Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Bugs Bunny endorses evolution

Anti-creation entertainment

Creationism has already lost the culture war in Hollywood and on Broadway. It's sad. Movies, cartoons, and musicals all stand arrayed against the literal young-earth interpretation of Genesis. What is a fundamentalist to do?

In Carl Kerby's case, he writes articles for Answers magazine, the quarterly publication of Answers in Genesis. In the January-March 2007 issue (Vol. 2, No. 1), Kerby presents That's Entertainment ... Or Is It? Kerby explains to a no-doubt hands-wringing readership how he has to keep interrupting videos of The Incredible Mr. Limpet and My Big Fat Greek Wedding so that he can catechize his children on creationistic concepts that are being disrespected by these movies. Watching DVDs with Kerby must be one long thrilling stop-start ride.

The writer is especially upset at how unfair the competition is for the hearts and minds of the nation's young people:
“There are 400,000 churches and 6,000 first-run theaters in the USA; which, do you think, impacts our country more?”

Sadly, the answer is always the same—theaters.
It follows, I think, that churches are doing a lousy job. For me, this was the high point of the article. However, Kerby is generous. In addition to the article itself, the writer took the trouble to compile a bulleted list of examples of the insidious influence of evolution on popular entertainment:
Evolution—It's Everywhere!

Examples of evolutionary references are not hard to find. Often these references are subtle, but they show how widespread and accepted the lie of evolution has become. We must train ourselves and our children to be alert to these lies.

THE FOLLOWING ARE A FEW EXAMPLES:
  • In the Bugs Bunny episode entitled “Prehysterical Hare,” Elmer Fudd is chasing Bugs Bunny when Bugs discovers a film—a documentary in Cromagnum Scope Color by Neanderthal Color—and watches it. In the film, Elmer Fuddstone is hunting the saber-toothed rabbit. While watching the film, Bugs jokingly says, “Get a load of that snaggle-tooth aboriginally. Could he be one of my ancestors?”

  • In the movie Fantasia, Mickey Mouse tells the story of evolution from single-cell organism to man.

  • In Finding Nemo when Marlin (Nemo's dad) and Dory are racing through the mass of jellyfish, Dory says to Marlin, “Give it up, old man. You can't fight evolution; I was built for speed.”

  • The evolutionary reference in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding occurs when Toula's fiance attempts to say “Happy Easter” in Greek to her father. The dad is not impressed and says back to him in Greek (shown in subtitles), “When my people were writing philosophy, your people were still swinging from trees.”

  • In SpongeBob Squarepants, you'll find evolution under the sea. The following is from an episode called “Ugh!”: “Dawn breaks over the primordial sea. It is here that millions of years ago life began taking its first clumsy steps out of the darkness, opening its newly formed eyeballs to stare into the blinding light of intelligence.”

  • Evolutionary content is even in a preschool program like Bob the Builder. In the episode titled “Scoop's Stegosaurus,” Bob digs a hole and finds a bone. He says it must be a dinosaur bone. Lofty is frightened, but Bob reassures her by saying, “It's all right, Lofty; the dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.”

  • In Peter Pan, the song “What Made the Red Man Red?” states, “Let's go back a million years to the very first Indian prince.”

  • Commercials that promote everything from auto insurance to high-speed internet contain allusions to evolution. A FedEx commercial that aired during the 2005 Superbowl depicted a primitive caveman who tied his package to the leg of a pterodactyl, which was eaten shortly after by a T. rex. In spite of the commercial's humor, the subtle evolutionary message reinforces the idea of molecules-to-man evolution, not the truth of creation found in Genesis.

I do believe that Kerby has made his point: evolution is indeed everywhere. It permeates the culture.

That's because it permeates reality.

2 comments:

Porlock Junior said...

Thank you. That's the most cheerful, hopeful posting I've seen in weeks. Worth at least a short break from everyone's hand-wringing at the prevalence of dopes.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, it hurts when many of them get their evolutionary notions wrong, as a good many of the examples cited did.

In fact, the idea expressed in the Peter Pan example is that environmental characteristics are inherited -- a notion debunked long ago.