I'd say that the crazy eugenicist "scientific" ideology that became ascendant in the late 1800s is directly responsible for the holocaust. One could also name materialist evolution as the basis for much of the murderous activiy of the communists. Oh no, the hands of materialist "science" are not clean at all. Not by a long shot.
Now how many massacres were initiated by differences in Scientific ideology?
I'd say that the crazy eugenicist "scientific" ideology that became ascendant in the late 1800s is directly responsible for the holocaust. One could also name materialist evolution as the basis for much of the murderous activiy of the communists. Oh no, the hands of materialist "science" are not clean at all. Not by a long shot.
I only made an observation about the fervor with which some FReepers react to statements on this subject, especially if those statements are pro-Creation and/or anti-evolution.
Were you trying to prove my point?
"Now how many massacres were initiated by differences in Scientific ideology?"
I don't know, but the communists, who are basically atheistic, killed many millions of innocent men, women and children over a relatively short span of time... more than religious zealots have over the course of known human history.
Now how many massacres were initiated by differences in Scientific ideology?
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Probably about 50 million in the 20th century alone.
Well, there was the Suez Neutrino Conflict of '72, and of course the Top/Truth Quark Naming Schism which resulted in much bloodshed.
And of course, the Dark Matter Wars smolder even today among the Physics Tribes of Borneo.
Now how many massacres were initiated by differences in Scientific ideology? How many people were burnt at the stake for disagreeing about Science? How many wars were started over Scientific interpretation?
About 100 million were slaughtered in the century dominated by Darwinism. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin declined to save himself more controversy. And the wacky race based eugenic theories of the Nazis were tied to some of the evolutionary ideas espoused in Darwin's book, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE .
Of all the forerunners of Hitler in Germany—Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Bernhardi and others—the most significant was certainly Ernst Haeckel, the atheistic founder of the Monist League and the most vigorous promoter of both biological Darwinism and social Darwinism in continental Europe in the late-nineteenth and early wentieth centuries.
Almost any 19th or even mid-20th century book on human evolution carries illustrations showing the progression: monkey, ape, Hottentot (or African Negro, Australian Aborigine, Tasmanian, etc.) and white European. Few of the early evolutionists were free of such arrogance, not even the politically liberal Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.
"The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."—*Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, p. 318.
"Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."—*Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 127.