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...as... 
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Therefore Jesus is Evil.
Posted on 05/24/2008 9:04:49 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The folks at Scientific American are steamed at Ben Stein: (see links):
Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie)
Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know)
Stein's controversial movie Expelled links Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler, the ultimate scientific hero to the ultimate manifestation of human evil. "A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust," shouts John Rennie's headline. Rennie then declares that its "heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."
The problem is, that the link is quite real. In fact, undeniable. One doesn't need to see the film to make that link. Simply read Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Darwin's Descent of Man applies the evolutionary arguments of his more famous Origin of Species to human beings. In it, Darwin argues that those characteristics we might think to be specifically human—physical strength and health, morality, and intelligence—were actually achieved by natural selection. From this, he infers two related eugenic conclusions.
First, if the desirable results of strength, health, morality, and intelligence are caused by natural selection, then we can improve them by artificial selection. We can breed better human beings, even rise above the human to the superhuman. Since human beings have been raised above the other animals by the struggle to survive, they may be raised even higher, transcending human nature to something—who knows?—as much above men as men are now above the apes. This strange hope rests in Darwin's very rejection of the belief that man is defined by God, for "the fact of his having thus risen" by evolution to where he is, "instead of having been aboriginally placed there" by God, "may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future."
Second, if good breeding gives us better results, pushing us up the evolutionary slope, then bad or indiscriminate breeding drags us back down. "If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men," Darwin groaned, "the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule."
Now to Hitler. The first, most important thing to understand is that the link between Darwin and Hitler was not immediate. That is, nobody is making the case that Hitler had Darwin's eugenic masterpiece The Descent of Man in one hand while he penned Mein Kampf in the other. Darwin's eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America, until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler's time. That makes the linkage all the stronger, because we are not talking about one crazed man misreading Darwin but at least two generations of leading scientists and intellectuals drawing the same eugenic conclusions from evolutionary theory as Darwin himself drew.
A second point. We misunderstand Hitler's evil if we reduce it to anti-Semitism. Hitler's anti-Semitism had, of course, multiple causes, including his own warped character. That having been said, Nazism was at heart a racial, that is, a biological political program based up evolutionary theory. It was "applied biology," in the words of deputy party leader of the Nazis, Rudolph Hess, and done for the sake of a perceived greater good, racial purity, that is, for the sake of a race purified of physical and mental defects, imperfections, and racial inferiority.
The greater good. We need to remember that, even though we rightly consider it the apogee of wickedness, the Nazi regime did not purport to do evil. In a monstrous illustration of the adage about good intentions leading to hell, it claimed to be scientific and progressive, to do what hard reason demanded for the ultimate benefit of the human race. Its superhuman acts of inhumanity were carried out for the sake of humanity.
Hitler had enormous sympathy for the downtrodden he witnessed as a young man in Vienna. "The Vienna manual labourers lived in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder even to-day when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness."
He believed that the social problems he witnessed in Vienna needed a radical, even ruthless solution if true change were to be effected. As he says with breathtaking concision, "the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt."
"Even in those days I already saw that there was a two-fold method by which alone it would be possible to bring about an amelioration of these conditions. This method is: first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved."
The proposed ruthlessness of his solution was in direct imitation of nature conceived according to Darwinism. "Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development."
How do we secure a better road for future development? By ensuring that only the best of the best race, the Aryan race, breed, and pruning away all the unfit and racially inferior. That isn't just a theory; it's eugenic Darwinism as a political program. As Hitler made clear, "the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind." Jews have to be pruned away, but also Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded, handicapped, and any one else that is biologically unfit.
That's Darwinism in action. Does that mean that Darwin would have approved? No. Does that mean that Darwin's theory provided the framework for Hitler's eugenic program? Yes.
Again, you call yourself a scientist but you are merely parroting talking points and posting airbrushed fantasies. You are practicing social engineering, not science: manipulation of facts and minds, not testing of theories. A ‘phisher’ of men.
I have no time for fanciful parakeet dances. I want facts and you are proffering piffle, for you have nothing else to offer.
Good Day.
Exactly.
Exactly. For many years, I defended so-called Scientific Creationism as being another explanation of data...until I began to attend lectures, examine the evidence myself, etc., and realized these so-called "scientists" were just charlatans misleading people.
There are many good Christians who believe them, and I have nothing against them...but I don't believe the leaders in these deceptions are even Christian--they bear false witness to the evidence.
Perhaps some are well meaning, thinking that misleading people is a lesser evil to people believing what they think is wrong, but I have a hard time with that. (I also have a hard time believing that Young Earth Creationism is the only possible fit with Christianity.)
I also try very hard to apply Heinlein's Razor, but still, my personal experience with some of these Scientific Creationists gives me the same feeling as listening to Bill Clinton. >shudder!<
I have no time for fanciful parakeet dances. I want facts and you are proffering piffle, for you have nothing else to offer.
