ADL Blasts Christian Supremacist TV Special & Book Blaming Darwin For Hitler

The Anti-Defamation League ^ | August 22, 2006 | The Anti-Defamation League

[js1138]

ADL Blasts Christian Supremacist TV Special & Book Blaming Darwin For Hitler

New York, NY, August 22, 2006 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today blasted a television documentary produced by Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries that attempts to link Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to Adolf Hitler and the atrocities of the Holocaust. ADL also denounced Coral Ridge Ministries for misleading Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute for the NIH, and wrongfully using him as part of its twisted documentary, "Darwin's Deadly Legacy."

After being contacted by the ADL about his name being used to promote Kennedy's project, Dr. Collins said he is "absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy's program utterly misguided and inflammatory," he told ADL.

ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement:"This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

"It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of 'Christian Supremacists' who seek to "reclaim America for Christ" and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law."

The documentary is scheduled to air this weekend along with the publication of an accompanying book "Evolution's Fatal Fruit: How Darwin's Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions."

A Coral Ridge Ministries press release promoting the documentary says the program "features 14 scholars, scientists, and authors who outline the grim consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution and show how his theory fueled Hitler's ovens."

[Junior]

It's a bit like that "niggardly" flap a few years back; the government school-educated illiterati really showed their stripes during that row, too. Methinks that is what we are experiencing here. This fellow has been inculcated that "race" refers only to the arbitrary categories imposed by society upon its members never realizing (because it was never taught them) that "race" has meant different things at different times in history, and that, during Darwin's day, it was not restricted to human beings.

For example:

We see an astonishing improvement in many florists' flowers, when the flowers of the present day are compared with drawings made only twenty or thirty years ago. When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the "rogues," as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard. With animals this kind of selection is, in fact, likewise followed; for hardly any one is so careless as to breed from his worst animals.

[Zionist Conspirator]

My antagonism is for the religious nutcases like Jim Jones and his kool aid drinking followers, the nutcases in the vatican who made galileo renounce his now proven to be true theories, the psychos of the spanish inquisition and the nuts who burned "heretics" at the stake

First, Jim Jones was an atheist who used a fundamentalist preaching style to get his ideological message across (hmm . . . maybe that explains Al Sharpton . . . )

Second, how dare you attack the Catholic Church or anyone else under the sun other than redneck American Protestants? Everyone knows that it's all right for anyone else in the world to be a "fundie," to believe in "gxds" and spirits, in mythic origin stories, etc. (Next thing you'll be attacking the Australian aborigines! Don't you know they're better than the rest of us???) Only "rednecks" are to be attacked and ridiculed! I think there's a law about that somewhere . . .

AND THE MORONS WHO ARE WILLING TO DO ANYTHING INCLUDING TO BASH EVOLUTION TO THE POINT WHERE THEY WANT TO LINK DARWIN TO HITLER.

Since I am a Theonomic positivist, I don't try to discredit Darwin by linking him to Hitler because I don't believe that there is any "self-evident" objective moral standard whatsoever outside of G-d's "arbitrary" decrees. If I were to try to appeal to your groundless hang-ups about genocide (groundless because they are not based on your acceptance of "arbitrary" Divine decree) I would betray my Theonomic positivist position.

If there is not G-d, then everything is permitted . . . not just sexual sins, but everything. No objective moral standard can exist in an ultimately meaningless world despite the shallowness of our lamentable Hellenistic heritage.

[Zionist Conspirator]

One of the great lies of the age. Hitler was a *Creationist.* He believed that Man, specifically Aryan man, had been plopped fully formed and perfect onto Earth by Providence.

[sarcasm] Why, not only that, he was the biggest Bible-thumper in history! He put up monuments to `Aseret HaDibberot everywhere! He made kids read Genesis (in the original Hebrew!) in biology class! He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem!

And he forced all Germans to celebrate the anti-Semitic holiday of Purim! Monster!

DANG those chr*stians!!! [/sarcasm]

[tjd1454]

"I know you don't like his conclusion. The problem is, his facts are correct."

The "fact," it seems to me, is that Hitler's Secret Conversations is accepted as a primary source in numerous publications about Hitler (Columbia Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica, etc.). Cp this quote from a Time magazine review of books about Hitler:

"Farrar, Straus & Giroux has reissued Hitler's Secret Conversations ($19), the Führer's wartime table talk (from Volkswagens to the Virgin Birth) that all Hitler biographers have acknowledged as an invaluable source."

[Zionist Conspirator]

Or blaming the holocaust on biologists who accept and work with the theory of evolution. That's the point of the "Hitler was a Darwinist" claptrap, isn't it?

I myself don't try to discredit Darwin by blaming him for Hitler (mach shemo!) because the whole point of my argument is that in the absence of G-d there is nothing objectively morally wrong with genocide or selective breeding or hatred or mass murder or anything else. People who try to appeal to the non-theistically-based moral hang-ups of atheists are merely reinforcing the idea that some things are "obviously wrong" and "we don't need G-d" to tell us so.

Ain't I a consistent little thang???

[Zionist Conspirator]

More accurately: if you can't deny the historical impact of Darwinian evolution on the natural world, you attack the guy that discovered it by fraudulently trying to link a scientific principle with a reprehensible religious/political ideology.

If there is not G-d, nothing is (or can be) objectively reprehensible.

[DManA]

Talk about strawmen. Where does Kennedy advocating FORCING anything on anyone?

[Zionist Conspirator]

Talk about strawmen. Where does Kennedy advocating FORCING anything on anyone?

