It's not just biology anymore:

In a post covering a wide range of topics, James Wolcott wrote last week:

A country where "evolution" is becoming a bad word is not a country interested in facing reality.

How true. The same day he wrote that (19 March), there was this story in the New York Times: A New Screen Test for Imax: It's the Bible vs. the Volcano, where we read: (emp add)

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including "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.

Which from a fundamentalist Christian perspective makes sense. Geology and astronomy contradicts the notion of a 6,000 year old earth. But why stop there? Chemistry and physics does not allow for transformation of matter except under specific conditions. But belief in miracles (e.g. water-to-wine) says that the fundamental assumptions of the hard sciences - which is 100% materialistic - cannot be true.

The news story indicates that it is in the South of the U.S. where the films are being opposed. To that we say, go ahead, eliminate all teaching of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy from the school curriculum. That's what the southerners want, so why not give it to them?

posted by Quiddity at 3/24/2005 07:02:00 AM