Darwin and Malthus

PBS ^ | 2001

[Tailgunner Joe]

He is indeed arguing that utopia is achievable, but only if birth rates are reduced. The entire reason to reduce the birth rates is to feed all the poor and achieve utopia.

[Mylo]

Thus I was correct when I said that Hitler told the German people to kill the Jews because they were the murderers of Christ.

His "attitudes" and "private conversations" (even if true from that one posthumous source) had NOTHING TO DO with the Holocaust. His public speeches and published writings are what motivated the Nazi's to kill Jews.

Therefore the Nazi's killed the Jews due to their understanding of Christianity, not due to their lack of understanding of Evolution.

nice try.

Maybe after you die I'll publish a book that reveals your "private conversations" and "attitudes"; that reveal that you are really an evolutionist and tried your best to post idiotic drivel to advance evolutionist thought by discrediting the creationist position.

[general_re]

He is indeed arguing that utopia is achievable, but only if birth rates are reduced.

It doesn't say that at all. Not even remotely. You really didn't read this article you linked, did you? Worse, you still haven't read it, despite the fact that you're being beaten silly with it.

Come back when you have a real argument, son. You're wasting everyone's time.

[narby]

You missed my point completely about Jim Jones.

Evolution is a scientific theory. That's it. Like a gun, evolution doesn't kill people, people kill people.

Your associating evolution with eugenics is an irrelevant slander equivalent to associating Christians with Jim Jones.

There *are* people who's first thought after hearing the word "Christian" is Jim Jones, and David Koresh, and "the inquisition". Just because you associate eugenics with Darwin is as irrelevant as those people who think evil about Christianity.

You are both wrong.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Nazism has nothing to do with Christianity. Learn about the SS and how they developed pagan ceremonies purged of all Christianity. The majority of the German Wehrmacht who fought for the Third Reich were Christians, but not nazis. Most had nothing to do with the killing of jews, that was the anti-Christian SS's job.

Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches

There is plenty more evidence of the nazi war on Christianity, but I'm sure that won't stop your slanderous religious bigotry.

[Tailgunner Joe]

I'm glad to waste your time. You don't seem to spend any time doing anything other than just being a waste.

[general_re]

So basically, you're abandoning any pretense at arguing the premise you set out with.

Wise move - it wasn't going very well for you. I'll be off, then, and leave the thread for anyone else who wants to drive by and laugh at the Tailgunner Joke. CYA.

[Tailgunner Joe]

You lost the argument in post 43 when you failed to rebut my correct definition of Malthusian utopianism. You seem to know nothing at all about Burke, Malthus, or even Darwin, and have offered nothing to this thread but lies, slander and insults. Go crawl back under your rock.

[Mylo]

It isn't slanderous religious bigotry to point out the truth that Hitler told the German people to kill Jews because they killed Christ. It is the truth.

If you don't like the truth, you cant just go about changing it after the fact.

The Nationalist Socialists were not right wing, they were Socialists.

The Nationalist Socialists were not Atheists, they wanted to "stamp out" atheism.

The Nationalist Socialists were Christians of the tradition of Luther who wanted the Jews all hanged; rather than in the tradition of Jesus, who wanted you to love your enemies and WAS a Jew.

There was no "Nazi war on Christianity"; there was a Nazi war against Poland, against France, against England, against the USA, against Atheists, and against Communists.

The Nazi's were Germans, and the Germans were (and are) a Christian people. Hitler was a leader of a Christian nation, and used Christian rhetoric to inflame anti-Jewish passion (the vipers in the Temple, etc).

Do you get tired of being wrong? Or do you just use historical revisionism to erase that also?

[Tailgunner Joe]

Hilter told the Germans to kill jews because they were cross-breed "sub-humans" who would dilute the master race's genetic superiority and "fitness." Everybody knows this. Your compulsion to deny this fact and say it was all about Christianity is as tranparent as it is reprehensible.

[Mylo]

"everybody knows this" may hold water in the intellectual circles you swim with; but they don't hold up with me.

In addition to his claptrap about racial superiority he ALSO used Christian rhetoric to inflame anti-Jewish passion among Christian Germans. Are you disputing this? I thought you ceded this point awhile back. Or are you delving into historical revisionism again?

[Tailgunner Joe]

Nazi "Positive Christianity" is no more Christian than Communist "Liberation Theology."

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Darwin was not so innocent of eugenics. His associates (and I believe a brother or cousin) were intimately involved with the budding eugenics movement in England. He knew what they were doing and approved of it.

[Tailgunner Joe]

"If reproduction as such is limited and the number of births decreased, then the natural struggle for existence, which only allows the strongest and healthiest to survive, will be replaced by the obvious desire to save at any cost even the weakest and sickest; thereby a progeny is produced, which must become ever more miserable, the longer this mocking of nature and its will persists." - Adolf Hitler

Hitler is obviously only arguing against birth control of aryans in this quote. While Malthus wanted to limit births in order that the poor wouldn't go hungry, Hitler hoped to cause their extinction and the speciation of a "master race" through competition with the unfit. While they had different goals, they both started from the same incorrect premises.

[jim_trent]

I ran across this quote from Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin's defender.

"The two most important questions in science are 'What can I know?' and 'How can I know it?'"
"Science and religion part ways over the first question, what each can know. Religion, and to some extent philosophy, believes that it can know, or at least address, the question, 'Why?'"
"The question 'why' is too deep for science. Science instead believes it can only learn 'how' something occurs."

There was a lot more, but basically, he said that science does not reject religion. They are not working on the same problems or seeking the same answers. It is religion that rejects science. Looks like it still does.

[Tailgunner Joe]

So if science does not reject religion, then all the evos who show up to mock Christianity and push atheism aren't being very scientific are they?

[jim_trent]

You must be going to different places than I do. The mocking I hear comes from the Creationists.

I have always thought that science tried to answer the question "how". Then they use that as a basis to predict other things (for example, using the law of gravity and its effect on heavenly bodies to predict the existence of a planet we now call Pluto amny years before it was found -- and there are many other examples in science). Sometimes their predictions are right and sometimes they are wrong. Testing finds out which.

I have not yet seen Creationists (or ID's if you want to be called that now) do that. They cast doubt on evolution, but do not use their "science" to predict anything. Without prediction, it is worthless.

[ExitPurgamentum]

Malthus held technology constant, which is silly.

His conclusion would be valid even if technology did advance but at an insufficient pace.

As for silliness, you're a bit too harsh, considering that ever today most people, including Congress, evaluate consequences of their actions assuming everything else being constant. The constancy supposition is perhaps silly for a present-day scholar but apparently not for anybody else.

[ExitPurgamentum]

there is a hard ceiling to food production,

Where and when this fact has been established?

[RightWingAtheist]

I wish there were more people who reviled both Charles Darwin and Edmund Burke at once. It would make my enemies all the more obvious.