You know, everyone believes that reality "forces" certain things on everyone. People who believe in G-d (ar at least in statutory religion, like Judaism/Noachism and [to a lesser degree] Catholicism) insist that because we were created by G-d we are obliged to acknowledge Him whether we choose to or not. Evolutionists think this is "fascism." However, evolutionists believe that their non-Theistic reality imposes the obligation to believe in evolution simply because reality is what it is. To be forced to acknowledge truth, apparently, isn't oppression. It's just that we disagree with what the "truth" is. I have yet to hear of an evolutionist who doesn't care whether or not we believe the "truth" or not.

To the Monotheist, G-d created us without our consent. To the evolutionist, natural processes created us without our consent. Both agree that our consent is not necessary in order for us to be obgligated to acknowledge "the truth."

[orionblamblam]

> If there is not G-d, nothing is (or can be) objectively reprehensible.


I'm sure that's true if you are sociopath.

[js1138]

For example:

We see an astonishing improvement in many florists' flowers, when the flowers of the present day are compared with drawings made only twenty or thirty years ago. When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the "rogues," as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard. With animals this kind of selection is, in fact, likewise followed; for hardly any one is so careless as to breed from his worst animals.

Proof that the Nazis were not Darwinian. They killed the best stock and bred the scum.

[orionblamblam]

I'm missing your point.

[atlaw]

Not sure what your post has to do with mine. But as for your proposition that "in the absence of G-d there is nothing objectively morally wrong with genocide or selective breeding or hatred or mass murder or anything else," there is an unfortunate inverse.

"God" has historically been provided with a great many self-serving and arbitrary attributes, and has taken on many forms. He is a handy slate on which to write the conventions of morality. And consequently, "in the [presence] of God there is nothing objectively morally wrong with genocide or selective breeding or hatred or mass murder or anything else," so long as the person committing these morally reprehensible acts proclaims them to be the "will" of his God.

Which leaves us in a peculiar situation. If God is the source of morality, by what measure do we conclude that acts committed in the name of "God" are morally reprehensible?

[Zionist Conspirator]

> If there is not G-d, nothing is (or can be) objectively reprehensible.

I'm sure that's true if you are sociopath.

Forgive me, I forgot that science discovered objective morality in 1838. They also discovered that with G-d out of hte picture sexual morality crumbles into silly outdated social taboos but that everything else remains intact. In fact, the non-existence of G-d now makes it imperative to achieve social justice!

Except I think some people think it makes it imperative to practice free enterprise.

PS: Thanks for admitting that you get to impose your morality on the world simply because you don't believe in G-d.

Now tell me again about what those awful "chr*stians" did to those poor widdwe Canaanite kids?

[Zionist Conspirator]

I'm missing your point.

That is obvious.

[FreedomProtector]

Whether or not Darwin used race as a generic term applicable to all living things/merely arbitrary categories, or race is restricted to categories of just human beings is irrelevent to demonstation that Hitler's philosophy which led to the Holocaust was based Darwin's naturalistic evolution.

Darwin's idea that evolution means the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life did indeed eventually led to Nazism and the Jewish holocaust - even if Darwin himself would have been appalled at the thought.


Hilter was a believer in evolution:

Sir Arthur Keith was a British anthropologist, an atheistic evolutionist and an anti-Nazi, but he drew this chilling conclusion:

‘The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.’

Reference
Keith, A., Evolution and Ethics, Putnam, NY, USA, p. 230, 1947.


Hitler used Evolutionary Theory to Justify the Holocaust

In Mein Kampf, Hitler used the German word for evolution (Entwicklung) many times, citing "lower human types." He criticized the Jews for bringing "Negroes into the Rhineland" with the aim of "ruining the white race by the necessarily resulting ization." He spoke of "Monstrosities halfway between man and ape" and lamented the fact of Christians going to "Central Africa" to set up "Negro missions," resulting in the turning of "healthy . . . human beings into a rotten brood of s." In his chapter entitled "Nation and Race," he said, "The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable." A few pages later, he said, "Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

"From the ‘Preservation of favored races in the struggle for life' it was a short step to the preservation of favored individuals, classes or nations - and from their preservation to their glorification . . . Thus, it has become a portmunteau of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and dictatorship, of the cults of the hero, the superman, and the master race . . . recent expressions of this philosophy, such as Mein Kampf are, unhappily, too familiar to require exposition here." - Gertrude Himmelfarb, Social Darwinism in American Thought


Without the philisophical ideas that man is nothing more than an intellectual animal, he is not distinst from animals in any way, AND man is so intelligent and evolved so that he should direct his future evolution Hitler would have never happened in history as we know it.

These ideas stand in antithesis to the philisophical ideas that man is created, man is created special, unique from animals, in the image of God, and the purpose in life is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

[js1138]

D. James Kennedy, however, is not a Zionist Fundamentalist...

Perhaps not, but he is promoting a fraudulent translation of dubious documents that are equivalent to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

[balrog666]

Kennedy-is-a-monster placemarker.

[RegulatorCountry]

"Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

Nazis-practicing-social-Darwinism placemarker

[js1138]

So if Hitler was such a good Darwinian, why did he kill the brightest, most talented and productive members of his society and promote the breeding of the Nordics, who, compared to the Jews were retarded? That's not very scientific.

And why are his racial ideas indistinguishable from centuries of German Lutheran antisemitism?

If he was being scientific rather than responding to existing religious bigotry, why pick on a religious group? Why not administer IQ tests and gas the less talented?

[Mrs. Don-o]

I'm told vegetarianism had an influence on Nazi thinking.