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 am not familiar with this claim. Could you please provide a link or additional information?
Kennedy's error is in going after Darwin's theories, and not atheism's complete lack of moral absolutes.
Wow, You are really on to something there. You have convincingly shown that acceptance of The Parallel Postulate causes degeneracy, mass murder, and the desire to have unbridled animalistic sex. It certainly would explain all the debauchery, serial killings, and wild orgies that Hilbert was involved with....
A sloppy exhaltation of Darwinism to the level of Euclidian geometry hardly constitutes a basis for denying the practical ramifications, let alone the objective uncertainties, of the former.
As for Francis Collins, his cockamamie book is reviewed here:
Review of "The Language of God"
In essence, the book appears to support the proposition that to feel that there's a deity is to know that there's a deity.
Timothy Leary would've been pleased...
Pardon my cynicism, but I can't shake the feeling that Collins is in it for the money: the royalties, the many talk show and church and campus speaking engagements with their honoraria, and an almost inevitable award from the Templeton people.
You may have a point. I do wonder, though, whether mammon alone could induce a famous scientist to incinerate his own reputation. The seductive power of simple-minded explanations is quite extraordinary.
taxesareforever thinks chimps are humans??
Looks photoshopped to me. Is someone auditioning for a job at Reuters?
Please provide references to support this claim.
~
Guess what--they were also taught to diagram sentences!
That's just goofy.
You can say that again. ;-)
It seems you didn't get the warm and fuzzy agreement you thought you'd get with that inane post. Awaiting your refutation of the replies to it.
Huh? How is this unclear to you? He contrasted "savage" to "civilized" people. So he's talking about indigenous groups of people without advanced civilization. Duh.
I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't read it myself!
Would it not be accurate to label all of the skulls as ape?
Interesting post, but the references in the original web page are dead links. And the water absorption coefficent plot is being brutalized in your analysis. If what you say is true, there shouldn't be any UV or IR radiation reaching us from the sun and that is simply not true. First of all, the visible spectrum, 380 nm to 780 nm lies on the steep side of the curve you show, not in the center of it. So our visual reception is skewed compared to the hole in the water spectrum. Secondly, the scale displayed in in wavelengths and is logarithmic. If you want to display the spectrum properly, in order to compare relative energies of different wavelngths of light, it should be displayed in units of wavenumber, where each division on the x axis is proportional to energy. When displayed this way, the big region of absorbance by water is really quite small. Lastly, even though light absorbance by water appears strong, the scale is per centimeter of liquid water. There is so little moisture in the air that the transmission window for light from the sun is much broader than what that plot shows. Air can transmit as low as 190 nm and that limit is routinely exploited by modern spectroscopy in ambient conditions. And air can tranmit an infrared signal far past what we can see, too. What protects us from UV is not water vapor, but upper atmosphere ozone. As for the spectrum of the sun, its emmisions cover the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The difference in intensity between the near IR, the visible and the near UV is negliegable. The sun, if you look at it, looks largely white. The yellow designation has more to do with the maximum emission wavelength, but the emission itself is very broad and not a narrow emmission as you aluded to in your posting. If the sun were blue or red, it would still largely look white because of the intensity and the broadness of the emission band. This is another example of twisting and manipulating facts to suit a creationist agenda and not presenting information in context.
At no time did I refer to Cromwell's England as "an exemplar of religious toleration." But, yes, considering the era, it was remarkably tolerant. I am glad I made your day, because Cromwell's "postumous execution" was done by a restored House of Stuart, which was itself overthrown by a second time by William and Mary. I don't see how this symbolic execution by a restored tyranny impugns Cromwell, esp. considering the Parlimentarians execution of Charles.
I believe the original question was whether there has been a theocracy in any major nation that has not killed and imprisoned religious dissenters.
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