Inherit the Wind

Inherit the Wind does not purport to be a historically accurate depiction of the Scopes trial. The stage directions set the time as "Not long ago." Place names and names of trial participants have been changed. Lawrence and Lee created several fictional characters, including a fundamentalist preacher and his daughter, who in the play is the fiancé of John Scopes. Henry Drummond is less cynical and biting than the Clarence Darrow of Dayton that the Drummond character was based upon. Scopes, a relatively minor figure in the real drama at Dayton, becomes Bertram Cates, a central figure in the play, who is arrested while teaching class, thrown in jail, burned in effigy, and taunted by a fire snorting preacher. William Jennings Bryan, Matthew Harrison Brady in the play, is portrayed as an almost comical fanatic who dramatically dies of a heart attack while attempting to deliver his summation in a chaotic courtroom. The real Bryan died in his sleep five days after the conclusion of the trial. The townspeople of fictional Hillsboro are far more frenzied, mean-spirited, and ignorant than were the real denizens of Dayton.

Okay, enough debating boys, here are the facts:

Book:
by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
published 1955 by Random House Publications
ISBN: 0553269151

Film:
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Released 1960
Not Rated
ASIN: 6302120624

Film:
Directed by Daniel Petrie
Released 1999
Rated PG
ASIN: 6305600988

...now that the facts are conveniently out of the way, I can get into my impressions of this work.

I was 'forced' to read this book in my 11th year English class. I thought I would abhor it, but instead, well.. this was the only book I've ever stolen -- that's right, I never turned it in at the end of the year, but instead I kept it. That's how good I thought it was.

I won't make any comentary on the 'bias' of the work, suffice it to say that it's not as bias as everyone is keen to think, and I highly recommend it.

Additional: Lometa asked me to tell why I kept the book as opposed to returning it. Well, it wasn't because stealing is 'cool', and I honestly didn't intend on doing it, it just sort of happened (like sex).

Besides the whole thing being very well written, and the dialogue being well composed and all that other literature crap(!), it inspired me to one important end: it showed me that science and faith do not exist in mutually exclusive space. It was this book that really gave me personal license to examine my faith with a scientific eye -- and in doing so, I realised that they can co-exists and, in fact, compliment each other. If mostly stems from the section of courtroom dialogue where Drummond is examining the good Reverend Brady as an Expert Witness on the subject of the Bible. The debate is on the age of a rock, to which Brady states that it cannot be more than 7000-some-odd years old, due to calculation based on the ages of the ancients mentioned in the Bible. Drummond responds to this answer by asking what day the Earth was created on, and how long a 'Day' Was at the time. The obvious answer here is '24 hours', which is the answer Matthew Brady returns. Though, in a feat of insight I could never hope to achieve in my lifetime, Drummond asks that, if the Sun was not created until much later, after the Earth was, how can a day's lenght be gaged?

That left me dumbstruck for several days afterward. Being a child of science, I had always assumed that God and Science were irreconcilable, and always would be. But after having my mind opened like that,I began to think in new ways about the world and about eternity. After A bit of research on my own after that, I also came to understand that, in the original Hebrew, the Bible doesn't say anything about a day. It simply says 'a period of time', which could be 24-hours, or even billions of years.

The important point that this work made to me was that You do not have to choose.