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.]
Whatever melts your butter, dude. I explained it, but just believe whatever you want to believe. You will anyway.
Ok, you seem sincere, so I'll just pencil you in as ignorant. Race theory and anti-Semitism weren't invented by Darwin, you know. Gobineau wrote his vile little opus entitled An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races some years before Darwin released The Origin, for example. And the openly Christian habit of murdering large groups of Jews goes back over a millenium. Blaming Hitler's Germano-philic/ anti-Semitic/eugenicist/genocidal ideas on Darwin is simply idiotic. Darwin himself would have opposed eugenics, certainly as it developed in the 20th Century (mostly in the USA - the Nazis were quite the admirers of US eugenics programs, after all). The roots of the ideology of the Holocaust (race theory, anti-Semitism, 'Blut und Erde', etc.) go back far, far boyond 1859 and Darwin.
"Without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler's passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed." (Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury)
You might consider learning something about a subject before you make pronouncements on it. Or is reading books that don't agree with your ignorant prejudices against your 'religion'? It seems to be the same worshipping of ignorance exhibited by Coulter and Kennedy.
Kennedy makes me ashamed to be Presbyterian.
--R.
 |
Everyone should stop linking Hitler to Darwin. Darwinism is, more or less, belief in the material world evolving itself. Hitler and Himmler -- Nazi movers and shakers -- believed occult things about spirit worlds and "race spirits" and strange realms beyond what we see. The Nazi beliefs would have made Darwin snicker. Let's try to be real. |
Furthermore, I also believe that people who claim the Holocaust is a consequence of Charles Darwin are implicitly denying the influence of centuries of Christian anti-semitism. It is for this reason I believe people who make such claims are engaging in a mild form of Holocaust denial.
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Hitler was a pagan. He killed the real german christians as well. But by his time there weren't many real christians left in germany.
I stopped reading at the Hitler analogy.
Should we pretend, in spite of the evidence, that evolution never occurred because its moral implications are "uncomfortable"?
Good science doesn't try to cater it's outcome to what might be comfortable to us, it does quite the opposite - attempts to reveal the truth, in spite of what we are comfortable believing. How society decides to deal with the outcome is another problem entirely that has no bearing whatsoever on the science itself.
Yours is an absurd comment, too -- it goes much too far. Consider: while Marx or Lenin are not "to blame" for the carnage wrought by Stalin or Mao, one cannot deny that ideas of Marx and Lenin played an important role in what happened later. To say otherwise is to suggest that ideas don't have consequences.
"Well, yes," you might respond, "but Marx just wrote an unreadable book. He is not the fellow who starved several million Kulaks to death." True -- and Darwin is not the fellow who invented Social Darwinism. But in the case of Darwin, as with Marx, there is a specific logic to their ideas which lends itself to the sort of misuse (if it is misuse...) that later occurred.
Kennedy makes me ashamed to be Presbyterian.
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but likely you're pcusa so it doesn't count.
That might get you somewhere if the record wasn't right out there for everyone to see. If I were you, I'd ask for that post to be pulled. It might save you the embarrassment of people actually reading what you posted. Not to mention sparing your children some embarrassment down the road.
But you just go ahead and do what you want, and say what you want. You will anyway. LOL.
No. But then, we should never forget that along with scientific advancement, comes the responsibility to understand the difference between "can" and "should."
Good science doesn't try to cater it's outcome to what might be comfortable to us, it does quite the opposite - attempts to reveal the truth, in spite of what we are comfortable believing. How society decides to deal with the outcome is another problem entirely that has no bearing whatsoever on the science itself.
Here you're saying nothing more or less than that science trumps morality. You have divorced "can" from "should."
Would the executions be public or private?
Pretty big leap of "logic".
Fact is, nazi racism had roots that went down into multiple soils. But all those soils had this is common: They were found in hearts that disbelieved the clear words and teaching of the Bible.
Where would the funding come from, church offerings or taxes levied by your idealized church-run state?
No, I'm just trying to say that a solid basis for a system of morality has to deal with the facts, no matter how uncomfortable they make us. Any system of morals that turns a blind eye toward the truth will be inevitably undermined as the evidence becomes more apparent for all to see.
Smehow I doubt you've ever said, suggested, or implied that someone comparing evangelicals or conservatives to the Taliban was engaging in hyperbole. But I could be wrong, if you wanna point me to the post of yours that demonstrates such a committment to evenhandedness. Whenever you're ready.
note: most present antisemitism comes from leftist ecumenical churches, non Christian secularists, aryan supremacists & islamofascists ie iran, hezbolah, plo, hamas etc, et al.
the Christian right fully disagrees with the above organisations.
Most conservatives think that the ugly essential truth about human nature has been obvious for thousands of years. Can you tell me anything science has ever demonstrated which invalidates the wisdom of the Ten Commandments, which were propounded to a bunch of pre-scientific nomadic tribesmen?
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