Monday, March 29, 2010

More resources added to the Den + Review of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" Documentary

Bear adds more resources to the Den
Late Last Night


Bear had a good time at church.  Then rested a lot.  Then did some more learning about Facebook and more work on the den.  She also added a bunch more resources to the Christian Resource Annex, including lots of online Bible Study tools, a search engine that is filtered to search only Christian Websites (so you can search for various resources on the Web and get a list of Christian Resources specifically), and info and a link to a free desktop Bible Software package that is as good (or better) than some you might spend several hundred dollars on.

Plus, Bear gave Euan Murray a spot on the Balcony so people can catch his testimony there, in future.

Plus learned how to put the Share and Subscribe buttons all around the Den Rooms, and even on each individual post, so people can export content from the Den to just about any social networking group on the Web (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, you name it -- Bear doesn't even recognize half the sites on the list, there are so many), and so they can also subscribe to receive the Den's journal entries daily through a wide variety of feeds or via email.

Which is probably more than Bear should have done on a Sunday night, she's thinking, but it was fun.

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" Documentary -- Review
Tonight


Bear just did a few "cleaning up loose ends" types of thing on the Den today, trying to get things consistent throughout all the rooms.  Then took some time off to watch the Documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" by Ben Stein, that has set off so much controversy.

It's about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design.  But Stein is not proclaiming that one is true and the other is not -- that's not what the documentary addresses (although in the end, after he's done all his research, he's clearly leaning towards Intelligent Design over Evolution, while at the beginning it was the other way around).  Rather, it is an investigative journalistic type of report (with some humor thrown in, but very serious at the end), looking into charges that scientists who advocate Intelligent Design are being blacklisted and arbitrarily blocked from jobs and University positions.  And he takes it to the next step, saying that there's no real freedom in this country anymore, at the scholastic level.  That unless you believe what a certain group believes, then you are very effectively blocked from making your case, through a wide variety of intimidation tactics and repression.

Plus, it goes into a lot of oher issues resulting from a country's unwillingness to allow anything but Evolution to be considered.

Bear didn't like the beginning 20 minutes of it.  Stein's sense of humor kind of grated on Bear, and Bear was wondering if she should be really watching it at all.  He made some comments about conservative Christians that weren't exactly kind.  Which made it even more interesting, when Stein ended up coming down on the side of Intelligent Design pretty strongly, once he had done the research.  And he now is leading petitions to send to Congress, for a new "Academic Freedom" act, based on his research.

In fact, it ended up being a very fascinating video, and Bear was very glad she hung on through the beginning and watched it all.  She might even watch it again tomorrow.  (It's a rental and has to be turned back in soon.)

It was nice to wind down a bit, away from Den-cleaning.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Please feel free to leave a comment or insight!

(Comments are moderated to prevent spammers, but anyone can comment, and they'll appear as soon as Bear next checks her email.)

Bear loves to hear from you! THANKS!