Posted on 04/29/2008 8:38:43 PM PDT by Soliton
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:
Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.
It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.
Richard
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Dear Mr J
Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.
1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer. Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States! Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.
2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.
3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?
4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.
With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.
Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins
You will no doubt be able to provide a specific citation for the Einstein quote — the date he said or wrote it and to whom.
Didn’t take this moron long to basically say Hitler was the Vatican’s fault... (rolling eyes).
In The Church’s Confession under Hitler, author Arthur Cochrane presents the not sufficiently well-known statement of exiled Albert Einstein, the great physicist, cited by Wilhelm Niemoller in Kampi und Zeugnis der bekennenden Kirche - Struggle and Testimony of the Confessing Church, p.526.
Stop right there and go read evolution 101
You seem well versed in the scientific roots of ID. Could you share your supporting evidence for ID without mentioning evolution?
LOL. As Joyce Meyers says, I can sit in a garage all day but that doesn’t make me a car.
That is a lie. A big one.
Lurkers go to my FR page and see for themselves.
Truth is truth
ID does not have a competing scientific argument to evolution. Hence the reason it can't be taught in science class. It could be discussed in philosophy or comparative religion, however. If you know what scientific evidence exists for ID, please share it. No one else will.
Dawkins is famous for condemning the Jewish G-d as a genocidal maniac. Now he blames chr*stianity in similar terms for the Holocaust.
Are you seeing the connection? The Biblical G-d is a genocidal maniac and chr*stians are genocidal maniacs. Therefore chr*stians are more "Jewish" (in the Biblical sense) than the Jews, and Jewish victims of anti-Semitism are in solidarity with ancient Canaanite pagans killed on orders from the Torah.
I guess Yehoshu`a Bin Nun was a member of the Klan!
Why is it that whenever people who are anti-science want to make their anti-science points, they drag out Einstein making quotes on social issues? Einstein was no better qualified to make a statement on social science or cultural issues than Forrest Gump.
If pictures of Catholic Bishops giving the Nazi Solute doesn’t convince you that some members of the Church were nazis, then nothing will.
It is more appropriate to ask whether Rudin or Ploetz, architects of Germany's peculiar notions of biology, were Darwinists, which they were of course. As for Darwin advocating Eugenics - well his son said he did. But why not ask how many great Darwinian scientists advocated eugenics? You know, the ones that should have known better than Darwin. The answer is: very many. See my FR homepage.
Cheapened science, and education. You may find John Dewey's essay "On the Influence of Darwinism" interesting. There's a link to it on my FR page.
It is most unfortunate that you bring this up, because the success of genetic algorithms in computer science show that 'natural selection', as understood by biologists, is either impotent or completely incoherent.
OK, I’d like to see you explain that one...:) When we use the underlying theory of evolution - genetic mutations and breeding - to solve mathematical problems, it works great.
Why doesn’t it work for evolution?
In a genetic algorithm, fitness is computed by some expression involving the characteristics of the system you are trying to optimize. In biology, fitness is computed by examining the relative numbers of offspring. If you tried to write a genetic algorithm with the biological version of fitness, it simply (and obviously) wouldn't work.
There aren't as many of these as you might think.
The article beginning this thread posted the following about these "wrong" place fossils:
And fossil remains have been found in strata dated at millions of years old; they are identical to Homo sapiens sapiens. That is, us. Hundreds of examples exist. ... A Professor of Geology found, in the lower Pliocene strata of Castelnodolo, near Brescia, a complete human skeleton indistinguishable from that of a modern woman. The staining in the bones, the depth and number of different strata above the skeleton and its position made it very highly unlikely it could have been a more recent burial. The inescapable conclusion is that this speciment of homo sapiens sapiens was walking around 3.5 million years ago.This example is completely false. First, the find was made over 100 years ago, and as was the case for just about all such finds back then it was poorly documented. It was more likely that the bones were intrusive into that old layer. More recently the bones were documented as modern by radiocarbon dating. In other words, they looked like modern human bones because they were modern human bones.
One should not grasp any these anomalous fossil "straws" as accurate without first doing a thorough check on their documentation. Most have been researched and found to be modern, but they live on as "proof against evolution" courtesy of the internet.
I’d say that fitness in biology is based upon the relative number of offspring that survive. Species and bloodlines that get too inbred can have lots of offspring, but they do not survive. I contend it is still a matter of fitness of the solution to the problem-set.
Additionally, many approaches with GAs use the approach of the fittest “parents” get extra children, while the worst parents get no children. Weight the reproduction of entities to fitness.
But see, here we’re discussing applications of evolution. NOT intelligent design! For evolution can be tested, modified, checked. ID simply can’t. You can’t even have this discussion about ID because it is fundamentally a supernatural basis. It is because it is.
THAT is what makes ID fundamentally not scientific.
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