Posted on 08/28/2006 6:31:13 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
The Holocaust wasn't Hitler's fault. Darwin made him do it. Complicit as well are any who buy into the scientific theory that modern man evolved from lower animal forms.
That's the latest lunacy from one of our more fanatical right-wing American Christian television outfits, the Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Coral Ridge espouses that America is not a free-religion nation, but a Christian one. It argues there should be no separation of church and state.
Thus it's America's Taliban, America's Shiite theocracy.
It certainly has a propensity for explaining or excusing Hitler. A few years ago it brought in a conference speaker to argue that American abortion was a more horrible atrocity than the Holocaust.
One year it disinvited Cal Thomas as a conference speaker after Brother Cal got too liberal. You're thinking I must be kidding. But I kid you not. Brother Cal had displayed the utter audacity to co-author a book contending that American Christian conservatives ought to worry a little more about spreading the gospel from the bottom of the culture up rather than from the top of politics down.
Now this: Coral Ridge is airing a couple of cable installments of a "documentary," called "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," that seek to make a case that, without Darwin, there could have been no Hitler.
Authoritative sources for the program include no less than columnist Ann Coulter, noted scientist, who says she is outraged that she didn't get instructed in Darwin's effective creation of Hitler when she was in school. She says she has since come to understand that Hitler was merely a Darwinist trying, by extermination of a group of people he considered inferior because of their religion and heritage, to "hurry along" the natural survival of the Aryan fittest.
Also quoted is Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Project, who tells the Anti-Defamation League that his comments were used out of context and that he is "absolutely appalled" by the "utterly misguided and inflammatory" premise of Coral Ridge's report.
The documentary's theme is really quite simple: Darwin propounded the theory of evolution. Hitler came along and believed the theory. Hitler killed Jews. So, blame Darwin for the Holocaust. Blame, too, all others who agree with or advance Darwin's theory. Get back to God and Adam and Eve and all will be right again with the world.
"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said Dr. D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries. "The legacy of Charles Darwin is millions of deaths."
Obviously, the theme is breath-taking nonsense. You can't equate academic theory with murderous practice. You can't equate a thinker and a madman, or science and crime.
And you can't ever blame one man for another's actions. That once was a proud conservative precept. In a different context, you'll no doubt find Coral Ridge fervently preaching personal responsibility. Except, apparently, for Adolf Hitler, to whom these religious kooks issue a pass. Ol' Adolf, it seems, just fell in with a bad crowd.
By Coral Ridge's premise, Mohammed is to blame for Osama bin Laden. Actually, Coral Ridge might not argue with that. So how about this: The pope is to blame for the IRA. And Jesus is to blame for Mel Gibson, not to mention Coral Ridge Ministries.
[Omitted some author detail and contact info.]
I don't think so. When was the last time that Coral Ridge Ministries lined up burqa clad women and shot them because the women didn't live up to Coral Ridge's interpretation of Christianity?
No, no, no. It's way to soon for that. First, you paint the enemy to be a thing worthy of killing, in this case by claiming that they created Hitler.
I admire your patience.
Regards,
Thanks, but it's just about exhausted here anyway :)
"In the world of political debate, which exists outside of a science lab I might add, we have this thing called hyperbole. It's an interesting concept."
In the scientific world, hyperbole is sometimes called good old-fashioned lying. That's an interesting concept as well.
OK, how about this? Nazism was based on the concept of a master race and the belief that culture degenerates when distict races intermix. It was dependent on the acceptance that the Aryan race, as decending from the Nordic warrior peoples, was the personification of all that was pure and holy among the races. The purity of the race was paramount, and the idea that it or another race might evolve into something better or higher was discounted. I don't think Darwin ever went down that road. And I doubt that Hitler would sign on to Darwin's ideas that he evolved from a lower species or that intermixing might produce a stronger, more survivable hybrid. After all, purity of the race was paramount, protection of the culture was everything. In the end Nazism is more dependent on the works of men like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain and Frederich Nietzsche, men who based none of their writings on Darwin, than on Darwin himself. Had Darwin never existed, Hitler most likely still would have, all other things being equal. But for Kennedy it's not about fact or science. It's easier to slander Darwin by linking him to Hitler than it is to provide evidence of ID that refutes his findings. It's completely understandable why he took this route instead.
"These men aren't conservatives.'
Neither, we find, are the gang in Washington, DC. Much like the elusive Yankee, finding an American conservative has become as bewildering as the road direction "go down the road a piece and turn left where the old school house used to be."
The splintering of the right continues apace. Socons, theocons, neocons, paleocons...
Liberals have a different problem. Renaming themselves progressives doesn't distance them from their politics. The L word has been anathema for twenty years and the only variance is left, far left and Michael Moore's your daddy.
Hitler was an embodiment of bad science and bad theology who found a willing audience to practice both.
Ah. I see that you're one of those folks who assumes that labels always mean what the common meanings of the words imply.
I assume that only pressing business has kept you from moving to the perfect nation, the Republic that is run for the benefit of the People. When you're able to go, give my regards to Pyongyang.
"It's easier to slander Darwin by linking him to Hitler..."
Excellent analysis.
There is a difference between "evolved from 'lower' animal forms" and the assertion that man differs from the apes only in degree and interjects in ascending order the races of man between chimp and the "higher" forms of humanity, with many different clans contesting for that perch.
You're hardly in a position to lecture others on a responsibility that you have explicitly abdicated.
Your method for interpreting the intentions of others is...interesting, at least. LOL.
That's good enough for me and sounds like he retracted what most people took for the statement's meaning...my own feeling is that you should let it go now after those two comments he made, otherwise, you begin to look to be about as intolerant as you claim he is.
Just my opinion...it cost nothing and you can take it for what its worth.
When in Rome I don't tell lies.
Church of Scotland, actually. The auld kirk.
--R.
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