US Bidding War for 'Creation?'

Paul Bettany, the actor playing Darwin said this on the BBC yesterday, so just maybe...

Awesome!

It's interesting that Mel Gibson may end up as the U.S. distributor. Will the evangelicals who once praised him for his Jesus move now deny him for Creation?

Gibson has Catholic roots. To the Jack Chick fundamentalists, he's working for the Other Side anyway.

It looks like Icon is the distributor in the UK: http://www.iconmovies.co.uk/

Hasn't there been enough movies about the British culture of evolutionism in the US? From Trainspotting to The Crying Game, Hollywood keeps using my former country as a dumping ground for the moral toxic waste from Darwinland. I wonder if they will accept the NC-17 rating as a necessary price for an authentic potrayal of Darwin/Huxley relationship.

Regarding Mel Gibson being a Catholic....actually he's what is called a 'Traditionalist Catholic'.

In short he isn't a Roman Catholic but an ultraconservative sect that rejects the findings of the Vatican II council of the 1960s. For all practical purposes they brand the present Catholic Church as 'heretical'.

Just thought I'd set the record straight.

Cheers

Toidel Mahoney said: Hasn't there been enough movies about the British culture of evolutionism in the US?

Toidel Mahoney said: From Trainspotting to The Crying Game, Hollywood keeps using my former country as a dumping ground for the moral toxic waste from Darwinland.

Toidel Mahoney said:I wonder if they will accept the NC-17 rating as a necessary price for an authentic potrayal of Darwin/Huxley relationship.

Feeding time already?

Let's keep our fingers crossed. But still it's potentially marvellous news. I hope it does show in as many theaters as possible throughout the United States and makes substantially more profits than "Expelled"/

Unfortunately for Toidel Mahoney, there continues to be no such thing as a culture of evolutionism. One might as well talk about a "culture of gravityism," or more pointedly, a "culture of roundearthism". Almost by definition, scientific beliefs may be arrived at independently by examination of the evidence; it is unscientific beliefs that require cultural transmission.

From Trainspotting to The Crying Game, Hollywood keeps using my former country as a dumping ground...

MPW said:

From Trainspotting to The Crying Game, Hollywood keeps using my former country as a dumping ground...

Neither movie was a Hollywood product at all.

Many of you know thisalready, but from Wikipedia:

"A week out of Lima, the Beagle reached the Galápagos Islands on 15 September 1835. At Chatham Island, Captain FitzRoy dropped anchor at a location near the site of the modern town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno.
"

Ken Ham from Oz, Toidel Mahoney from the UK? My god, with all the homegrown wing nuts already quacking, it now appears they are freely heading to the US to evagelise the minds of the benighted.

I suppose nastily, someone might say (and I don't), that this improves the IQ of all three nations.

Ken is, alas, an Australian, though I believe that he has taken out US citizenship now, which I understand can be dual, in our case. He has lived in the US since 1985 or so, and with a bit of luck, he's never coming back.

Even so, he's more a demonstration of the fact that extreme outliers on the bell curve remain extreme for any statistically significant population, than of the extremity of Australian religion in general. Yes, we've got loons of every known description, and ratbag creationists like Ken Ham are but one flavour of them. But they're a tiny fringe minority of a mostly secular nation.

Only about 7% of Australians are regular attendees at religious services, while those who state on the census that they have no religion is up to nearly 4 million out of the 20-odd million population. This proportion is set to increase, apparently: Australian youth was ranked in a 2008 survey by the Christian Science Monitor as the most secular of all nations surveyed.

The odd part about the latter is that the proportion of students receiving a private-school education (as opposed to a State one) has been steadily increasing for decades, and is now over 34%. The private schools are overwhelmingly religion-based. If inculcating their religion were an important part of their function - and they all say it is - then it is plain that they have comprehensively failed in that.

The link in the original post is now broken; use http://www.nbcbayarea.com/entertainment/movies/Creation-May-Cause-Big-Bang-in-US-59246832.html instead.

By the way, a correction to the Bay Area NBC story indicates that Mel Gibson is not involved at all: "The original article confused the film's distributor, Icon Distribution, with Mel Gibson ow[n]ed Icon Productions. The companies use the exact same logo and indeed Icon Distribution was once owned by Gibson. It is no longer. We regret the error."

I watched the trailer. For me, it's a "must see" movie.

They should add a section to their website where people can sign up for updates. Some study materials for teachers/churches would be a good idea also.

Most British Christians (I speak as an ordained minister in the north of England - now working for the Marxist, I'm sorry, National Health Service, but that's another story) are as hostile towards creationism as any atheist - if not more so, because it damages us by association. We get taught the science of evolution in school, it's not an issue for us. Or indeed anywhere in Western Europe.

The USA, among developed nations, is absolutely the exception in imagining there is any sort of "debate" to be held. Creationism is not a Christian point of view but a heresy, a conspiracy theory, entertained by self-righeteous paranoics.

It's hard to call it a "heresy" when the major proponents typically have their own denominations or are part of an independent-minded one that's only loosely conglomerated. For that stamp to stick, everyone would need to agree on some kind of overarching orthodoxy from which the heretics obviously diverge. That's pretty difficult in a nation that's mostly Protestant and fragmented.

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