Intelligent Design.

There. Let the search engines come to me! Apparently that’s all you need to get expelled in academia. Seventeen uniquely formed letters mentioned in passing, or cited on a web site, and you too could lose your job. Even get blacklisted.

And that’s the subject of Ben Stein’s Expelled, soon to hit theaters in April, but already building a grassroots following ala Gibson’s The Passion. The blog world has already been set ablaze—flaming against Stein’s evenhanded documentary-style expose.

The film got personal for me. Two of the profs feeling the wrath of Darwin’s bulldogs (Huxley apparently replicated himself) got the boot from my alma mater, Baylor University, and my wife’s, George Mason. There were others, but how is it I scored twice in this 90-minute gem?

Which goes to show, again, that the debate over origins affects us all.

Stein's brilliance is really letting the key players on both sides speak for themselves. Stein gets PZ Myers to pillory religion as fantasy and a nice diversion like knitting. But Myers hopes to eliminate it altogether. The climactic scene with Ben questioning Richard Dawkins is on par with the moment in A Few Good Men when Cruise gets Nicholson’s character to blurt out “You can’t handle the truth!” under oath in front of everyone.