Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Richard Dawkins.net ^ | 4/20/08 | Richard Dawkins

[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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

[PugetSoundSoldier]

OK, a couple more questions: do you agree that micro-evolution happens? If no, why not? If yes, then why not teach evolution at least at that level?

And what scientific rationale leads you to a foundation for ID? Evolutionists can at least point to micro-evolution which most ID supporters concede is factual...

[Fichori]

Evolutionary Mutant Dogfight ping...


(drum roll please)

Let the Flames & Vitriol commence!


(Let me know if you would like me to start a formal list.)

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

You’re starting too late with your premise.

You’ve got to go back. Way, way back.

Now go back infinitely further.

Where did any of it come from?

The answer to that worldview, that article of faith, will color all further premises.

Atheism is a religion, it’s just anti-God.

Micro-evolution is merely projection of bigger more specious leaps of anti-Creationism. Many critters develop. But a caterpillar doesn’t evolve into a butterfly. Humans develop callouses if they work with their hands a lot. Starfish regenerate organs. Like beget like.

I recall hearing of a case of moth ‘microevolution’ based on fraudulent statistical analysis.

Too many are devout in their efforts to debunk God, even if they use antiscientific dishonesty to plot the points on the curve they like best.

Like beget like.

[buck jarret]

ID has nothing to recommend it. When you separate God & religion, you have bastardized religion, not science.

[PugetSoundSoldier]

OK, so you refuse to acknowledge even micro-evolution, within species. Then your calls for what’s scientific or not fall apart pretty quickly; any serious ID advocate will at least admit that micro-evolution exists and is a scientific fact.

And to date, I have yet to see any ID proponent provide ANY factual data regarding ID.

So we have at least a testable, provable theory in micro-evolution, and at least a reasonable expansion to macro-level.

ID has a conjecture that is neither falsifiable, nor has any facts to even form a basis for a hypothesis. Meaning it has zero basis in science.

[Soliton]

The simplest explanation that covers allteh facts is that something, some force, soem energy, some conscious entity, drove the Universe to be the way it is.

Until you can provide a theory as to how your designer originated, you haven't advanced the discussion. In your instance god is just another name for "fill in the blank". As to the Planck's constant (something Jesus forgot to mention)comment, please look up the anthropic principle.

[Sun]

What a waste of time studying evolution is, all over a THEORY.

[Caramelgal]

Ping for later.

[Guenevere]

Expelled is one of the finest, most profound movies I have seen in a long time.

It's more than a movie...

..It's a wake-up call!

[dread78645]

... I would love to see Mr. Dawkins give some concrete examples of Hitler's Catholicism as an adult.

No need for Dr. Dawkins to it, the Nazi photographers have it covered:

Hitler's Brown shirts (SA) attending and leaving church services.

Hitler leaves the Marine Church in Wilhelmshaven.

Hitler in front of the "Church of our Lady" --a Brown shirt rally, Nuremberg 1928.

Hitler at the same church, now sans Brown shirts.Nuremberg 1934

Hitler as "best man" at Hermann Goring wedding.

(Only Christians perform Christian weddings, and the Nazis were no exception)

Same with Christmas.

and

Christmas 1944 with Nazi officers and their girlfriends.

The Concordat between the Vatican and the Nazis.

(Note the Concordat legitimized Hitler and the Nazi government to the eyes of Catholicism, Christianity, and the world)

Chaplain with a machine gun unit.

(Note the insignia on the officers cap and Christian Cross around his neck)

Memorial for Fallen SS Soldiers, Poland 1939.

Catholic Bishops giving the Nazi salute in honor of Hitler.

Spanish Bishops giving the fascist salute.

Cardinal Michael Faulhaber marches between rows of SA men at a Nazi rally in Munich.

More Priests giving the Hitler salute, August 1933.

Welcome Celebration for Bishop Konrad Graf von Preysing in the Sportpalast, Berlin, 8 Sept. 1935

(Note the Chi Rho Cross, next to the Swastika)

Flags of the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), an amalgam of Lutheran, Catholics, and the NSDAP (Nazi Party).

(Note the flags with the Christian cross with the swastika centered on the cross)

SA storm troopers with placards of the "German Christians," Berlin, July 1933.
Hitler himself appeals to all Protestant Christians in a radio speech on the eve of the election to vote for the "German Christians."

Presidium of the "German Christians," Berlin, November 13, 1933
(After "The Church and the State" election)

National Bishop Friedrich Coch giving a Hitler greeting in Dresden, 10 December 1933

Gott Mit Uns (God With Us) Nazi Buckle

Hitler and mother with the Mutterkreuz (Mother's Cross)
(Note the longer lower branch, it's a Christian Cross, not the symmetrical Iron Cross used for military decorations)

Schlageter pin badge
In memory of Nazi Leo Schlageter, a martyr for the German cause. Executed by the French in Duesseldorf in May 1923.

