February 21st, 2006
Guantánamo actors questioned under terror act after film festival
It’s reassuring to know that actors pretending to be al-Qaida suspects are caught and questioned by police at Luton Airport under suspicion of being terrorists. No flies on our border control! These actors had just returned from the Berlin Film Festival, where they had been promoting the film they had made about the experience of a group of Tipton men who had been detained in Guantanamo after visiting Afghanistan. They obviously looked like terrorists… but that’s kind of the point isn’t it. The original suspects who accompanied the actors to the film festival had looked enough like terrorists to get arrested and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they were detained without charge and interrogated for two years. The actors in the airport were asked, for reasons quite beyond me, whether they were making films to further the Islamic cause. OK, so Islamic terrorists are seriously into making films to further their cause – except that they’re usually bad videotapes with muezzins singing at top volume over footage of balaclava-clad nutters decapitating engineers, and they’re usually played on Al-Jazeera. They’re not films made by Michael Winterbottom that are shown at the Berlin Film Festival.
Academics fight rise of creationism at universities
There was a time when the biggest philosophical questions your average student concerned themselves with were the merits of a diet dominated by Pasta ‘n’ Sauce, or the wisdom of fancying unattainable women from Australian soap operas – I remember, I was there. There is now, however, a terrifying new development in British universities, the cancerous and insidious spread of creationism amongst science students. A recent upsurge in the number of students who are challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution is something to be truly worried about, maybe even moreso than the state-sponsored increase in the number of faith schools in this country, and the resulting apartheid and religious indoctrination of Britain’s children. Why is it worse? Because university students are supposed to be of the age where they are able to make their own informed decisions about their religious beliefs and their world view in general, and they are at university to enquire, study and learn - but creationism is anathema to rational thought and scientific enquiry. There is also the fact that these are science students – a significant number of our future scientists, doctors, environmentalists and researchers are likely to be creationists. Creationism is a comfortable bedfellow to a whole raft of irrational and unproven theories – one being that there is a God in the first place.
What is the problem with creationism? It might be easier to ask what is right with it. Creationism is a theory where the Earth, and Humanity, are divine creations from recent history – where everything was created in between six days and ten thousand years, depending on who you believe. Both the Bible and the Qur’an espouse creation theory – both books speaking of everything having been created by God. There is no supporting scientific evidence for creation theory – creation theory, whether you are Christian or Muslim, is based on the contents of a book, nothing more – what’s more, the book is a subjective liturgy, not a piece of research or accurate historical record. There is little or no mention of the presence of radioactive isotopes on Earth that age it at around 4.5 billion years, no mention of carbon-dated fossil records, no mention of the development of single-celled organisms from simple proteins. The Bible says it all happened in six days, and the Qur’an says all animals were made by God out of water. A creationist would probably also find a way to explain away the vestigial tail they have at the bottom of their own spine - they would indeed deny the evidence that’s embedded in their own pious backside.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory with overwhelming evidence stretching back over many years of research, is under attack – by Christianity and Islam, Christianity more recently attempting to present a more credible theory in the form of Intelligent Design (ID). ID’s main argument is that the process of evolution was too complicated to have happened without divine intervention – utterly typical of the simplistic answer you’d get from religion. It’s too complicated to have happened on its own, so therefore God did it. The sheer weight and credibility of the evidence for natural selection and evolution, compared to the sheer non-existence of evidence for creation theory and ID, is so huge as to be absurd, yet polls reveal that 45% of the population of the US believe in creation theory, and we now have an increasing number of science students in this country taking the same stance. Fortunately, students presenting creation theory backed up by the Bible or Qur’an as if it was fact in their work are currently being failed (and so they should), and the Royal Society is set to host a debate in April entitled ‘Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right’. When science is under threat of being transmogrified by the lunatic religious, the stakes are about as high as they can get and the creationists have to be challenged to present their evidence, put up or shut up, because the damage done by wider acceptance of irrational, unproven theories could be irreversible.
Related information:
An embarrassing confession – two of my finest music finds weren’t from the coolest sources. After seeing Shrek I found out about the brilliant Jeff Buckley, as a cover of his song ‘Hallelujah’ was used in the film, and I found out about my favourite band Elbow from a Rathergood animation of northern kittens singing the Destiny’s Child song Independent Woman.
Poor Americans. They’re forced to download pirate copies of the recent Richard Dawkins program ‘The Root of All Evil?’ from the Internet, because as Andrew Hearst says on his 
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Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
