Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
Posted on 04/07/2009 12:17:49 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Judaism in the Year of Darwin
David Klinghoffer BeliefNet April 5, 2009
Link to Original Article
Welcome to the year of Charles Darwin. In coming months, the secular world will be celebrating two anniversaries relating to the originator of evolutionary theory. February 12 marks what would have been his 200th birthday and November 24, the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.
The cultural and political battle over evolution in the United States will intensify. Yet I believe many Orthodox Jews feel that it somehow isn't "our fight." Darwin argued that a purposeless, unguided process--natural selection operating on random genetic variation--explains the whole history of life's development. But frum Jews have no doubt that life was purposefully designed by our Creator.
Though I'm a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the think tank best known for advancing intelligent-design theory, I can appreciate this response. However, permit me to argue that the Darwin wars are very much our fight, as Jews, or should be.
Begin with the fact that Hitlerism was no less than an exercise in applied Darwinism. To whip up his fellow citizens in the service of a race war against the Jews, Hitler relied on the language of Darwinian biology.
In the coming year's celebrations, you can bet that the nastier parts of Darwin's writing will be safely ignored. As a young man, during his adventures as a naturalist aboard the Beagle exploring the coasts of South America, Darwin had his eyes opened to the good points associated, as he came to see it, with genocide.
In 1833 he made the acquaintance of General Juan Manual de Rosas, who was busy liquidating the Indian population of southern Argentina. "This war of extermination," Darwin wrote in a cheerful letter home, "although carried on with the most shocking barbarity, will certainly produce great benefits; it will at once throw open four or 500 miles in length of fine country for the produce of cattle." The "extermination" (a favorite word of Darwin in his writings) of failed races, whether animal or human, is a great theme in his books and a key feature in the advance of the evolutionary process as he conceived it.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin prophesied: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
Evolutionary theory was embraced and championed in Germany faster even than in England, Darwin's native country. Hitler felt its influence, as the important biographers of him agree. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: "The basis of Hitler's political beliefs was a crude Darwinism." Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant "extract[ed] the elements of his world view" from various influences including "popular treatments of Darwinism."
The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, "Nation and Race," where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is couched from the start in Darwinian terms. He writes: "In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right of opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a mean for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of higher development." He praises "the iron logic of Nature" with its "right to victory of the best and stronger in this world."
But what if the strong (Aryans) choose not to dominate and exterminate the weak (Jews)? "Eternal Nature," he writes, "inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin's laws.
Hitler calculated that an appeal to the Germans against the Jews would be most likely to succeed if framed in scientific-sounding evolutionary terms. Mein Kampf was hugely popular and influential, selling six million copies by 1940.
Nazi propaganda hardly sought to hide the Darwin connection. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, "In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply." Between 1939 and 1941, German physicians empowered by the state under the Action T4 plan murdered 70,273 children and adults who had been observed to suffer from debilitating mental or physical conditions.
It should not have been surprising that Hitler under Darwin's influence would follow up by seeking to destroy the Jews. Not because Darwin was an anti-Semite (he wasn't), but because his worldview is all about explaining life and its mysteries in purely natural, material terms, leaving no room for God. In Mein Kampf, when his use of Darwinist rhetoric is most pronounced, Hitler decries the Jews for their "effrontery": "Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature." In Darwinism, Nature sweeps all before her.
Judaism says just the opposite. Torah is marked by the call to defy Nature, to do the hard work of bending our personal natures to God's will. It is almost as if Hitler, following the logic of Darwinism, sensed that Torah and thus the Jews who uphold it must be his ultimate, eternal foes.
Today, the skinhead and Neo-Nazi subculture is full of Darwinian chatter. Whether on aggressively Hitlerian web sites like Stormfront.com or in the writings of the racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana politician David Duke, discussions of evolution as a proof of white supremacy are common.
Darwinian science has otherwise mostly lost its anti-Semitic edge, but its leading contemporary spokesman, Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, can't be matched for his hatred of the God of Israel and for his attack on the intelligent design of life. His latest bestselling book, The God Delusion, rails blasphemously at the Creator that he denies.
