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
Sounds like a combination of buying a pig in a poke and affirmative action.
If you were doing science you would have the evidence already, and not be shy about presenting it. But ID has no scientific evidence; it stems from and relies upon religious belief.
You have no standing to question evolution now. I provided the evidence that proved wrong your contention that evolution wasn't empirical science. Now you run and hide. You have been proven to be a dishonest debater. Therefore, I will no longer debate you.
"If you were doing science you would have the evidence already, and not be shy about presenting it. But ID has no scientific evidence; it stems from and relies upon religious belief."
"You have no standing to question evolution now. I provided the evidence that proved wrong your contention that evolution wasn't empirical science. Now you run and hide. You have been proven to be a dishonest debater. Therefore, I will no longer debate you."
ToE doesn't apply to every instance of a species extinction either. If you want to exclude any argument an exception can be found for, there really won't be much to say.
If its all just a big hoax, it should go away on its own.
As far as science is concerned it deserves to go away on its own, and it did for much of two centuries.
But it was revived by fundamentalists after the Supreme Court's Edwards decision, and they keep pushing it for religious reasons and making false claims that it is science. They occasionally manage to convince a school board or a legislature that doesn't know any better to endorse it.
The falsehoods that are inherent in these claims are why scientists are disputing ID.
Perhaps the fact that ID’s nearest competitor has so many holes in it has something to do with it.
If you are going to quote me at least do it right.
The text below is the post you are referring to in its entirely. It deals with science, not "Evolutionary Science." And you don't mention any problems with the post, so you must be saying that you agree with it.
There are assumptions that science makes that are unfalsifiable.It is hypotheses and theories that are required to be falsifiable, not assumptions.
According to Wiki:
An assumption according to Asimov issomething accepted without proof, and it is incorrect to speak of an assumption as either true or false, since there is no way of proving it to be either (If there were, it would no longer be an assumption). It is better to consider assumptions as either useful or useless, depending on whether deductions made from them corresponded to reality. ... On the other hand, it seems obvious that assumptions are the weak points in any argument, as they have to be accepted on faith in a philosophy of science that prides itself on its rationalism. Since we must start somewhere, we must have assumptions, but at least let us have as few assumptions as possible.
Also, check out this essay:
Background Information—The Nature of Science
A brief excerpt:
So, what is science? Let us start by asking, what are the goals of science? Science, at its most basic level, is a search for explanations about the natural world. The goal of science is to find the best possible natural explanations for natural occurrences. Scientists seek to understand why the natural world is the way that it is, as well as how the natural world works. In order to do this, they use methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical rule used by scientists. This rule states that scientists must look for a naturalistic cause (and only a naturalistic cause) for a natural phenomenon. In other words, scientists cannot invoke supernatural explanations. This method of science assumes:
1) The natural world has an order to it—nature follows the same general rules throughout the universeWhy do scientists use this methodology? Because it works! It has proven to be a reliable method of uncovering explanations for natural phenomena.
2) Natural phenomena have natural explanations
3) Humans can uncover these explanations, using critical and objective thinking, as well as careful investigation
" If you are going to quote me at least do it right.
The text below is the post you are referring to in its entirely. It deals with science, not "Evolutionary Science." And you don't mention any problems with the post, so you must be saying that you agree with it."
... I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. - Albert Einstein
Yes, even in wartime reporters make up quotes by famous folks ...
... Having a long-standing interest in verifying quotations, I turned to The Expanded Quotable Einstein, but it does not include this statement. So I wrote to its editor, Alice Calaprice. She was unsure about the statement but kindly referred me to Barbara Wolff at the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem. Ms. Wolff was able to answer my question: It turns out that the Einstein Archives contain an unpublished letter mentioning this topic specifically. Writing to Count Montgelas on March 28, 1947, Einstein explained that early in the Hitler years he had casually mentioned to some journalist that hardly any German intellectuals except a few churchmen were supporting individual rights and intellectual freedom. He added that this statement had subsequently been drastically exaggerated beyond anything that he could recognize as his own.--Did Einstein Praise the Church?
