I’m somewhat embarassed to admit that I ran across a link to this New York Times article on Slashdot. However, having admitted that I do, in fact, read Slashdot on a regular basis, let me move on to the actual content of the article.
For those of you too lazy to read the article, or too paranoid to put up with the Times’ free registration, here’s a quick summary: Imax theaters have begun rejecting some films that make references to evolution, for fear that showing these films will cause too much controversy among Christian Conservatives. Granted, it’s only been a few films so far, and only a isolated theaters (unsurprisingly, they are almost all in the South), but it probably won’t shock regular readers of this site when I say I find this trend disturbing.
One of the movies in question, a documentary called “Volcanoes,” puts for the suggestion that life on Earth originally evolved around volcanic vents on the ocean floor. According to the director of marketing at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, some members of test audiences called the film “blasphmous.” The article continues:
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like “I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact,” or “I don’t agree with their presentation of human existence.”
There is the obvious problem here of verifiable scientific theory being trumped by the specious arguments of a small minority of religious bullies, but what bothers me more is how they manage to cloak their objections in reasonable-sounding terms.