But it's not our fight, as Torah-believing Jews? Historically our rabbis have certainly indicated that it is. Long before Charles Darwin was born in 1809, similar debates were being fought in Europe over scientific challenges to the belief that God created and designed the world. In medieval Spain, the science of the day was carried on by Aristotelian philosophers who denied that the universe had a beginning. So there could be no Creator in any sense recognizable to a Torah Jew.
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, among other Jewish philosophers, knew it was necessary to directly address the challenge of this scientific doctrine. In the story he tells in the Kuzari, the religiously searching Khazar king stages a debate between a rabbi and an Aristotelian scientist-philosopher. (A Christian and a Muslim also participate briefly.) The philosopher denies that God intentionally created the world but instead argues that a series of natural causes explains the existence of everything. That is Darwinism in a nutshell. Yehudah HaLevi saw it as totally normal and desirable that a rabbi should engage in an extended and very well informed disputation over such issues.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lived to see Darwin's influence spread rapidly across Europe after the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. In his Torah commentary, Rav Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian thought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we all live. Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most grotesquely animalistic fashion, Hirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learning to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal" (Numbers 25:3).
Western culture has since become widely convinced that human beings, just like animals, lack moral choice and responsibility. Applied Darwinism results in the widespread, easily observable failure to distinguish between people and animals, a moral disease we may call animalism.
Both the elite and mass media are rife with it. So the rights of animals become a sacred cause, justifying even violence in their defense, while ascribing a unique dignity or worth to men and women is increasingly suspect. If human beings lack such a dignity unique to them and transcending whatever condition their body may be in at a given moment--fetus, child, or adult, sick or well, conscious or "vegetative"--then extinguishing a human life when it seems convenient to us becomes very easy to justify.
The social consequences range from animal-liberation terrorism to modern eugenics, right-to-die initiatives, euthanasia, abortion and more. In the state where I live, Washington, voters just this past November overwhelmingly approved an assisted-suicide law, the second in the nation (after Oregon). It permits doctors to help patients identified as "terminally ill" to take their own lives.
And this is not our fight? The Darwin-Hitler connection would be enough reason to acknowledge the evolution debate as one in which religious Jews have a profound stake. The moral and hashkafic aspects of the fight make it, without any doubt at all, ours, perhaps more than it is anyone else's.
From now on, one may consider that there is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds. Recent experiments make it possible for one to wonder what distinguishes live bodies from inanimate matter. In the face of this discovery, the Church will begin by rising in revolt, then it will continue to teach its “truths”. One day finally, under the battering-ram of science, dogma will collapse. It is logical that it should be so, for the human spirit cannot remorselessly apply itself to raising the veil of mystery without peoples’ one day drawing the conclusions.
-Hitler
If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can’t satisfy them with the Party’s programme. Time will go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
-Hitler
Christianity is an invention of sick brains….The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem.
-Hitler
How many Klinghoffers constitute a trend, Alter Kaker?
Another one from the master of illogic!
Real education leads one inexorably to God's word, and thus Creationism.
Or did you mean Indoctrinated?
No. I mean educated.
Indoctrination is telling someone “this is the “TRUTH” and nothing shall deviate from the “TRUTH”.” when all they really have is INTERPRETATION not the truth.
Creationism is about indoctrinating the ill educated into believing the illogical.
Science is about learning how to study things by forming ideas of how they work and seeing how the evidence fits the ideas, and changing the ideas as necessary such that they better explain the evidence.
Those vulnerable to Creationism are the ill educated and the under educated.
The more educated someone is the less likely they are to accept Creationism, making Creationism the refuge of the ignorant and uneducated.
Lists of Banned Books, 1932-1939
-snip-
Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279
6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).
http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm
putting the word evolutionary in front of anything they disagree with appears to be a growing *tactic*
What is your masters in?
Yes.
Geology creationists don’t like is “evolutionary” Geology.
Astronomy creationists don’t like is “evolutionary” Astronomy.
Physics that creationists don’t like is “evolutionary” physics.
Lawyers that creationists don’t like are now “evolutionary” lawyers.
Hitler believed in the teachings of Christianity about as much as Stalin believed in the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both men despised and hated Christianity with a passion. Both paid lip-service to Christianity/ROC in an attempt to dupe the masses into believing they were something that they were not.
