You said — For more on the persecution of Creation and ID scientists, teachers, etc., read the book “Slaughter of the Dissidents.”
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Well, of course, any such persecution will come from the Darwinists, and their rabid and dictatorial goal of enforcing their views on everyone, no matter what. And we can see what this kind of “Darwinian mentalilty” leads to in the world, from the book below (a book review given...)
MURDEROUS SCIENCE
FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY, BY RICHARD WEIKART
By: M. D. Aeschliman
National Review
March 28, 2005
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, by Richard Weikart (Palgrave Macmillan, 324 pp., $59.95)
It is an open question whether civilization will survive Darwinism, whose inspiration for Nazism, militarism, racism, wars of extermination, eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia is amply documented in Richard Weikart’s excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable chapter of cultural and intellectual history that had tragic consequences: the growing ascendancy in Germany in the period 1860-1933 of Social Darwinist ideas that fostered a ruthless, amoral view of the human person and of the relations between individuals, groups, nations, and races. Though in this period all “advanced” Western nations (and Japan) were affected by the Darwinian bacillus, whose revival in new and seductive forms we see today, for complex reasons Germany was the land in which it grew strongest and had the most tragic consequences. Bismarck’s success in unifying Germany through warfare and Germany’s growing industrial power in competition with Britain and France gave prominence and prestige to “blood and iron” and ideas of ruthless realpolitik, which a century earlier had been articulated by the Machiavellian Frederick “the Great.” Like distinguished earlier scholars such as Carlton J. H. Hayes and his student Jacques Barzun, Weikart has no doubt that “Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life.”
The key figures in German “Darwinismus” were Ernest Haeckel and Nietzsche, but Weikart’s book is also largely concerned with a host of less well-known German biologists, medical doctors, and social scientists who promoted Darwinism to great effect. Much valuable documentation appears here in English for the first time. Darwin himself was very pleased at the growing influence of his thinking in Germany. In 1868 he wrote to a German scholar: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” Haeckel, his most important German disciple, praised Darwin in a letter a decade later for having “shown man his true place in nature . . . thereby overthrowing the anthropocentric fable.” The “anthropocentric fable” is the belief in the special character of human life, the sacredness of the human person, and the absolute warrant of conscience and Christian or Kantian ethics. Many contemporary Darwinists, such as Peter Singer and James Rachels, are exhilarated by the Darwinian liberation from ethics, conveniently forgetting the 1914-1945 chapter of modern moral history that had so much to do with the “liberated” cynicism, fury, and cruelty of Social Darwinism.
On the first page of his book Weikart quotes from the same critical 1859 letter to Darwin from his Cambridge mentor, Adam Sedgwick, that Jacques Barzun quoted from in his magisterial 1941 book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage: “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.” To break the link between the material and the moral, Sedgwick went on, would “damage” and “brutalize” humanity and “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” The hysterical, obscene strife, carnage, and cruelty of the period 1914-1945 are here foreshadowed with prophetic power.
In fact Weikart’s book raises without treating — as being beyond his task — one of the most painful dilemmas of contemporary civilization, a dilemma of which most common citizens are often dimly aware but which many scientists, caught in the grip of curiosity (libido sciendi), the will to power (libido dominandi), and dangerously vague utilitarian idealism, resolutely wish to ignore or deny: the destructive threat an omnicompetent science poses to ethics. Even liberal commentators such as Richard Hofstadter and, more recently, Stephen Jay Gould (in Rocks of Ages) have found themselves defending parts of William Jennings Bryan’s ethical critique of Darwinism, which was the product not only of Bryan’s Christian religious beliefs and democratic political loyalties but also of his revulsion at the German Social Darwinism and militarism that he believed had been a major cause of World War I. Though Bryan was no intellectual, Weikart, Hofstadter, and Gould credit him with powerful insight on this point. (Along the same lines, Albert Alschuler has recently documented — in his book Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes — the American Social Darwinist nihilism of the “mature” Oliver Wendell Holmes.)
One book on the widespread participation of German medical doctors in Nazi human experimentation, sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide is titled Murderous Science. Weikart’s book itself draws on Detlev J. K. Peukert’s important essay on the Holocaust with the haunting title, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science.” It was the lonely “knight of faith” Kierkegaard who, like his English Christian contemporary Adam Sedgwick, warned in the 19th century that “in the end, all corruption will come about as a consequence of the natural sciences.” The uses of the words “nature” and “natural” in contemporary moral and educational discourse are utterly ambiguous, promiscuous, and obscurantist.
Weikart’s book displays in detail how “the survival of the fittest,” the purposeful extermination of the weak and vulnerable and of “racial enemies,” came to seem the obvious dictates of “natural law” and science to thousands of apparently well-educated German intellectuals in the period 1860-1933, a period in which the German university system was the envy of the world and the model for other nations (such as America). He notes that by and large only Catholics and some Socialists resisted the ascendant Darwinian picture and the political, social, and moral ideas that came with it. Yet they were easily and widely mocked as retrograde, superstitious, and sentimental “humanitarians,” a term connoting weakness and timidity.
Weikart notes Nietzsche’s role in promoting an alluring, amoral, post-Darwinian philosophy throughout Germany and the educated world, helping create what Carlton J. H. Hayes called “a generation of materialism.” Nietzsche’s brilliant rhetoric promoted “the higher breeding of humanity, including the unsparing destruction of all degenerates and parasites” (Ecce Homo). We are not far from Darwin and his eugenic cousin Galton here, or from the influential racist Gobineau, much admired in Germany, whom Tocqueville rebuked on Christian grounds. We are also not far from Hitler.
In conclusion, Weikart treats Hitler not as an anarchic criminal and madman, but as a charismatic but principled Social Darwinist with a racist, utilitarian worldview that was the fruit of the 70 years of Darwinist thinking in Germany that Weikart has documented. Hitler’s idolatry of the Germans as the “culture-bearing” people reminds us of the seductive temptation, not only in Germany or in the past, to replace traditional Christian religion and ethics with “culture” (often so much more exciting, bold, and novel) and science (apparently so much more certain). He also suggests that celebratory contemporary Darwinists such as Singer and Rachels — and all who believe in the omnicompetence of natural science — have learned nothing from the tragic 20th century.
Mr. Aeschliman is a professor of education at Boston University, professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.
Yes, a very apt description of Darwinian thought, or the Theory of Evolution — “Murderous Science”...
Some others and their comments about the book
FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY,
BY RICHARD WEIKART
“Richard Weikart’s outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and ