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.]
And how come some of the same Freepers will say "Piled Higher and Deeper" when dealing with a lefty PhD holder?
Which is the same playbook of all anti-evos:
Willful refusal to back up their claims.
*gasp*
/sarcasm
Wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea, like, for instance, that a source is fair and balanced when it's not, or that it doesn't have an agenda, when it does, or that it's objective, when it's not, etc.
Please nothing...you want a fight over beliefs here and I won't give in to this sort of spat. If anyone here owes explaination it would be you and you want to use other peoples words to do it with the link.
I respects peoples stand on the issue, what I don't respect is rote dismissal...which is what you have to offer based upon what? No evidence supports is according to you and I freely admit a lot of others. Evidence to "suggest" is what you want me to agree to.
I used to think the same way as you, but I've found that many, many conservatives want only Christians elected to office.
Who is denying God here?
Looks to me like the full quote simply confirms the fact that Hitler's racist ideology was in great part founded in evolutionist theory.
It reminds me of the modern-day apologists for communism: They think that the Soviets just did it wrong.
Dimensio didn't mention Christians in his post. He said those who believe in God. You took it to mean only Christians.
You have a backa$$ward way of looking at the Constitution.
It's not identical. It's not even close, in fact. The argument that evolution can be used to support essentially philosophical positions such as racism or eugenics, is far closer in type to the arguments that form the philosophical basis of the Declaration of Independence. Whereas the latter presupposes the existence of "self evident" and "unalienable" rights, the former invokes observed principles of evolution to proclaim that some races are better than others.
By contrast, you're describing an attempt to anthropomorphise an inanimate object into something that has the ability to act as a moral agent. That's a completely different argument.
With that distinction in hand, we can address the topic of the article. Although Darwin certainly didn't cause something like Hitler's eugenics program, the ideas he formalized were certainly part of the philosophical underpinnings of it. One need not invoke "cause" when "influence" is enough.
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.
I always expect you to toss in a snide little insult -- and as usual I am not disappointed. As it happens, I am a conservative. It just so happens that my brand of conservatism is intellectually curious enough to want to understand the roots and precepts of ideas with which I disagree.
Saying that bad people have used ideas in support or thir bad behavior is inane.
No more inane than the idea the good peoople have used good ideas to support their good behavior. The Founders were probably the foremost examples in all of human history on the matter of putting good ideas to work. Are you suggesting that it's inane to characterize their efforts in that way?
there is no widespread idea, secular or religious, that has not been used in support of bad behavior.
Well, yes. And that, sir, is precisely the point.
The comment has been deleted, and I don't know what it said, so I can't really respond to its contents.
Your "argument" is not terribly impressive, however, except perhaps as an example of attempting to obscure the issue.
"Looks like Darwin knew he was using the words "race" and "species" inclusive of man in "Origin." Now, if his followers would just admit that.
I won't hold my breath."
Don't. You have taken a fair amount of heat on this thread for cherry-picking quote segments to support your view. While this is probably deserved, it is highly hyopcritical of those doing it.
They cherry-pick evoloution the same way. According to Darwin's theory, it is indeed possible, if not probable, for one race to be more "evolved" than others or different races to exist in varying degrees of "evoloution", much like many other species and sub-species around the world.
The modern PC denial of this indicates more of a religous-type belief in evoultion than support of a hard scientific theory.
Just my opinion.
It should be noted that Bevets has been corrected on the context of several of his quotes, but refuses to correct his website. He also refuses to accept that not all who accept evolution as valid science are atheists and refuses to believe that it is not illogical to quote the Bible exclusively to prove that the Bible is inerrant.
Ummmm... He argues that Hitler was inspired by evolution, yet he also argues that he lost because his enemies - namely, us - were also inspired by evolution!
But hey - Darwin is responsible for Naziism, Darwin is responsible for communism, and Darwin is also responsible for capitalism. So why not blame Darwin for both sides of WWII?
I say Darwin was responsible for both the National League and the American League.
That being said, it must be admitted that in our present day most nonbelievers in public life are liberal, as well as most who belong to liberal Protestant denominations or are Jewish. Even many Catholic politicians and clergy are pro-big government, with exceptions made on the so-called social issues.
Darwin was probably just as racist as any other man in that time period, when slavery (long justified by the biblical curse placed upon Ham) was widespread. However, he was a gentle and compassionate man and thought that slavery was a great evil. In this respect he was quite a bit more virtuous than many clergy of his day.
It seems to me that racism is something that is more based upon convenience and selfishness than upon any particular reasoning. Religion served to excuse racism for centuries (and still does, for some people), and as religion wanes people will certainly find some other excuse. At least if one is basing this conclusion off of religion it is somewhat rational, because religion makes truth claims without concrete evidence. However, you can't rationally excuse racism by using the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is a model explaining the origin and inheritance under selection of traits. It can't make any judgments about the value of these traits. For this reason it doesn't make sense to talk about the process of evolution as advancing towards some higher goal. Is color vision "better" than monochromatic vision? Is light skin "better" than dark skin? These are just two different things, each useful for some applications and less useful in others. The value judgement comes from the observer, and thus invariably says more about the observer than about the thing observed.
While it is not rational to draw racist conclusions based upon the theory of evolution because evolution is a goalless process and no point in the chain of descent is better or more good than any other point, it also doesn't make any sense because all of the races are pretty much at the same point evolutionarily. The races diverged probably just some tens of thousands of years ago. There are no genes that are unique to any particular race, just alleles that occur with greater frequency in one population than in another. These make a noticeable difference in appearance (once again, there is nothing "better" about any particular skin shade or hair texture) but not much difference in essence. There is the possibility that some races may have concentrated alleles contributing to high intelligence in their gene pools, but this is hard to determine because of the influence that culture and environment (malnutrition and disease, for instance) have on demonstrated intelligence. If there are any such population differences in intelligence they are no excuse for prejudice--the population distributions overlap and it makes no sense to suppose that a person is unintelligent because some people say that his race has an average IQ of 95 instead of 100 when he's quite possibly a couple standard deviations above average and up around 130. Statistics are useful in looking at populations, not individuals. And once again judging high intelligence as "better" than low intelligence is a value place upon the trait by the observer, not something inherent to the trait. To natural selection it is not "better" to have higher intelligence--it may be adaptive at some times, or at others it may be a waste of energy because a marginally higher intelligence has no reproductive advantage over a sufficient lower intelligence.
Racism is going to persist as long as phenotypically different groups of people exist, and it will be excused by whatever means are at hand, no matter how much twisting of logic and fact are necessary. There is nothing profitable about using the theory of evolution as a scapegoat for racism. When you send the scapegoat out of the camp, the sin still remains.
"do you view Gregor Mendel's studies to be in the category of "amoral science" with a "direct line" to Hitler and the Holocaust?"
The "rediscovery" of Gregor Mendel in the very early 1900's certainly gave a popular boost to Galton and eugenics, but it cannot be said to have influenced Galton in penning "Hereditary Genius," as he was unaware of Mendel's work at the time. Did Mendel's study of dominant and recessive traits in peas have any influence upon Nazi eugenics programs directed at human beings? Only to the degree that it added a further, scientific sheen of justification for eliminating people deemed undesireable, whether by the Eugenics League or by the Nazis in Germany. Mendel did not, however, delve into the relative worth of this or that "race" to society. Galton did.
This is where the eugenicists are wrong. In evolutionary thinking, there is no "better," as such a term would be used by the eugenicists. (i.e., inherently superior or morally better) There is only "better suited for the environment" and "less suited for the environment." The "better" which the eugenicist invokes is a value judgment or a moral judgment; no such value or moral judgment is proper in evolutionary biology.
The eugenicists took thousand-year-old ideas about breeding humans and attempted to put a modern, "scientific" gloss atop it, by linking it to Darwinian thinking and terminology. (Probably because natural selection also was derived from artificial selection (as was eugenics), and because Darwinism was the most modern, up-to-date, cutting edge thinking at the time.)
However, there is a basic, unavoidable distinction between them, as we've already discussed, namely that eugenics is artificial selection and Darwinism is natural selection.
As such, the eugenicist doesn't use "observed principles of evolution to proclaim that some races are better than others," but, rather, espouses eugenicist principles which are couched in the language of evolutionary biology. By couching it in terms of Darwinian biology, the eugenicists hoped to "steal a base" and borrow some of the respectability and legitimacy that Darwinian evolutionary thought earned for itself.
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