At least discernment, learning and tolerance when it relates to the validity and scope of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and a second theory, Intelligent Design.

As stated in a press kit on the website for the movie, “In a controversial new satirical documentary, author, former presidential speechwriter, economist, lawyer and actor Ben Stein travels the world, looking to some of the best scientific minds of our generation for the answer to the biggest question facing all Americans today: Are we still free to disagree about the meaning of life? Or has the whole issue already been decided…while most of us weren’t looking?”

What do you think, readers? As a writer with journalism training and experience, I would be hard-pressed to think of something that bothers me more professionally AND personally than a person or institution (educational, governmental, religious or other) that actively and purposefully works to stifle freedoms—with freedom of speech and thought being near the top of the list.

Man’s inhumanity to man so often is played out by a degradation of rights and privileges, as dissent is cowered, obedience is demanded and resistance is punished. Don’t get me wrong—the scientists and learned people who are shown in “Expelled” have not suffered anything like people in devastated regions like Darfur, areas of China, South and Central America, or past generations who died in concentration camps, killing fields and the Roman Coliseum.

Ben Stein however, has purposely connected his documentary, both visually and factually, with major historical events that divided nations and resulted in the suffering and deaths of millions: Nazi Germany’s desire to rid humanity of genetically “inferior” people and the Berlin Wall that kept freedom and dissent out of a major portion of Eastern Europe after World War II.

Okay, you may think that it is over the top to discuss Adolf Hitler’s massacre of millions of Jews, Christians, Gypsies and others in the same breath as the fate of a teacher in Seattle, WA (USA) who doesn’t make tenure because of a paper that dares to consider the possibility of intelligent design. Take that skepticism, or disbelief, or whatever you call it with you to the next screening of “Expelled.” Then remember that Hitler didn’t set up the crematoriums on the first night that he took power in the 1930s. No, first he and his henchmen worked methodically to stifle the right to speak or think in opposition to the ruling authority. Today, the ruling authority in terms of science doesn’t want to engage in the discussion regarding intelligent design.

If you see the movie and then comment here along the lines of, “Nice try, but here’s why I don’t think that Ben Stein is right,” we can have a good discussion. Just don’t comment cavalierly that you don’t need to consider the question because “intelligent design is for religious morons and can’t hold a candle to evolution.”

Because then I might be closer to the truth by saying that rather than keeping an open mind, your head was squeezed shut so tightly that your brains fell out.