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To: Rockingham
When Christians become atheists, they tend to turn to alternative outlets for the innate human religious impulse: radical leftism; New Age Mysticism; extreme nationalism; and notoriously toxic ideologies, such as Nazism and communism. As the old warning goes: deserted altars do not long remain vacant -- they become occupied by demons.

Right, so we stop teaching science because kids might become Nazis if they learn too much and question their religious faith.

99 posted on 08/01/2005 12:24:40 PM PDT by Zeroisanumber
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To: Zeroisanumber
No, you stop teaching bad science: evolution as if it proves scientific materialism and disproves the existence of God.

As for Hitler, you mean a jibe, but there is more to it than you think. Hitler sincerely embraced extreme German nationalism and the leading New Age and scientific theories of the day: the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and the Ultima Thule society, and doctrines of scientific racism, eugenics, and evolution -- with much of it imported from the US and Britain.

A vulgar belief in evolution was a large part of what fostered and sustained Hitler and the Nazis. Take a look at the War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black, gives an account of its role.

Here is a useful review by Johannes L. Jacobse:

In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black exhaustively chronicles the rise of the American eugenics movement. Eugenics ("good birth" in Greek) is considered crackpot science today, but at one time it captured the hearts and minds of America's leading thinkers, including social scientists, educators, judges, philanthropists, and clergy.

America in the late 1800s and early 1900s was particularly susceptible to eugenic ideology, writes Black. The divisions between people were marked not by economic class but by race, which compelled social analysts to think in group terms. Crime and poverty were considered ethnic - and in some cases generational - phenomena, rather than individual incidents. The resistance to quick assimilation demonstrated by the eighteen million immigrants between 1890 and 1920 threatened social cohesion. Regional trends like the absorption of Mexicans after the Mexican-American war, the mass influx of Chinese laborers, and the numbers of emancipated slaves affirmed the fear that America was tearing itself apart.

The father of the modern eugenics movement, England's Francis J. Galton, gave the pseudo-science its first taste of scientific credibility. Intoxicated by the ideas of Charles Darwin, the rediscovered genetic theories of Gregor Mendel, and the secularized philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Galton concluded that assembling data about social heredity could predict which families and ethnic groups would produce socially desirable offspring.

Eugenics never found widespread acceptance in England, but in America it was a different story. The American movement found a leader in Charles Davenport, a biologist with a flair for organization, fundraising, and promotion. Drawing upon Galton's work and funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Davenport opened the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1904.

Davenport wasted no time. In short order, a battalion of social workers fanned into the countryside to chart the characteristics of people they considered undesirable (blacks, poor, infirm, criminals, alcoholics, etc.). Thousands of people were forcibly sterilized (6,000 between 1907 and 1927; 36,000 by 1940). Children were taken from their families. Criminals were castrated.

Some states passed legislation supporting sterilization, and the nation soon found itself considering a federal policy of forced sterilization. The eugenics movement found its poster child in Carrie Buck, the daughter of a prostitute. After giving birth to an illegitimate child, Carrie was forcibly institutionalized and declared "feebleminded by the laws of heredity."

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the chief jurist hearing the case. Carrie lost 8-1. Writing for the majority, Holmes arrogantly declared:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if we could not call upon those who sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices… compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… three generations of imbeciles is enough.

It was music to the eugenicists' ears.

Common people were more clear-headed. The arbitrary decisions about what constituted social desirability struck many Americans not only as capricious but as evil. The movement was resisted, critiqued, and mocked at every turn, and justifiably so. It was challenged in the courts and editorial pages. Support for it finally began to wane.

In Germany, the opposite happened. The American ideas were enthusiastically embraced by German thinkers, resulting in the murder of 250,000 disabled Germans between 1935 and 1945 alone. Black believes that the inspiration for Hitler's Final Solution drew more from the ideas of American eugenicists than from Hitler's nationalism. Here the real evil that eugenic ideas could unleash was revealed to anyone willing to look.

However War Against the Weak displays one glaring inconsistency. Early on Black praises Planned Parenthood, but Planned Parenthood preserves the eugenic ideal more visibly than any other American organization today. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the patron saint of the contemporary abortion movement, was an ardent and unrepentant eugenicist. Black roundly criticizes her, but why he finds it necessary to throw this bone to Planned Parenthood is unclear.

Black concludes his impressive work with an ominous warning:

After Hitler eugenics did not disappear. It renamed itself. What has thrived loudly for decades quietly took postwar refuge under the labels human genetics and genetic counseling.

Genetic data banks, designer babies, and plans for massive social engineering projects are run by a new league of eugenicists that threaten the weak on a scale about which early eugenicists could only dream. Only one precept can prevent a slide into this dark age of war against the weak, cautions Black: "Nothing should be done to exclude, infringe, repress, or harm a person because of his genetic makeup." A simpler commandment will do: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/black.html

Here is the website for the book:
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/articles.php
294 posted on 08/01/2005 3:51:11 PM PDT by Rockingham
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