Leo Schlageter memorial

Grave of Alois and Klara Hitler at St. Michael's), in Leonding, Austria

(Hitler visited the grave of his parents, shown center, on March 12, 1938, the day he followed his troops as they invaded Austria)

Detail of a frieze carved into the side of the pulpit at Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin.

(Note the Aryan Jesus next to the Nazi soldier and Aryan women and children)

Baptismal font with carving of Hitler holding an stormtrooper's cap.

German Lutheran Church Gazette honoring Hitler, April 1939.

Translation reads: "German Deacons' Gazette

MAGAZINE FOR MALE DEACONS
Organ of the German Deacons
One is your Master, Christ, but ye are all brethren

(Note the Crown & Cross in the upper right,the Lutheran Church still uses the symbol today)

"When you see a cross"
Page from the anti-Semitic German children's book, "Der Giftpilz" (The Poisonous Mushroom)

The text reads, "When you see a cross, then think of the horrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha..."

"Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ" 1913 by Adolf Hitler

It's really quite attractive, actually. Something only a Christian could invent.

Note that Jesus looks like a blond haired Aryan. Which is appropriate, Nazis did not consider Jesus a Jew)

"Mountain scene with wayside cross" 1925 by Adolf Hitler

Wow This just screams for a 'John 3:16' quote ...

---

Okey-doke, Oshkalaboomboom. I'm done for now.
Sooo what do you have, I mean, besides a BS book by faux-historian Richard Weikart or bogus quotes from François Genoud?

Or maybe you can jitterbug around with the same old lame excuse: "Hitler didn't act like a Christian, so he wasn't a Christian"?

[Hegewisch Dupa]

Hitler as "best man" at Hermann Goring wedding.

Most fascinating Best Man Toast ever....

[ninonitti]

Okey-doke, Oshkalaboomboom. I'm done for now

I'd love to trace the evolution of your memorabilia collection......it's not the result of intelligent design by chance?

[bvw]

The long-term Legacy of Reverend Wright's Bonfire of the Vanities includes not only pulling the carpet from under Hugo Chavez, driving the stake into the heart of Los Hermanos Castro, and the depopulation of "African Studies" Departments, the evisceration of Ron Paul Truthers, and the banishment of all things both Marxist and "Liberation Theological" from sane adult discourse ... but by the sounding of that Mighty Horn of his own vanity, the Reverend laid into rubble the walls of the fortified City of Darwin.

As Solomon said, once, "Even this will pass." There is a season for everything under the sun, and the season of destruction can appear to be awesomely brief once all the foundation timbers have been hollowed out, by years and years of the combined efforts of earnest termites.

[Soliton]

Do some research before you post next time! :-). I would never have thought of using pictures. How can anyone argue with that? Oh yeah, “He was just pretending to be a Christian”. He never mentioned Darwin, but he claimed to be a Catholic. Last I heard, if you say you are a Christian, you are a Christian, only God knows for sure.

[Dionysius]

Proving a point with Nazi propoganda photos or mediocre artworks by the pre-apostate Hitler? This is akin to proving the ultimate value of Scientology with “Battlefield Earth”.

[allmendream]

If Hitler was an atheist he kept it a secret. One of his first acts in power was to crack down on atheists.

“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out”. Adolf Hitler

“For their interests [the Church's] cannot fail to coincide with ours [the National Socialists] alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life”. Adolf Hitler

[Coyoteman]

ID is a science? NO. No more than evolution. Scientific METHOD should be applied to all observed phenomena and fraudulent alleged phenomena, such as Piltdown Man.

Evolution is a science, in spite of the anti-science religious propaganda you apparently are listening to.

It is a science because it follows the scientific method.

And you want the scientific method applied to Piltdown Man? You are half a century too late! A scientific test about 1953 showed that that find was assembled from fossils from different time periods.

ID should be taught in science classes? YES, as hypotheses, not fact, given equal time with evolution or none to either.

ID is pure religion, with the serial numbers filed off in an effort to get back into science classes. The modern version of ID was cooked up shortly after creation "science" was removed from classrooms by the U.S. Supreme Court--with the goal of sneaking religion right back into the classrooms.

But you say ID is an hypothesis? And it should be taught as an equal with the theory of evolution? What then would be the curricula if ID was in the classrooms?

How about giving us a brief outline, just maybe 10 or 12 lines, of what the course of study for ID might be.

[js1138]

You left one out.

[Fichori]

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither [can] a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

Matthew 7:15-20

I think that pretty well sums up weather Hitler was a true Cristian or was just masquerading as one.

[Baladas]

Where’s you picture of Hitler partaking of the Eucharist? Where’s your picture of him with a rosary? Where’s your picture of him with a Bible? With his hand on it?

Bfd, he posed by a cathedral. Catholic-bashing again? Any REAL Catholic would NEVER committ suicide, NEVER.