No, because they would have done the same things with or without any findings of science to use as a cheap excuse for their policies.
Let's turn that around so you can see how slimy and pointless a tactic that is: You are not embarassed by the behavior of such consistent Christians as the KKK and the Inquisition?
Or even Hitler? People are so desperate to try to attack science by straining to blame it for Hitler and more, as if that somehow makes the science not true -- this twaddle comes up so often I can deal with your current scummy attempt by just quoting from prior posts where I had to deal with other people who think "guilt-by-association" is some kind of mature way to deal with something they don't want to think about:
Hitler didn't invent Darwinism, he just used it as an excuse to "clense" the races.And:Gee, really? Then why do his private notes show that he based his idea of inferior races on the Bible? Hitler's own handwritten notes, drawing an outline of his philosophy:
Hitler divided his study into five sections:
1. The BibleUnder the first section, "The Bible -- Monumental History of Mankind", he lists these topics (among others): "2 human types-- Workers and drones-- Builders and destroyers", "Race Law", "First people's history (based on) the race law-- Eternal course of History".
2. The Aryan
3. His Works
4. The Jew
5. His WorkHitler was actually privately basing his racial view of mankind on *Biblical* foundations.
Here's a Nazi propaganda paper -- no mention of evolution or Darwin, but references to Christ in regards to "driving the devil from the lands":
The headline reads, "Declaration of the Higher Clergy/So spoke Jesus Christ". The caption under the cartoon of the marching Hitler Youth reads, "We youth step happily forward facing the sun... With our faith we drive the devil from the land."
He just thought that "natural selection" thing needed a little boost I guess.
No, Hitler thought God needed a little boost:
"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.."While we're on the subject, did the Ku Klux Klan subscribe to Darwin when they were trying to keep the "mongrel races" in "their place" and preventing them from "polluting" the white race through intermarriage, or were they a bunch of God-fearing Christians? Let's check, shall we?
-- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"In 1916, the oath for joining the KKK included the following questions: "Each of the following questions must be answered by (each of) you with an emphatic "yes": [...] Fourth. Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion? [...] Eighth. Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?" Source: FBI internal document, "The Ku Klux Klan, Section 1, 1865-1944 .
And the Christian foundation of the KKK is hardly limited to 1916, in 1953 they declared that the only membership requirement was to "believe in God and the United States" (source), and even today they're still a proudly bible-thumping group (see also here).
Here's another goody from that same FBI document:
In 1922, Evans gave Stephenson the job of organizing the Klan in Indiana. Stephenson hired full-time organizers and found Indiana a fertile field for the Klan's traditional program directed against Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and foreigners, which he extended to include communists, bootleggers, pacifists, evolutionists, and all persons the Klan considered immoral.Let's see... The KKK versus the "evolutionists"... Okay, I know which side the angels are on in *that* face-off...Hey, mc5cents, if evolution is the root of all evil, how do you explain the Christians in the KKK despising the evolutionists instead of being inspired by them?
Meanwhile: The KKK is against the evolutionists, Ann Coulter is against the evolutionists -- so which side does that put her on?
Oh, and speaking of Coulter -- she cluelessly claims that "the first genocide in recorded history" occurred after "Darwinism gained currency" (hey, it also happened after "the New testament became popular, is she asserting cause-and-effect *there* too?), but clearly the woman's an idiot. She laughably tries to say that "the first genocide in recorded history" occurred sometime after 1859 (when Darwin published his book on evolution), but anyone with even a smidgen of knowledge (which leaves out Coulter, apparently) knows that there have been genocides for thousands of years, including several detailed in the Bible, countless throughout Asia and Africa, and notably the genocide of the aborigines in Tasmania, committed against the "savages" by good Christians quoting scriptural "justification", which ironically a number of anti-evolutionists have tried to blame on "Darwinism", despite the fact that it happened in *1847*, more than a decade BEFORE Darwin had published his first work on evolution...
So just how stupid *is* Ann Coulter, that she can say the "first genocide in recorded history" happened after 1859? The word "moron" seems woefully inadequate. And she's not very honest either.
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. [...] 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.
You do not see the connections between their thoughts and their actions?
I see connections between Hitler's rabid hatred of Jews and his actions. I see connections between Stalin's brutality and his actions. I see connections between Mao's lust for power and his actions. I don't see that a study of how species are shaped by nature suddenly turns anyone into a monster. These men would have been monsters in any age, whether Darwin had written books on biology or not. Plenty of racists through the ages have "justified" their innate racism by quoting scripture, too, but scripture didn't make them racists, it was just one of the things they used to try rationalize their behavior.
You wish to hallow the thought behind the actions, while disavowing the consequences?
What are you babbling about here? Nothing in evolutionary biology contains anything about murder or genocide or totalitarianism.