Posted on 05/01/2008 3:09:53 PM PDT by sitetest
It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"
I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.
Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.
Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.
Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."
Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"
No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.
Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.
More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."
It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.
One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:
"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."
Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."
Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.
Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.
In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?
As I recall, the Nazis alleged that Jews did this by unconventional(ie, un-natural) and unethical means, thus polluting German purity and survival.
Eugenics was about creating a better breed of man, not a new species. Darwin was concerned with the origin of new species. Socrates, via Plato's Republic, actually provided a model for social eugenics 400 years before Christ was born.
"Race" is another word for "breed". All races on earth are ons species. A superior race would be a superior breed WITHIN species. If you want to have an honest debate. Stop making things up as you go along
True. But grass needs dirt.
Not sure what that means in all this: I just now waded in.
But what fun!
Tom
But my point is precisely that no one seems to get this. Everyone has it in their brains that Jews are liberal, urban, sophisticated, intellectual, and liberal as all get-out, therefore the Biblical Israelites weren't "Jewish" in the conventional sense. Instead somehow chr*stianity gets associated with all the good stuff and the Biblical Israelites are turned into a combination of the Ku-Klux Klan and the Spanish Inquisition. After all, the ancient Israelites simply could not have been Jews practicing the identical Torah that Orthodox Jews practice today. No way, Hosea! Jews don't sacrifice sheep or raise crops or execute people for apostasy or exterminate heathen races--they win Nobel Prizes. Everyone knows that! And so Mr. Dawkins (and most other people) turn Joshua into the Pope or John Hagee and his pagan Canaanite victims into the "real Jews" of that era.
Now, the ADL's attacks on the "new testament" are most interesting, considering that the six day creation is taught no where in it. No siree, it comes from the Torah. So how did a Torah teaching magically become "un-Jewish" and chr*stian? See previous paragraph. In fact, most of the manifestations of the Bible that liberal Jews spend all their time attacking don't come from the "new testament" at all. The Hexameron? The Ten Commandments? The definition of male homosexuality as a capital offense? None of this is in the "new testament" (it condemns the practice, but prescribes no legal penalty). So it seems to me that the ADL's and the Holocaust Museum's invocation of the "new testament" as the origin of anti-Semitism is, quite bluntly, a fig leaf. This becomes even more obvious when one considers that Jewish liberals spend most of their time trying to legislate the "sermon on the mount" even as they condemn the "chr*stian" Ten Commandments.
Now--I am personally not huge on screaming "Darwin caused the Holocaust," and I'll try to explain why. I ask everyone who has read thus far to read the following very, very carefully.
First, the Darwin/Hitler connection controversy detracts from the actual subject at hand and wastes much time. As a matter of fact, I believe Darwinists welcome the charge just so they can spend all their time refuting it and blaming the Holocaust on "chr*stianity" (by which they mean the "genocidal old testament G-d").
But secondly and much more important is that appealing to the Holocaust in order to discredit Darwin assumes that Theists and atheists share a common morality even though they disagree about the existence of G-d. This is a terrible mistake. Theists and Atheists cannot share a common morality for the simple reason that morality means "obedience to the commandments of the Creator of the universe." Anything other than this is not morality at all. It is a mere collection of hang-ups. In appealing to the horrors of the Holocaust one implies that the mere fact that they were horrors means that they were "obviously" objectively immoral and that both Theists and atheists can agree on this. Nothing is immoral merely because it is horrifying or instinctually repulsive. A thing is immoral only because G-d so defines it. Discrediting Darwin via the natural revulsion most people have towards the Holocaust implies that morality rests on something other than Divine decree. Morality is not the product of science, reason, instinct, intuition, or the opinions of any number of human beings (whether a single one, a plurality, a vast majority, or even of the human race as a whole). It is the product of Divine Revelation alone. When Dawkins argues that Darwin is not responsible for the "crimes" of Hitler he ignores the fact that apart from the G-d he doesn't believe in he has no grounds to regard them objectively as crimes at all.
It is for these reasons that I wish people would not spend so much time trying to discredit Darwinism by associating it with the Holocaust.
Nazis viewed the world in terms of competing races. This racial theory was born of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Wilhelm Marr.
So before Darwin, racism did not exist? Europeans and Americans thought Africans were their equals? They enslaved them for what? Oh, I recall, in America they counted as a fraction of a white man. And, you call me nuts.
Max Müller is often identified as the first writer to speak of an Aryan “race” in English. In his Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861. He was a critic of Darwin.
Well you have finally said something so stupid I can no longer debate you. I guess you just solved the world's racial problems by denying races exist. Hitler believed they existed, hence the "Aryan Race". He acknowledged they weren't "different species" by trying to eliminate non-Aryans from the gene pool. Different species do not interbread by definition. I can't believe that I have cast my pearls before such a swine.
You’re making things up. Your premise is that Nazis emphasized Jewish achievement. This premise is ridiculous.
Nazis emphasized the falsehood that Jews are inferior.
Certainly it did exist.
But Darwin provided it a rational basis.
First, excellent post! Second, tying Darwinism to Hitler or the holocaust has nothing to do with the validity of Darwinism. The point is to show the thought process by which Darwinism led to the Holocaust. Both ideas can be completely true....i.e. Darwinism is true, and, Darwinism led to the Holocaust. There is no conflict there.
However, I think the reason this debate has come up and the reason Stein inluded the Darwin/Hitler connection in his movie is because of the constant bashing of Christianity and Judaism by athiests such as Dawkins and Hitchens, who spent a lot of effort accusing Christiainty of the worst crimes in history, including the Holocaust. Stein is just throwing their own crapola back in their faces and they are not liking it very much......:)
Now go back to my post #101 and pay attention to it.
How does this assertion of yours work in Russia. Stalin razed the Christ Church Cathedral in Moscow, executed priests, melted down their church bells. And you believe the Church encouraged the masses to submit to the world's most vile and bloody dictator? I do recall hearing Stalin once retorted to a follower about the anger of Rome to which he replied, " how many divisions does the Pope have?"
——I have shown repeatedly that breeding WITHIN a species is Socratic, not Darwinian.——
And it has been shown repeatedly that Hitlers inspiration for the improvement of the “Master Race” was born more from Darwin that from Socrates as he saw the evolution of the “Master Race as the goal. Not the improvement, the evolution.
Please show me an example of where Hitler EVER mentioned Darwin
Stalin didn’t try to use religion like Hitler did. Stalin was a Lenenist. Lenenists were atheists.
Really? Darwin identified natural selection as the process of speciation in nature. Eugenics the science which appealed to the Nazi's is nothing more than a fancy name for breeding. Breeding has been going on for thousands of years. Breeding (planned selection) is what helped Darwin come up with the idea of natural selection. Darwin did not provide anything new for the racists.
Did Hitler ever use the word evolution(in German of course)? Where did the term(idea) come from if so?
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