Why Can't We Question This?

Well I'm sitting in a motel room in (or near?) Cincinnati eating cherry sours, and that reminded me of Sour Patch Kids, which of course reminded me I'm long overdue writing my review of Expelled.

I took Sour Patch Kids with me to the movie, so that's how the association link gets me back there. They were tasty, but left my teeth sensitive for days. I think I burned off some enamel with the super-sour powder!

I brought along my own candy for a couple of reasons. First, there's nothing more fun than sitting in what is going to be an adult crowd at a movie eating "noisy candy," something in a crinkly bag that can't be chewed very quietly. Second, it's a little rebellious since the theater doesn't want me to bring in treats, preferring I buy theirs instead. The whole movie was themed around free thought and challenging unnecessary rules, so in that spirit -- Sour Patch Kids!

And now, finally, my review. I have watched all of Michael Moore's documentaries in the past couple of years except Roger and Me. That one hasn't been available at Blockbuster. I started tentatively and skeptically because he is such an in-your-face political leftist I wasn't sure what value would be in his movies. I was very pleased to find out his movie-making style is humorous, personable, and pleasantly brazen, even if not quite brilliant. Just when he seems to be on the verge of making an important point, he backs away and starts spouting party-line talking points. Still, for blatant propaganda, it's entertaining.

I start with Michael Moore because he is the best-known and possibly best politically based documentary propagandist making films, so his work is a sort of benchmark. Ben Stein incorporates many of Moore's techniques in the construction of Expelled. We follow Stein on a "journey of discovery" to get at the truth, a Michael Moore staple. He sets up expectations based on pop culture news coverage of his topic and then takes a closer, often biting, and often stunning look at things as they really are.

The movie is very brave. Hard-line Darwinian evolutionists wind up fumbling over the huge holes in a random, material-world-only explanation of life on earth and its diversity. They pretty much dodge the issue of evolution from simpler to more complex species with sarcasm and derision, completely revealing the fact they have no clue how the irreduceable complexity of an eye could evolve.

Stein gets renowned scientists to speculate on the origins of life on earth by saying perhaps chemicals were on crystals, and as the crystals formed with defects they just "happened" to get all 250 protein sequences right to become DNA. The scientists' favorite answer to dodge the statistical near impossibility of life randomly beginning was to agree that life on earth could have been seeded by extraterrestrials.

And the coup de grace -- Richard Dawkins, evangelistic atheist and harsh opponent of the theory of intelligent design, said he believes in intelligent design. Of course, the intelligence would have to be extraterrestrials planning the variety of life on earth, and they themselves could only have appeared by completely random evolutionary processes. But Dawkins clearly acknowledged that observing life on earth leads to the reasonable conclusion that design was involved.

Stein's greatest achievement with this film is probably his willingness to expose the intent of scientists opposing intelligent design and advocating Darwinian evolution only, in spite of the holes. They admit their goal is to remove religion as an important part of people's lives and elevate science in its place. He doesn't get to subtle but significant distinction in the science vs. religion argument, however.

Science as a field is limited by definition to the study of the material, observable world. It must look for the material, non-supernatural explanation for anything. Which is fine and reasonable, because it's science! But the ENORMOUS error scientists make is to say that, because science limits itself to material explanations, only the material world exists and is valid. That is NOT what science says at all. Science only says, "We cannot study things we cannot directly measure and observe."

The movie is quite moving when Stein takes the audience on a brief history of Darwinian thought and where it has led: in the United States to progressivism and the eugenics movement of the 1920's where 50,000 people were forceably sterilized, and through the philosophies of socialism and Kantian and Nietschian humanism to the anti-religious experiments in government in Europe that culminated in the Soviet and Nazi threats to democratic and free civilization.

Stein, though Jewish, focuses not on the mass genocide of Jews and gypsies by the Nazis in his tour of Germany, but on the tens of thousands of people killed in gas chambers because they were disabled or impaired. He reminds all of us that Adolf Hitler spoke often about natural selection, and how "soft" civilizations that took care of their weaker members were keeping evolution from improving the human species. Hitler sought to rectify that and give natural selection a big boost.

Was Nazism a right-wing phenomenon? Hardly! With socialist goals and anti-religious materialism as its foundations, it was a close kin of the anti-religious zealousy trying to silence a modern-day discussion of intelligent design as a possible explanation of the holes in Darwinian evolution. Had Stein made that point clear -- that the oppression of thought in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was leftist and has the same roots as the oppression of the discussion of intelligent design -- this movie could have achieved true greatness. As it stands, it is a wonderfully-made, entertaining, and powerful film.

Hopefully people who see this film will understand that forbidding debate about Darwinian evolution, which as a theory has significant holes and by no means accounts for the variety of life on the planet, is akin to the totalitarian oppression of socialism's two variants, communism and fascism. Hopefully people will stand against baseless dogma imposed from above and say

"Why can't we question this?"

To freedom of thought, freedom of ideas, and freedom to debate

Please, Sir, May I Think Some More?

DOCUMENTARIES RULE!

Planning to see it tonight so I'll follow up with a review.

