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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.'"
...that the theater owners think that showing science films is too controversial or not interesting to the general public...
...or that they're probably right.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
because this is epidemic of our society in america.
we lose out on interesting ideas and concepts because they may offend someone. it happens in all levels of education, in business, everywhere.
this is sad but not suprising.
how is "an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor" offensive in any way?
we shouldn't let a minority dictate what is right or wrong because we risk having our freedom become the same "freedom" they have in China.
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Why do they stick their heads in the holy sand all the time, why can't they just accept that people have different views and should be allowed to express them.
It makes me sick that religious wackos are given all the freedom to worship/teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their righteous bullshit.
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.
Wake me up when there is something happening the US which doesn't upset a minority group which goes in search for media attention or takes it to court.
bash$
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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Welcome to America, where ignorance isn't just bliss, it's a virtue.
Who will welcome our new overlords, the ChrisTaliban turning the USA into Afghanistan West? Where are the reasonable Christians who repudiate this demented abuse of our country into a market theocracy in their name? ...tumbleweeds..
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Soon enough American students will not be exposed to scientific methodologies and theory because of the complains of Christian fundamentalists. While the Religious Right will feel their children are pious and enlightened, the rest of the world will progress with our understanding of nature and science. The rest of the world will innovate and prosper, while America will be dragged down into religious strife. Christian fundamentalism will be the death of America.
So we have:
+ Christians who are against science
+ Muslims who are against the West and progress
+ Scientologists who believe a SF story
+ Mormons who believe a non-SF story
Jesus, it makes you wonder....
I'm not American, so I can't say how much of a real impact something like this has, but I wonder if this recent rise of very conservative religious fundamentalism in the USA and efforts to stop the presentation of things that contradict their view might not lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
While the situation isn't as bad as that Escape from LA movie from the late 80's, there certainly are aspects of that in modern American politics it seems.
First off, I am not a religious person.
....as I watch my Karma plummet....
But, this is my gripe with them...
If I had a conversation with one of these people, they want you to embrace their way of thinking... OK fine.
Yet, when I try to peddle MY truth, its immediately too much to handle, so not right and so horrible they wont hear it.
I am in the south. This is how these people are.
but, then they are quick to call themselves open minded. YEAH RIGHT.
If I cant tell you my truth, and have you at least LISTEN, your not open minded. your a closed minded fool that doesnt deserve to breathe air. its that simple.
All I ask of these people, is to meet us all half way here. they dont have to like it, and they dont have to agree with it.
but saying they are 'good, understanding people' is a REAL stretch.
They DO NOT have to go see these movies....
yet, they boycott their presence. thats not open minded... that is just religion attempting world domination. their way or the highway.
Go watch the documentaries. I do.
Rebel against religious zealots.
It keeps happening! The "PC" culture of this country keeps destroying what's left of the free thought that was painfully conquered a long time ago (I'm not even going to go into free speech).
It's a battle on two fronts: the religious lobbyist that do things like hindering the teaching of science in schools, and the large corporations that would do anything not to offend anyone for fear of losing a few bucks.
How do they get away with it? Why don't people say "oh this is horrid, no more IMAX for me". We just can't be bothered anymore: the PC rants (if you say something controversial YOU are at fault), the lack of any real political debates (besides minor economical and odd moral-related issues) since the outlawing of Communism and any other non-majority view, and of course the the vultures of the media that keeps feeding on this whole thing (WHY show that piece about "evolution is just a theory" over and over?).
I'm an European, and I have no voice in what the American people decide to do, but it's their lack of action and ignorance of the issues at hand that makes me heed this warning: how soon until the free-flying politicians and corporations will do all they wish while you're too busy watching TV? You may have these comfy lives forever, with no blood or guilt on your own hands, but one day you may find yourselves unwilling free citizens of what you yourself would name an "evil empire" if you were on the other side.
The cookie told me to.
As a thinking christian (as opposed to the new moronic version of christian) I really despair of this childish rejection of reality (science). Religion has lived with the reality of the world around them for a very long time. I believe now in this time of deep denial about the changing landscape of America and an uncertain future that the more unstable elements in many sects see the rejection of science as somehow bolstering there own flagging faith. A faith that if real in these people would easily be able to encompass science as a wonder of God and not a challenge to him.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
you don't get love from a whorehouse.
likewise, you don't get spirituality from a church/ temple/ mosque.
but that is ok, because just as there are some who will never know real love due to intellectual or character issues, and therefore need whorehouses to sake their lust that would otherwise drive them insane or drive them to commit horrendous crimes on the street, so to are their spiritual pinheads in this world who need churches/ temples/ mosques to give answer to their doubts and fears, so they don't commit horrible atrocities of spiritual void.
so the lowest common denominator empty pap we call organized religion is vile, but still necessary. just like whorehouses.
we don't want ugly or crude men raping women on the streets and we don't want small-spirited people walking around without a sense of morality or a human conscience. if they don't have the spiritual backbone to decide right or wrong, or find the basic goodness in human existence on their own, well then please, let the church turn them into sheep. better sheep than demons without a sense of social responsibility or a clue as to their relationship to human society and the idea of a greater good.
however, when these spiritual pinheads band together and try to gain political power and enforce their narrowminded interpretation of human nature on everyone else, including those who are spiritually sound on their own, they need to be stopped. in many ways, the consolidation of spiritual pinheads into organized religion and then their subsequent desire to see all of humanity fall in lockstep to their blind interpretation of a given creed is unavoidable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't head them off at the pass and continually deny them political power over the rest of us who are spiritually grounded all on our very own.
so organized religion should not be stopped, it is useful to the health of society by satisfying the spiritual needs of those who can't do that on their own. organized religion and the fruits of its passion is even enjoyable in the way a quaint parade in a rural backwards town is enjoyable to a tourist.
but the cost of accepting that means we must be forever and eternally vigilant that the church, the mosque, and the temple never ever enjoy political power. lest they doom the rest of us to the spiritual zombification that is organized religion.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While this article discusses something limited in scope (thanks for the spin, Slashfaux), this is becoming more and more common. But who is to blame? We (secularists and freethinkers) are.
