In this compelling and painstakingly researched work of intellectual history, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially those pertaining to the sacredness of human life. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary "fitness" (especially in terms of intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis. He convincingly makes the disturbing argument that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles rather than nihilistic ones. From Darwin to Hitler is a provocative yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.
Uh, the terrorists are using "God" as their reason for trying to wipe us off the face of the earth. Islamists are pushing ID into American and Muslim schools.
You apparently have never met an argument from adverse consequences you didn't like.
Coulter's "reasoning" is fallacious, and so is the reasoning you've quoted above.On this very thread, which I (perhaps mistakenly) assume you've been reading, it's been pointed out that all of the terms I've bolded in the paragraph above also took place before 1859!
Kindly explain (or find us a book blurb explaining), how Darwin's theory caused events that took place before it was expounded.
Feel free to try to "explain" her comments about the "first genocide in recorded history" occurring after "Darwinism" was on the rise. We'll wait. Because from here, it looks like a blatant falsehood that only a complete idiot, totally ignorant of not only history in general but the Old Testament in particular, could make.
But why don't you top fantasizing about what Coulter might say, and defend your OWN worship of this kind of horse crap? You've read Coulter's nonsense, and you've read several cogent rebuttals to it. Are you unable to make up your own mind based on the facts, or are you just sitting there thinking, "I'm unable to evaluate anything for myself, I'll just sit here and mindlessly presume that Coulter must know what she's talking about so I'll cling worshipfully to whatever she said no matter what kinds of refutations have been presented against it, and I'll fantasize about how she probably could justify her comments if only she would descent from Heaven and bestow her infallibile wisdom upon us." I have a bit of advice: Learn to think for yourself.
I also await you to break your silence on the fact that the KKK and other groups explicitly rested their actions firmly on religious grounds, and explicitly *attacked* evolutionists. If you and Coulter can play guilt-by-association by mentioning that Marx liked Darwin, I'll be glad to return the favor and point out that you're on the same side as the KKK with regards to being pro-Christian and anti-evolution. That means exactly as much as the Hitler/Marx/Darwin twaddle, so tell me again how much stock you put into such stuff.
But that being said, there is an excellent book out there by Richard Wiekart which supports Coulters view of Hitler and the Nazis.
Only if you consider "excellent" fallacious reasoning, ad hominems, and "guild by association" slurs.
It's one thing to note that "Darwinism" has been misused and abused -- but name me one ideology that hasn't been.
It's quite another to cluelessly argue that because it has been misused, it must be wrong, like most of the idiots who try to make the "Hitler and Darwin" association using the most tenuous connections and stretched arguments.
Evolutionary biology merely describes what happens when nature operates without intervention. It's no more a "justification" for genocide than the science of hydrology (which deals with floods, among other things) is an excuse for purposely drowning people because floods occur naturally, or epidemiology is a justification for biological warfare because epidemics happen in nature.
Science describe how things happen when nature is left to take its course -- only a moron would argue that this is how things *should* be or that humans are bound to "assist" nature in killing off the weak and drowning people who live in the paths of flash floods and infecting people who are at risk of pathogens.
Nor is there any justification in evolutionary biology for the notion of "lower races" -- according to genetics we are all "equally evolved", since we have all been subjected to an equal timespan of natural selection since our last common ancestor.
Anyone who tries to use evolutionary biology as "justification" for any kind of eugenics is, frankly, an idiot, and so are the people who attempt to make such a link.
If you or Coulter or Wiekart want to go after anyone stupid enough to misuse biology in this way, I'll be glad to cheer you on. If you want to lobby for including in schools short presentations which instruct students that to misuse biology in an attempt to justify racism or eugenics or genocide is to be evil and stupid to boot, I'll be right behind you.
But to try to slur evolutionary biology, or to try to advocate that it should be hidden under a rug, or that its science is somehow incorrect, just because there are a few maniacs around who will grasp for any thin shred of excuse to "justify" the evils they would go ahead and have done anyway for their own sick purposes, is frankly one of the most disgusting displays of cynical propaganda I've ever seen, on par with Michael Moore's demagoguery, and you and Coulter and Wiekart should be denounced as the dishonest rabble-rousers that you are who are more interested in attacking science education than you are in any feigned concern about the roots of genocide, because if you were actually concerned about the causes of genocide you'd be equally vocal about the way that belief in God itself has been endlessly perverted by Hitler, the KKK, Islamofacists, Christian Identity, the terrorists in Ireland, the Inquisition, the British monarchs who (at various times) burned Catholics and Protestants, etc. etc. etc. Oddly enough, though, I never hear you denouncing religion in general for these kinds of abuses the way you denounce "evolution" for the few times *it* has been allegedly invoked and misused as an excuse by people who would have found excuses for their bigotries and hatreds even without Darwin, which isn't the case for many religious persecutions that were fueled *purely* by religious disputes.
I hope you are not a Southern Baptist ...