Chris Weinkopf writes about Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled:

…a searing satire whose critics have largely failed to recognize it for what it is. Instead, they fume over what they perceive as Stein’s unfair treatment of them.

They resent, for example, that Stein’s movie repeatedly associates the unequivocally godless with images of the Berlin Wall, the USSR and even Josef Stalin. They protest the suggestion that evolutionary absolutism poses a dire threat to America’s most-cherished rights. And they decry Stein’s charge that Darwinist thinking led - and naturally leads - to evils like eugenics and Nazism.

Which is to say, they miss the point.

Stein’s film is part parody of, part rebuttal to, the crusading atheists who have risen to prominence in recent years - such as Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. And it employs the same nasty tactics they have perfected.Is it unfair to liken all Darwinists to communists? Of course, but no less so than likening all believers to al-Qaida and the Taliban - a popular trope among the New Atheists.

Is it a stretch to argue that academia’s hostility toward skepticism about the Gospel of Darwin imminently imperils freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom itself? Certainly. So is the claim that scientists who detect hints of design in their research are “anti-science,” and that those who resent the teaching of atheist dogma as fact in public schools are attempting to impose a “theocracy” on us all.

And yes, it’s a cheap shot to pin the wickedness of Adolf Hitler on Charles Darwin’s writings from a century earlier. But, then, so is blaming every abuse committed in the name of God on religion itself.

For 90 minutes, “Expelled” puts its targets in the same uncomfortable, unfair position in which believers have long found themselves in academia and the media. In turning the tables this way, the movie reveals, cleverly and amusingly, that you don’t need to believe in God to be a zealot.

And zealots of any stripe cannot tolerate mockery, nor do they understand when they’re being satirized.