In response to your challenge yesterday I have posted three links to detailed summaries of horse evolution.
Your only response has been, like above, to hand-wave the evidence away. You can't refute the evidence so you try to pretend it doesn't exist.
Well, here is some more for you to ignore:
The Branching Bush of Horse Evolution.
This article has a lot of good historical background. You might actually learn something if you would just allow yourself to read it. And there is a lot more evidence where that comes from.
You do realize though, don't you, that with every good article loaded with evidence that I post that you just hand-wave away you just make yourself look more and more like a religious zealot, unwilling to even entertain evidence contrary to your religious beliefs?
But while Darwin was an agnostic, many of his most vocal supporters today, including on FreeRepublic, are ardent atheists. Among Christians, he has both supporters and critics. I’m not aware of any atheists criticizing Darwin (evolution).
Yes, but they were not exposed to countless millenia of environmental exposures that could have influenced them. For example, once upon a time, some insect might have landed on fresh tar oozing from the ground, thus becoming exposed to polyaromatic hydrocarbons that could be mutagenic. I doubt that happened in the lab.
Remember, even buying 1,000,000 losing lottery tickets wouldn't mean there's no likely winner in a lottery that's SO huge. Nature has drawn countless zillions of times.
: ...as... : Therefore Jesus is Evil.
In fact, that was my point. I realize now that my post could be read the wrong way. I was trying to say that those who wave away the horse evolutionary sequence as "varieties of horses" only know they're horses because of the work scientists have done. If they saw a live Eohippus without being told what it was, I doubt they'd immediately say, "Oh, that's just some kind of horse." In fact, as it would be almost as accurate to say "that's some kind of tapir" or "that's some kind of rhinoceros," since both those lines descended from Eohippus or something very much like it. As G.G. Simpson said, "Eohippus is referred to the Equidae because we happen to have more complete lines back to it from later members of this family than from other families." I have wondered if that's why it's often referred to as Hyracotherium these days, to avoid the implication that it's more a horse than anything else.
And since you're not a real scientist...lyrics from the movie:
I don't know what they have to say,
it makes no difference anyway -
whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I'm against it!
Your proposition may be good,
but let's have one thing understood -
whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it!
I'm opposed to it.
On general principles I'm opposed to it.
Ergo, "Darwinian" does not equal "atheist."
The problem in that is that the evidence given was anecdotal, an example. It provides no evidence that Darwinism led to Nazism, nor that atheism did...it just shows the evils of a madman who was likely an atheist.
Similarly, a listing of the excesses of the Crusades would not be evidence for why we should shun "religious, Christian thought."
I prefer Eohippus myself, but the reason for Hyracotherium is that it was published that way first. Owen's find was incomplete, so based on the teeth, he thought it was like a Hyrax--thus the name, meaning "Hyrax-like beast".
Marsh's find 35 years later was more complete, showing its horse-like attributes, and so actually, the term Hyracotherium demonstrates evolution even more strongly, as the teeth were still showing an early form's characteristics even while the later (equine) forms were developing!
Of course, I believe "The Spirit Of Allegiance" will wave away the evidence, as it doesn't fit his preconceived notions. Sad.
Any sandwich involves two slices of bread. The slice of bread on the bottom of the evolutionite time sandwich involves the Haldane dilemma and related problems of population genetics: it would take quadrillions of years for evolution to produce a modern human from an ape even if that were possible (it isn't). The slide of bread on the bottom involves the growing body of evidence that ancient man dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis and included them in his artwork. Any sort of a google search on 'dinosaurs' and 'petroglyphs' will give you a flavor for it.
Sure they can. They're doing apologetics, not science. They can just make it up as they go.
Unicorns? Pah! This is the one I want to see found:
It's called the Von Daniken effect.
(And it also shows that Rorschach did not live in vain!)
The link offers convincing arguments that the temple stone could not be a recent addition for the sake of tourism. Cambodians would kill anybody who messed with those temples in any way, for any reason.
Then again there is the question of Peruvian Ica stones:
Naturally enough establishment science venues will claim the Ica stones are all fakes but they do not offer an explanatgion as to how the first batch of the things which ever turned up numbered in the thousands or why anybody would have ever gone to such huge pains on a purely speculative basis, i.e. why anybody would have done the fabulous amount of work needed to create thousands of these things before they knew whether or not gringos would pay for them.
“eugenics, is hardly more than animal husbandry applied to human beings.”
Yes, and other cultures (such as the Spartans)practiced it long before Darwin, just as cultures used selective breeding on their domestic animals.
"Now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons."
Cavemen living with dinosaurs must be true. Indeed, to this day, those tail-spikes are still called "thagomizers."
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