Here are some quotes to show you what Hitler really thought of Christianity (and monotheism in general for that matter):
July 1941:
“National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.” (p 6 & 7)
October 1941:
“Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” (p 43)
“The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that’s why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State.” (p 49-52)
“The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.”
“Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer.... The decisive falsification of Jesus’ doctrine was the work of St.Paul. He gave himself to this work... for the purposes of personal exploitation.... Didn’t the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. Today, it’s in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul: the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St.Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” (p 63-65)
December 1941:
“Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.... .... When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunised against the disease.” (p 118 & 119)
“Kerrl, with noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.... Pure Christianity— the Christianity of the catacombs— is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.” (p 119 & 120)
April 1942:
“There is something very unhealthy about Christianity” (p 339)
February 1942:
“It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors— but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch Uin the next 200 yearse will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn’t... behold .” (p 278)
http://www.puritanfellowship.com/2007/11/adolf-hitler-hated-christianity.html
Young Earth or Old Earth?
From the article: "Long before Charles Darwin was born in 1809, similar debates were being fought in Europe over scientific challenges to the belief that God created and designed the world."
It appears that any explanation that deviates from the biblical account qualifies as scientific for Mr. Klinghoffer.
The problem with your quotes is that they are all from a single source that was not written contemporaneously, but after the fact.
Hitler never made any public pronouncements that were anti-Christian, and if he did the majority of the German people most likely would not have followed him.
So it matters little if Hitler was secretly anti-Christian. He was only the head Nazi. The rest of the Nazi's were inspired by Hitler's ranting about “avenging my saviors blood upon the cross”.
Similarly the secret and private thoughts of Osama bin Lauden are of little consequence to the fact that his pronouncements are Islamic fatwas and he inspires his followers using the language and motivations of Islam.
==And do you think that biology departments teaching biology to university students who wish to learn it and sign up for the class is “unconstitutional”?
I’m not talking about teaching biology, I’m talking about mandating schools to teach the Temple of Darwin’s materialist creation myth, while at the same time mandating that the only other logical possibility, namely the teaching of design, be banned from our public schools and universities.
I get it. So when people point out the fact that Arafat was a committed Marxist-Leninist, your response is that he quoted the Qur’an and wanted to kill Jews, so therefore he must be an Islamic fundamentalist. And now that I point out the Hitler despised and hated Christianity, and was a committed social Darwinist, you say it doesn’t matter what he really was, as long as he tried to dupe the Germans into believing he was a Christian he should be treated as a Christian. Next thing you will be telling me is that B. Hussein Obama is a moderate because he tones his rhetoric down in his national speeches! You are something else, Allmendream.
Teaching biology in science class involves (gasp!) teaching the theories of biology. The only scientific theory of how living organisms change is Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection of genetic variation. Creationists have not offered a scientific theory that can either replace or refine it.
A school is certainly free to teach “creation biology” to anyone stupid enough to sign up for it, but really, creationism is of absolutely no practical use. Good luck getting a job doing actual biology when all you learned was how Darwin = Hitler.
Your quotes are all from a single source and have nothing to do with what motivated Nazi's to kill Jews. Nazi's were not inspired to kill Jews by what Hitler secretly thought, but by what he actually said. What Hitler actually said was that killing Jews was “avenging my saviors blood upon the cross”.
Similarly, Al Queda are not inspired to kill Jews and Americans by what Osama bin Lauden secretly thinks, but by what he actually says. What Osama bin Lauden actually says is not that they need to kill Jews and Americans because of Darwinism, but because of insults against Islam that we have supposedly committed.
*Just as you think Osama Bin Lauden secretly despises Islam and is secretly an atheist from the “Temple of Darwin”?*
Does he really think that?
Yes. GGG is of the opinion that “Islamic” terrorists are really “temple of Darwin fanatics” and are inspired by materialism not religion.
GGG also thinks that HIV is a “harmless” virus and not the cause of AIDS.
I have long maintained that when you scratch a creationist you will find that they often have other illogical beliefs not supported by evidence (like Geocentricism).
Most Jews are just too educated and intelligent and know the Bible too well to be Darwinists.
...fixed.
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