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.]
If not, why make the threat? Words mean things. Shall we assume that your words are meaningless? Shall we ignore them?
"The moral arguments against the ideas of Social Darwinism must be made in spite of the observations, not because of them."
It's interesting, just how many moral equivocations have been made on this thread, in purported defense of amoral science.
It's inane because it's identical to the argument that guns cause murders.
If you are a conservative, which I seriously doubt, you believe people are responsible for their behavior. You do not allow people to blame others for their actions.
Saying that bad people have used ideas in support or thir bad behavior is inane. there is no widespread idea, secular or religious, that has not been used in support of bad behavior.
Do you believe that the only rights one has are those granted by the Constitution?
Oh, I know that some Christians believe in evolution.
I also know that the puppet masters so eager to use evoltion to trash Christianity no longer believe in it.
But the Christians who believe in evolution are not my main concern.
It's the Priesthood of the Religion of Science who are forcing their theology so wholesale on relatively defenseless children that I so oppose.
Eugenics was strongly practiced by the Spartans. (Didn't work, the Thebans overpowered them anyway.)
Staunch evolutionist, Sir Arthur Keith:
The German Fuhrer . . . consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.
Elsewhere, Keith wrote:
The leader of Germany is an evolutionist, not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him, the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front;" he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people.
Hitler used the German word for evolution (Entwicklung) over and over again in his book. In fact, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the very title itself of Hitler's book ("My Struggle"), was influenced by Darwin's subtitle, "Struggle for Existence," and by the German advocate of evolution, Ernst Haeckel, who published a book, in 1905, entitled, Der Kampf um den Entwicklungs-Gedanken ("The Struggle over Evolutionary Thinking").
In Hitler's Mein Kampf, he spoke of "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 bastardization." 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 bastards."
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."
Should we also take threats from Creationists at face value? (See post 11)
Well, at least you recognize that your little cavalcade of ignorance was a vast waste of everyone's time.
Quote-mining is usually fruitless, because you get trapped in your semantics, looking increasingly foolish as you assert notions which have already been debunked.
http://bevets.com/equotesd.htm#D
Bevets.com is a Fundamentalist Christian creationist site. See....
We have almost 300 million people here in the US...and we have 40 million abortions?
The 40 million figure brings out the skeptic in me.
Sounds like Sir Arthur Keith is rueing the defeat of the Reich, to me. Let's look at the entirety of that passage, since we're speaking of omissions:
"The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. He has failed, not because the theory of evolution is false, but because he has made three fatal blunders in its application. The first was in forcing the pace of evolution among his own people; he raised their warlike passions to such a heat that the only relief possible was that of aggressive war. His second mistake lay in his misconception of the evolutionary value of power. All that a sane evolutionist demands of power is that it should be sufficient to guarantee the security of a nation; more than that is an evolutionary abuse of power. When Hitler set out to conquer Europe, he had entered on that course which brought about the evolutionary destruction of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes (see Chapter 34). His third and greatest mistake was his failure to realize that such a monopoly of power meant insecurity for Britain, Russia, and America. His three great antagonists, although they do not preach the doctrine of evolution, are very consistent exponents of its tenets."
LOL.......I SHOULD have written it the other way.
I never threatened to kill anyone. That's absurd.
I engaged in (over the top, probably irresponsible) hyperbole in keeping with the laughable idiocy of the article.
In retrospect, it wasn't the best thing to post. I was rightfully called on it.
It was my way of expressing my wish that imbeciles such as the person who wrote this article would not breed and burden future generations with their offspring. Voluntarily, of course.
*gasp*
/sarcasm
LOL! Don't lecture me on "reading carefully," pal. Your version of "careful reading" apparently implies that we must ignore the plain meaning of the passage.
Darwin is obviously speaking in terms of a continuum -- otherwise the passage would make no sense. The topic of a "widening break" in the fossil record is introduced as follows:
But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct.....
Which is to say: he grants the existence of the break, and must now seek to explain how that break does not damage his theory of gradual change. And thus he uses the example of how breaks can appear in human evolution:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.
IOW, Civilized races and savage races are "related forms" -- and he'd no doubt have said they're "closely related." But in the context of explaining the "break," one must conclude that he sees the extermination of the "savage races" as widening the "break." Civilized and savage races are thus clearly differentiated on an evolutionary path.
At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated.
Somebody, whether it be members of the "civilized" or "savage" races, will likewise exterminate the apes which (according to Darwin) represent something lower than "the savage races," which are in turn lower than the "civilized ones."
The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider,
Which is to say -- a wider evolutionary gap will appear once the savage races and the apes are out of the way.
for it will intervene between man ... and some ape as low as a baboon
The "path" of human evolution is toward becoming more civilized, and there will eventually appear an even wider break between (civilized) man and baboon.
The ellipsis in the above serves to clarify his meaning. The removed portion, however, is instructive:
... in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian ...
Which is to say, Caucasians are furthest along the path, but not at the apex of civilization: there is still progress to be made.
instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
And here we see that the "break" between man and ape occurs between "negro and Australian" (both "savage races"), and the gorilla.
I know you're wedded to this idea that Darwin was a racist and no amount of showing that your quotes are out of context and misleading will ever set you straight.
I don't know that Darwin would be considered a racist in (say) the Klan sense of the term. However, his words speak for themselves, in that they directly state a continuum with "civilized races" on one end, gorillas on the other, and "savage races" in between. And it has to be admitted that the Klan, et al, can make a lot of noise about the idea that certain races are less evolved than others.
However, the lurkers on this thread now know just how benighted you truly are.
They might think that. Or they may see that I am making an honest attempt to engage what Darwin actually said. You are not even bothering to address the specifics of my comments; instead, you've rather typically gone ad hominem.
I'm curious, do you view Gregor Mendel's studies to be in the category of "amoral science" with a "direct line" to Hitler and the Holocaust? After all, Galton's ideas concerning the specific "science of eugenics" (which he so named after Darwin's death) are certainly as much Mendelian as Darwinian, as early 20th American eugenics enthusiasts well recognized.
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