We refuse to affiliate or support organisations which champion our cause. We refuse to be sufficiently vocal about matters of importance to us. We refuse, at the very least, to put our money where our mouths are.
Let me tell you, with absolute certainty, that the religious fundamentalists are more than happy to do all these things.
So, when are we going to step up and demand an end to this nonsense?
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When I was growing up as a kid, I never thought that Science and the Bible were necessarily in conflict. Most people believe that the bible represents a guide and isn't to be taken absolutely literally.
For instance, the whole "God created the Earth in seven days." Seven days could mean seven million years, or seven billion years. It's worded in a way that man can understand. Why do people reject Evolution, when it could have been God that kickstarted the whole thing?
I can't say that I believe these things anymore but if you can believe that there is an almighty being that created us, why can't you also believe that this being crafted the universe as we know it now, and all the wonders it contains that science as yet to scratch the surface on?
It's a scary time when the few people with extreme religious views can change the life of everyone to suit their needs.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You misinterpreted what they meant by "open minded".
:)
You, mistakenly, thought that "open minded" meant having an open mind, and being open to new ideas.
What *they* meant by "open minded" was that they'd no longer accuse you of witchcraft for being different from your neighbors, or throw you in prison for the crime of "blasphemy", or just come by and burn down your house because you're a filthy non-believer.
The fact that they've allowed you to live, even though you're obviously some sort of eviiil horrible pagan-creationist science-worshipper, shows how open-minded that religious zealots in America have become lately.
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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Errrr...If you recognized anything, you would recognize that the word "theory" means a very different thing in science then it does in Common parlance. For instance, Gravity is a theory. That Germs cause disease is a theory. The Earth Revolving around the sun is a theory. Basicly, anything that cannot be directly observed is a theory. Evoultion is Just as well supported as any of the above theories I mentioned(sometimes more so). If you would like to to tell us about the problems you "know" evoultion has I would be glad to address them.
I feel that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between evolution and creation.
I thought you said you weren't a christian. Why do you half belive in Creation?
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.
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)
Don't be so confident that human stupidity is going away anytime soon. Bible-thumping fundies will just be replaced by some other group of ignorant buffoons, who would rather believe any kind of comfortable fantasy rather than an uncomfortable truth.
That's the reason Voltaire and Swift are so fresh even today.
The only thing to hope for is that the ignorance is not sufficient to wipe out human scientific knowledge.
When the original poster specifically mentioned experiments, then experiments are fair game. Read the quoted text. As far as observational science goes, the fossil record provides an extremely fragmentary, internally inconsistent, and generally unhelpful view. It is reasonably well accepted (except by idiots^W americans) that this in itself does not deny evolution, it merely doesn't support it very well.
If we come to try and make judgements about long-time-scale dynamic processes from point observations, we fall into the trap of blind inductionism. And that's not (good) science.
Evolution is sufficently poorly characterised that it isn't very good at making predictions, and there aren't many new observations to test them on, so that trivial view of hypothesis doesn't work too well either.
Popper would disagree. How can a singular event be falsifiable? It's the grue/bleen problem all over again. If you're denying this, what account of science are you using?
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
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.
"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."
===
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.
In Europe, we have the same growing right-wing as in the US, but it has not been incorporated by religious factions.
So were does the difference come from? The parent post explanation is way off, at least in Western Europe religions are struggling massively just to get people into the churches - most people just don't believe in churches as institutions anymore, that try to prescribe how people should live. So it's not about the content of the religion, it's about the institution that looses acceptance.
And this is a phenomenon that goes beyond religion; trade unions or any other institutions loose grip on people's lives. We live in the era of the individualist, people make their own choices for their own lives. And they assemble their own 'belief' from religions and non-religous streamings like Buddhism.
NB: European countries don't have state religions
They do sound interesting. I wouldn't mind seeing any of those, either, nor would I mind exposing my kids to them, so long as the programs don't outright mock what I believe. I would view it as an opportunity to discuss with my kids what I believe and why I believe it. Ultimately, my kids have to decide for themselves what they believe about the world around them.
I don't think that evangelical Christians, by and large, are afraid of the marketplace of ideas. They are used to being the underdog in an ideological war.
If you look at the public struggles between creationists and evolutionists, the creationists who represent the mainstream Evangelical thought are not trying to remove evolution, they would just like the teaching of evolution to acknowledge that it is not a proven fact, and that there are other schools of thought, an in particular, the possibility of intelligent design.
As a creationist, I do *not* want the teaching of religion in the public school classroom. Public school teachers have a wide variety of religious beliefs, so what would be the guarantee that they would represent the Christian belief? I rather not even go there.