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.]
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein (attributed).
I agree, there is no scientific basis to make that claim. That's a question for the faith and value system that we choose to hold. I'm in total agreement that faith serves an important purpose in realms where the facts only leave us with a shade of gray.
Once one reaches the point of application, however, the moral implications of the science come to the fore: one must confront the difference between "can" and "should."
Absolutely. We could develop and detonate neutron bombs, but that wouldn't make it a good idea to do so. The only point that I'm making is, that if (God forbid) nuclear terrorists were to do such a thing, I wouldn't blame nuclear physics, or proclaim nuclear physics to be faulty science on that ground; I would blame the people who perpetrated the event.
I agree that science did open a Pandora's Box of ideas over the last couple centuries, there's no denying that. Science is just a tool, though; how people use the tool is up to them. (Which is exactly why we should do everything in our power to keep nations like Iran and North Korea from developing these tools to their fully destructive extent...)
Everyone be nice.
= = = =
IF as such so called "scientific" folks contend in favor of evolution . . . that man is nothing more than a rat, pigeon, radish or rock,
then
there's no inherent reason to be nice or any other lofty value or behavioral standard. I may as well stuff a Jihadi grenade in a dark place as well as give flowers, food, scorpions . . . plague . . .
"When did Darwin claim that 'Aryans' were superior to 'Semites'?"
I never said he did. You're twisting my words. Chamberlain and Gobineau were Aryan supremacists (well, Teutonic supremacists, more precisely). Hitler was a big fan of Gobineau, and more stridently, Chamberlain. In his later life, Chamberlain became a confirmed Nazi and was hailed as one of the "philosophical fathers" of the Nazi movement.
I don't know if Hitler even read Darwin or cared much about him. And I think it's a stretch to equate Darwin's THEORY of evolution with anything that Hitler believed.
}:-)4
"Though it makes the same point: our government is expected to be neutral regarding matters of conscience and belief. And yes, this also requires that agnosticism and atheism be treated just like any other religious belief: receiving neither preferential treatment nor special burden."
Where does the Constitution say the govt. is to be neutral regarding such matters? Where are atheism or agnosticism granted any rights? Nowhere. It merely says that Congress may not make any law regarding establishment of religion, which included any law disestablishing the then-existing established churches in several states. It also forbids Congress from abridging the free exercise of religion--a fact which the professional atheists on these threads always chose to ignore.
"Lies are lies, and they have real world consequences, whether they are propagated by Charles Darwin or Martin Luther."
What lies did Charles Darwin propigate?
I too would like to know the answer to that.
It's a very serious allegation, and one that EternalVigilance would never have thought about making without evidence.
So let's have it, EV. What lies did Charles Darwin propigate?
You're dancing, FRiend. Your term "adequate" implies that some sort of optimization is taking place -- you're saying that there is a threshold below which reproductive success becomes far less likely. You're essentially saying that evolution is a statistical process ... fine. But because evolution also optimizes, "fitness" is still in the picture, in the sense that certain traits improve the probability of successful reproduction.
How?
Evolutionary changes are often described in terms of "improvements" which better adapt offspring to a given environment. Thus, your term "adequate" might be replaced by the more commonly used, "better adapted to the environment, and thus more likely to survive to pass on one's genes."
I've seen racial theories along the following lines: that humans evolved as they spread out of Africa; and that they were evolved higher intelligence in response to challenging environments that called for, say, greater cooperation or planning abilities. As a result, some have said that the "darker races," being less evolved, were inferior to the more intelligent races.
And thus your "How" has beed addressed.
Comparing the Religious Right to the Taliban is even stupider than making a link between Darwin and Hitler. Maybe evolutionists should also be considered a religion since their arguement here seems more emotional than logical.
That's about as bright as saying you don't need to be an "expert" to understand quantum mechanics or thermodynamics. I suppose you've actually read, say, Darwin or Haldane or maybe even Mark Ridley or Douglas Futuyma's textbooks on Evolution before you used your 'common sense' to dismiss an entire field of biology?
"Dr." Kennedy's Ph.D. isn't in the sciences. He's a theologian.
Why is it the fundy/Creationists insist on flashing their (generally irrelevant) degrees around, does it *really* impress the gullible that much? You don't generally see scientists bragging 'Doctor Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.'
--R. 'who went a lot further than high school'
His untruths were fundamental, and yes, racist at their core.
Charles Darwin
"In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection."
He thought he was smarter than God:
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."
The very title of the The Origin of Species is:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
Placemarker.
Biology proves evolution?? When and where? I could do what you just did and say that Mathematics disproves evolution. Ask Hoyle or any other mathematician.
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