Why Positive Thinking Doesn't Work

I have been concerned for a while about the sweeping influence of "The Law of Attraction" on the field of coaching, especially personal coaching or life coaching. I have literally watched this simplistic belief system stop people who were on a path of change, striving towards goals they had set after self-discovery and a lot of planning. This spiritual belief system means, to some, that you don't really have to expend any effort to get what you want.

I've asked questions politely and offered soft challenges. I will be told, "No, you don't understand. That's not what it means." But then the explanation pretty closely restates what I understand to be the simplicity of the beliefs. So whether it's the true "dogma" of The Law of Attraction or not, the populist dogma brings up a lot of concerns.

One belief is you don't have to pursue what you want. You just think on it, make a picture board, and feel good feelings about it and you will bring it into your life. Lest any of you think I'm oversimplifying the idea, in the movie The Secret a boy yearns for a specific bike and thinks about it every day. He doesn't mow yards or do chores or sell his older toys and clothes in a garage sale. He just yearns. One day, an elderly gentleman puts the bike on his porch. Voila!

I hear from people who are so certain the law of attractions works they will not put effort into their goals. I hear from people who are so certain it works they will not take time to explore their own deepest wishes to develop a life plan. They just wait around for the universe to deliver the right thing for them, which of course they will recognize immediately because it will resonate in their souls.

Why won't they strive? Why won't they make effort? Because "going after something" feeds into their view of "scarcity thinking" or "poverty thinking." The idea that you have to work at something, that you have to strive, becomes equated with what they consider a "false" belief that there is scarcity in the universe. Scarcity thinking is the false belief system that keeps us from "manifesting" everything we want. Believing some things are difficult is scarcity thinking. Believing you have to pursue something and put a lot of time and effort into it is scarcity thinking.

This actually worries me. It gets close to frightening me. Believing that you are stuck in a low-pay, low-joy life because very few people get to enjoy life is "scarcity thinking." Believing you have to expend a lot of time and energy to learn new things, improve yourself, or start a new career as a self-employed person is REALITY. If you want to be a seven-figure consultant, you have to figure out the focus of your business. You have to develop products and services. You have to market to people. You can't just feel wonderful assuming you have the right to be a wealthy consultant and wait for checks to show up in your mailbox.

Even one of the people in The Secret, I think maybe the Chicken Soup for the Soul co-developer Mark Victor Hansen, talked about "manifesting" checks in the mailbox. At one point of financial struggle he focused on big checks showing up in the mailbox. But he didn't sit around waiting! He went out and helped start a publishing phenomenon. Of course the story ends with "big checks" showing up "in the mailbox."

There's a similar story about Jim Carrey. Early in his career he supposedly wrote a check to himself for $10,000,000. On the memo line he wrote "for acting services rendered." Years later, when he got the role in Dumb and Dumber his salary was -- $10,000,000. But in between he was working hard in comic acting and making a name for himself, doing anything but manifesting and simply waiting.

I have encouraged people to consider "The Law of Intention" instead of The Law of Attraction. When you put something in your mind by writing about it, thinking about it daily, talking about its importance to you, and setting real goals for it, you energize your own mind. You have more focus and a magnificent filter for sifting through all the information flowing around and finding what is relevant to your goal, your heart's desire.

The Law of Intention suggests that by meditating or yearning or creating a visual "wish board" we can focus on what we are pursuing. But the focusing doesn't substitute for the pursuit. It augments the pursuit, the way a supercharger and computer-controlled timing augment an engine. Intention amplifies your efforts.

I got off on this near-rant after reading Michael Masterson's article in "Early To Rise" today. Click on this link and scroll down to his article. He briefly reviews research on positive thinking, then moves on to point out that the true source of confidence in our abilities is success.

The process he describes is the process of mastery in developmental psychology. We start with something new and struggle to do it. Because it is important we keep at it as we slowly get better. If we don't get blocked or frustrated, eventually we master the skill, like walking or talking or interacting in social situations.

With more specific things, like learning to market successfully, there are more obstacles, greater frustration, and many more messages that tell us it's okay to give up because we probably can't do it. You don't conquer the uncertainty and the difficulty of the task by saying, "Oh yes I can!" You conquer it by moving at a comfortable pace, one skill at a time, until you can manage it and move to the next. Your success moving forward a little bit is the confidence to take on the next small challenge.

"Oh yes I can!" has to be rooted in evidence for most of us, especially those of use who don't think and feel positive things automatically. For us, it is important to accept that we will struggle and not be good for a while, but through continued effort we can slowly improve. Success will give us the confidence that positive thinking alone never can.

Ha Ha Ha? Hmmm....

Lots of people like to laugh.

Lots of people like to keep laughter going.

I think maybe they equate laughing with a good time.

Or maybe just with a no-conflict time.

Lots of people really, really want to be funny.

They say things that are almost structured like a joke.

It's like those cheap knock-off Rolexes -- you can tell what it's supposed to be.

But it ain't a Rolex.

And these things people say that are structured like jokes but aren't really jokes just aren't funny.

But there are way more people who say something that's supposed to be funny and then laugh like it's funny than there are really funny people.

There just aren't that many people who are really, really funny.

There are way too many who really, really think they are.

And that's really, really annoying!