creo/evo creative movies/books/plays

A late 70s Italian picture contains a beautiful and powerful commentary on this debate: Allegro Non Troppo. It's a series of cartoons set to classical music pieces in the manner of Disney's Fantasia. My favorite sequence is what I call The Melancholy Cat; set to Sibelius' Valse Triste it follows a lonely cat wandering through the ruins of a war-torn city, remembering what life used to be like. It will bring tears to your eyes.The sequence which is relevant to this debate is set to Ravel's Bolero (an ordinarily boring piece of music IMO). It begins with a shot of a coke bottle being thrown onto a lifeless planet by a passing spaceship. Interaction between the planet's environment and the tiny bit of Coke left in the bottle creates life, and that life evolves into more complicated life, which evolves into still more complicated life. Finally, the beauty of this evolutionary progress is interrupted by the appearance of religion.

Actually it bears a striking resemblance to actual history. The names of the major players and the town were all changed, and of course parts of the background story were invented, but the courtroom dialogue was very consistent with the historical courtroom transcripts, which I've read. If anything, Darrow's arguments were toned down in both the play and the film. I suppose this was done in order to keep the work from seeming to condemn Christianity outright, but you're wrong if you think the historical Scopes trial was somehow kinder (for lack of a better word) to fundamentalist religion than was this picture.

I don't know what fundamentalists are like in New Zealand, but here in the US Deep South many (perhaps most) do display a "raging intolerance", even today. As for your other points, these are the sorts of changes that are typically made when dramatizing factual material. The play and film are not unbiased and were not meant to be. Inherit The Wind is not a documentary. It had a point to make and it made it well.From the court transcripts it's difficult to tell whether Bryan went into a "frenzy" toward the end, but he did in fact die only a week after the trial closed. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest, as this work does, that the Scopes trial might have hastened his death.You should go back and read Mencken's writings on the trial. His comment about the remarkable tranquility of the town where the trial took place came very early on, perhaps even before the trial began in earnest. He made many statements later that clearly suggest that the town was in an uproar.I don't know if you've ever spent much time in the US South, but I've lived here all my life. I can tell you without any hesitation whatsoever that this picture captures beautifully the attitudes of a huge segment of our population regarding the bible. These people are just as sure today that every word of the bible is absolute truth as they were 40 years ago that white people were superior to blacks. In fact, they used to claim - with some justification - that their racism came straight from the bible. If you can find a racist here today (it isn't hard to do), there is a 99.9% chance that he or she is also a biblical fundamentalist.

Most of what you've said has already been responded to, but I wanted to say that yes, the trial was held in Tennessee. If you will recall, I used the phrase "US Deep South", of which Mississippi and Tennessee are integral parts. The two states share a border. This area is my home and I know it well.I would also say that yes, my percentage was rhetorical (or hyperbole, which may be more to the point).As was already pointed out, most any opinion or prejudice can find biblical sanction. Shakespeare said (I believe it was in The Merchant of Venice) that "The devil can cite scripture to his purpose", and the devil's white southern followers demonstrated the point admirably during the civil rights struggle. They did (and still do) the same when they used the bible to fight against tolerance and enlightenment.This is why I made the point that I don't know what fundamentalists are like in your part of the world. You call yourself a "fundie", but judging from the tone of your rhetoric and some of the things you've said I would say that you are quite a bit more intelligent than most US southern fundamentalists. I think I am probably a better judge of the fundamentalists who live here, and I would say that they, like those who lived in Dayton, Tennessee in the 1920s, are (largely but not entirely) uneducated, unenlightened and in no way practiced at the art of thinking for themselves. They allow their preachers/priests/pastors, etc. to do their thinking for them. They never question anything they were reared to believe UNLESS change is forced upon them, as it was in the civil rights revolution.

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Unless you can quote where in the NT it says do these things, in the name of Christ - then the people who do then are NOT Christian, even if they say so.

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I agree with you so far as that goes, and I would hesitate to say you're missing the point because you weren't responding to me, but from my perspective it hardly matters whether such people are or are not Christian. The fact is they believe themselves to be Christian and they believe they are doing God's work. Many historians insist that Toms de Torquemada was a devout Christian, and no doubt he would have identified himself as such, yet he was responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of Jews and other "heretics".I speak of the so-called "Christians" here in the US South because I interact with them daily and have come to know them quite well (and I thank God I wasn't reared to believe as they do). Most of them no more impress me with their faith and piety than would Attila the Hun, but the fact is they believe themselves to be Christians. Some of them are unreconstructed racists who believe (devoutly) that all of this country's problems started with the Civil Rights movement. Almost to a man (or woman) they believe that the ACLU is Satanic. They are morons, plain and simple. They have been taught since birth that they are not to think for themselves and should believe nothing that doesn't come straight from the bible. They still oppose the teaching of evolution in the schools, and I've heard many, many of them say that Darwin's books are Satan's scripture. You may feel that people like this are not true Christians (and I would agree with you) but that doesn't matter much. What matters is what they themselves think, because what they believe is what will dictate their actions.

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...this line of debate does belong in it's own new topic. But, I'm not the one who's going to start it.

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I hope you won't mind if I start it then; I do have something more I'd like to say. I'll call the new thread 'Fundamentalism and the True Christian' since that seems to be what we're discussing.[This message has been edited by berberry, 01-16-2004]

Inherit The Wind is a McCarthy-era stage play about the Scopes trial of the 1920s. You'll recall that Scopes was a high-school science teacher charged with violating a stupid Tennessee law which forbade the teaching of ToE in the schools. The play was made into a famous motion picture in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. I don't know if you can download it but you should be able to buy the script in book form or rent the movie at most any well-stocked video store.