Darwin film: America, are ya really this dumb?
Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’
Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.
The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.
However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.
Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.
The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”. </em>
When America is finally reduced to the ashbin of history, mythology-based intentional stupidity will loom large as a reason. To the 61% of my fellow citizens who don’t “believe” in something they don’t understand, here’s how we’re gonna break it up. You get everything up to the second before the first living thing appeared. But evolution is what occurred next- and thousands of experiments for hundreds of years have proven it. So hush. Stop making us the laughingstock of the planet.