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
This is just anthoer hapless attempt to take the eye off the ball: namely liberals censor those that disagree with them, be it science, government or the law.
Your efforts are pointless.
Some think that by reading scripture, or attending church makes one a Christian and so forth.
Hitler read some scripture to the masses at Nuremberg, therefore he was a Catholic.
It’s basically the Daily Kos just oozing off their reservation.
Uhhhh, because he could and loves to drive liberals mad!
“The claim that Hitler was Catholic is just bogus. He may have been raised
Catholic, but by the time he tookpower, he was as atheist as the Communists.
And this author knows it.”
Maybe not.
If the author has been hangin’ with Bill Clinton or Maureen Dowd.
You Mean Hitler Wasn’t A Priest?
http://www.nationalreview.com/shiflett/shiflett012102.shtml
RE: your picture of Bill Clinton
What’s up with that?
I thought Bill was/is a Southern Baptist.
That sure doesn’t look like communion in the couple of Southern Baptist
churches I’ve visited.
Simply AMAZING!
It never ever ceases to amaze me how people think attending church makes one a Christian!
But NOW because the nazis photographed themselves in and around churches, clergy and the like, Hitler was a Catholic!
Hitler walked into a cathedral, so he was a Catholic!
A chaplain pictured with the troops, so of course: HITLER was a Christian!
WHO KNEW?
Perhaps you can point out ONE single New Testament scripture that justified Hitler’s actions?
This post is simply beyond words! I’m not a Catholic, but I think it’s most obvious to virtually all that perhaps you’ve wandered way too far off the daily kos!
So far you’ve been able to display that you can cut and paste, nothing more.
But I guess the jury is still out on what a rather extensive nazi library you hold and rather or not you bought the nazi propoganda for real!
Any chance you have any pics of Hitler and the nazis embracing ancient nordic paganism?
Nahhhhhhh....nevermind.
You are right, ID is agnostic. The implications of ID can be left to religion and philosophy.
“There aren’t as many of these as you might think.”
All it takes is one to falsify the TOE.
All it takes is one to falsify the TOE.
If it is the right one, and if it is verifiable, you are correct.
But the list of nonsense I usually see presented as out-of-sequence fossils doesn't falsify anything. The one I cited above took only a few seconds to debunk through a google search.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary documentation. If 10,000 items suggest one thing, and one suggests the opposite, it makes sense to double check that one contrary fact to see that it is really accurate.
Not true.
Oh, I get the claim, it's just that the conclusion drawn by the claim is false! We already know - from the hard, pure mathematical world of genetic algorithms and chaos theory - that we can start with an infinite problem-space and hundreds or thousands of failing solutions. And within a matter of a few dozen or hundred generations end up with solutions that START to work. And over a few hundred or thousand generations, with solutions that work really well!
If your algorithm was worth anything, it would be put to use solving a real problem using real chemistry.
How does the algorithm determine if a mutation is viable or not? Unless it is used in a real world context it is interesting but useless. It sounds like a complicated game of hotter/colder.
“One word: fossils.”
One word: observation.
“Science is built on the backs of earlier scientists. It is a multi-generational process, and using observed data from earlier researchers is valid and accepted, and allows for observations beyond the lifespan of a single person.”
Yep, and when enough generations have actually taken place (with written/visual records) so that, for example, the evolution from a fish to a bird can be completely observed and documented then we will be able to confirm the TOE.
“The absence of a fully observed process does NOT mean the process does not exist; it just has not been confirmed, meaning the theory is still a theory.”
I agree, it has not been confirmed because the observation has never taken place. So it shouldn’t be sold to the public as having been confirmed, is a fact, is true, etc., as many on FR have claimed.
“You may find John Dewey’s essay “On the Influence of Darwinism” interesting.”
Interesting. Dewey was a socialist utopian and he had some radical ideas which are still pervasive in schools today.
March 29, 1998
Pro-abortion and Protestant President Bill Clinton received the Holy Eucharist at Queen of the World Church in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The priest who gave the Communion alleged he was just applying the latest directive of ecumenism that came from the South African Bishops Conference.
Yeah, therein lies the rub. The data cannot be independently tested or replicated through experimentation because it has been discovered, not observed during testing. To go from a strong suggestion to claiming that the TOE is fact, truth, and all the other claims made on FR and other places is quite a leap.
"If it is the right one, and if it is verifiable, you are correct."
Again, that's the problem. There is no way to verify any piece of fossil data by re-test and independent observation under controlled conditions.
Thanks for the info on that photo of Bill Clinton.
I don’t know if the “priest” was Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian
or some other flavor.
I just know that at least for non-Catholics visiting Catholic services
can cross their arms on their chest and approach the priest for a
blessing. But they are NOT to partake of the bread & wine.
Knowing Clinton is (probably nominal) Southern Baptist, I just knew
there was something Clintonian about the event depicted in that photo.
Then how did the designer come into being? Did the designer evolve? Was the designer created by a big-bang type event? Who designed the designer?
If your algorithm was worth anything, it would be put to use solving a real problem using real chemistry.
Heh, GAs are used extensively in chemical kinetics and identification of optimum molecular shapes.
How does the algorithm determine if a mutation is viable or not? Unless it is used in a real world context it is interesting but useless. It sounds like a complicated game of hotter/colder.
It uses a fitness function - a means of determining how well the solution fits the target goal. In biological terms, that would be how well the individual survives and thrives. In mathematical terms, it's an overall fitness score based upon what you want.
In one way, it is like doing "hot/cold", but in this case you take thousands of guesses at once, and you tend to head in the direction of guesses that lead to hot.
At which time it moves from theory to fact. Until then, it's a theory, because we do have observed micro-evolution, and we do have some observations called fossils.
I agree, it has not been confirmed because the observation has never taken place. So it shouldn’t be sold to the public as having been confirmed, is a fact, is true, etc., as many on FR have claimed.
I don't think anyone would dispute micro-evolution as a fact; no need to look beyond different dog breeds, or ring species. That is an established fact.
Macro-evolution is still a theory; anyone who claims otherwise is scientifically wrong. However, general relativity is still a theory as well. Should it not be taught?
ID does not have any examples NOR observations to even warrant a rigorous definition of a hypothesis, let alone a theory. How come it should even be taught in a school?
I fully concede evolution is a theory; what evidence do you know of that would give ID the standing of a theory? Without that standing, why is there even a debate about ID being taught in schools, other than from a purely theological/religious viewpoint?
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