common ancestor.
The repercussions made me lose all respect for authority.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
That's truer in America than it is other places because of our high number of Fundementalist and Evangelical Christians. Neither the Catholic Church nor any of the major liberal Protestant denominations believe in inerrancy -- the idea that the Bible is perfectly and literally true.
The bible in it's basic form probably pre-dates religion, it was only later that people began to see it as something more and worship it, like present day people do with Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTRs.
Not really. Much of the Hebrew Bible dates from around or after the destruction of the first Temple, so it was absolutely composed for religious purposes. It contains traditions that are centuries older which certainly pre-date the understanding of religion that its writers had, but even those stories began as a part of religion. To call the Bible a collection of fables and stories created only for the purpose of morality is a gross distortion of the Bible's very complex literary history.
[Ok. Time to get back to writing thesis]
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
I've seen "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," and it's just pretty fish swimming around. Nothing too serious and I'm suprised people are up in arms about it.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Religious Studies people and Sociologists generally attribute this to the fact that America has no state support of religion. In European countries one church is usually given a monopoly of sorts; it is state funded and presumes to count all members of the dominant ethnic group as members. Because it has this safety net, the church is protected from having to keep up with the religious needs of the populace and as a result religion in general wanes in social importance.
In America, to the contrary, there is a thriving marketplace of religious institutions which have to keep up with the needs of their congregants. The result has been a recent wave of populist religious movements, including the so-called non-denominational "Super-Churches," Televangelists, and many Evangelical and Fundementalist denominations.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
The greek one, for starters: incest, infanticide, patricide galore.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The situation was interesting in Britain where, although we have a state religion, there are also a large number of other branches of Christianity, largely as a result of the roundhead victory in the Civil War. With the puritans came a wide range of nonconformist churches: Quakers, congregationalists, anabaptists, eventually methodists and so on. But these grew up in the context of the Reformation and never became significantly extreme. Whereas in America, although the founding fathers were deeply religious types who set out from Britain with the intention of founding a religious community, there was no state religion. The various sects and churches that grew up did so in far more isolation from the technological developments that, up till the 19th century, were largely centred on Europe. When technology did arrive and the USA took the lead in technological development a lot of these small churches had their world views shattered. I think they're going through what the Roman Catholic church in Europe went through with Copernicus and Galileo, and displaying much the same unhealthy response.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
and there you go and highlight the BIGGEST hypocracies of BOTH the "liberal" and "conservative" movements.
Liberals:
- no to capital Punishment
- no to war
- yes to abortion
- yes to euthanasia
Conservatives (bible thumpers):
- yes to capital Punishment
- yes to war
- no to abortion
- no to euthanasia
Both may be the opposite ends of the scale, but they both believe that sometimes its ok to kill, and sometimes its not ok to kill.
soo.. what does that make me, a person who is:
- No to capital punishment
- No to war (except in self defense(*) )
- No to abortion
- No to euthanasia
does this make me "center", as opposed to left or right wing?? Intresting...
(*) Self defense meaning, protect myself and my family from attack, as opposed to bombing the crap out of iraq.
Have a nice day!
The greek one, for starters: incest, infanticide, patricide galore.
The biblical creation myth has incest, it's just implied rather than directly stated. After Abel is killed, Cain has a child with his "wife." So either Cain's wife is his mother, or a sister which isn't specifically mentioned, as women often weren't.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if your guess isn't too far from the mark. I dated a fundamentalist girl once and when she took me home to meet her parents, a similar issue generated a bit of conflict between her parents and me. They were grilling me on my tolerance of public schools (they had homeschooled their three children) and insisted that my willingness to expose my [future] children to attitudes or beliefs which with I didn't necessarily agree was like throwing my children to a pack of wolves. It wasn't sufficient to be a strong influence on my children's development -- it was, in their eyes, necessary that I be the absolute arbiter of every channel of information they receive.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I'm not certain if this is an issue of intolerance. One doesn't choose to be tolerant or not of scientific fact. One can tolerate different lifestyles or religious choices, but truth is truth.
Christ did advocate social reform, but at the same time He did condemn. He condemned the Jewish establishment for raising the Law up into an idol, such as in refusing to heal on the Sabbath. He condemned obeying the letter of the law without understanding the spirit of the law. Christ, through His Divinity, was fit to judge. We, in our humanity, are not. As such, we encounter a dialectic in the Bible: the divine transcendence that allows Christ to be judge, and our own fallen nature that mandates that we "love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another" (John 13:34) and "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you" (Matthew 7:1,2). Was not the primal sin eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Do we have the pride to think that we can become gods and judge?
As I make note of in another post, "sin" means, literally, "missing the mark." The character of humanity in the context of the Fall is that we are always missing the mark! If we were perfect, then the Church would no longer be needed to guide us with its tools, and we would be deified. But that isn't the case. The matter is that we do constantly judge, we do constantly fail to love one another, we do constantly try to play god. A young monk was once asked, "What do you do all day in the monastery?" He replied, "We fall and rise, fall and rise." As Yannaras writes: "what God really asks of man is neither individual feats nor works of merit, but a cry of trust and love from the depths." And we are called to love and forgive one another, as the father forgave his prodigal son, as we all continually miss the mark. This is not to excuse us from responsibility: we must also notch another arrow and fire again! And if our arrow should hit another, we must repent and ask for forgiveness. But yes, to look for a true Christian... you will find only sinners! That is the point of Christianity, indeed.
You are forgetting cultural context of course. This is like translating Russian literature. Sure you might be able to get the literal translation right. However, you're still going to be faced with books litered with the equivalent of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra".
This context does not exist for the new testament. Between various forms of the Catholic church demanding mindless obedience and Islamic invasions, that cultural context was pretty effectively wiped out.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thus, if you want to break it down over lines of whether or not it is ok to kill, then yes, both sides apear to demonstrate hipocrisy. But there is a real and possibly valid line which divides the two camps.