In this case, Einstein had been in the US since December 1932 (two months before Hitler became Chancellor), at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He would been just as aware of the goings on inside Germany as any other immigrant.
Time magazine puffed up his comment into a profound quote and published it 8 years after the fact.
The Humanist Religion
The humanists have openly told us their views of final reality. The Humanist Manifesto I (1933), page 8 saysReligious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.And Carl Sagan indoctrinated millions of unsuspecting viewers with this humanistic final view of reality in the public television show Cosmos: "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." The humanist view has infiltrated every level of society. ...
Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modem science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.
The Humanist Manifestos I and II both state that humanism is a religion, a faith. [Manifesto I: pages 3 and 7; Manifesto II: pages 13 and 24.] Manifesto I, page 9, very correctly says: "Nothing human is alien to the religious. " Christians of all people should have known, taught, and acted on this. Religion touches all of thought and all of life. And these two religions, Christianity and humanism, stand over against each other as totalities.
The Humanist Manifestos not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other nontheistic religions.
On page 19 the Humanist Manifesto II says: "It [the State] should not favor any particular religious bodies through the use of public monies .... " Ironically, it is the humanist religion which the government and courts in the United States favor over all others!
Its called picking yourself up by your bootstraps.
It doesn’t work very well.
German Martyrs
Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer. These defiant words of Pastor Martin Niemoller were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I."
So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure im prisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.
More than 80% of the prisoners in the concentration camps are not Jews but Christians, and the best tribute to the spirit of Germany's Christians comes from a Jew and agnostic (TIME, Sept. 23) — the world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Says he:
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . .
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
The Failures of Force. Of the fate of German Christians Dr. Henry Smith Leiper, secretary of the World Council of Churches, says, "This is one of the most subtle and terrible persecutions in all history." But the blood of martyrs is the seed of faith. Though the Nazis have jailed over 10,000 pastors, priests and monks for long or short periods, an unknown number have been beaten to death, the churches stand far higher in German esteem today than they did in the easygoing '20s. Church congregations have grown remarkably. Sales of the Bible have shot up from 830,000 copies in 1933 to 1,225,000 in 1939, topping Mein Kampf by about 200,000.
From Hitler's viewpoint the most dangerous aspect of Christian resistance is the refusal of thousands of churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to pray for a Nazi victory. The Gestapo can silence all open attacks from the pulpit, can imprison all outspoken pastors and forbid bishops to write pastoral letters, but it cannot make them pray for Nazi success. That situation is unparalleled in a nation at war. Even the Schwarze Korps, organ of the Elite Guard, admits it: "The spiritual gentlemen . . . write as though they want to make our soldiers dislike the war. They do not find a single word to say about the purpose of the war. They do not pray for victory."
...
(excerpt)
...I think that pretty well sums up weather Hitler was a true Cristian or was just masquerading as one.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15-20
Then Pope Innocent III wasn't a Christian by your standards, either. BTW, Pope Innocent III was the greatest mass murderer prior to the 20th century.
Which brings up the next question: If "by their fruits ye shall know them" is the test for Christianity, then how did Hitler get 44 million Protestants and 22 million Catholics to support him?
Do you think the entire nation of Germany were apostates?
Sir, I would never dream of bashing Catholics, at least not when there are so many Fundamentalist hanging around ... Low hanging fruit, if you know what I mean.
Any REAL Catholic would NEVER committ suicide, NEVER.
(skirl-skewee-skirl)
Anybody hear bagpipes?
Yes. That was the Time magazine article I was referring to in post 152.
The quote is pure puffery, and 8 year old puffery at that.
My standards?...I think that pretty well sums up weather Hitler was a true Cristian or was just masquerading as one.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15-20Then Pope Innocent III wasn't a Christian by your standards, either. BTW, Pope Innocent III was the greatest mass murderer prior to the 20th century.
Which brings up the next question: If "by their fruits ye shall know them" is the test for Christianity, then how did Hitler get 44 million Protestants and 22 million Catholics to support him?
Do you think the entire nation of Germany were apostates?
Nice try.
Now, how did Hitler get 44 million Protestants and 22 million Catholics to support him?
Or do you think the entire nation of Germany were apostates?
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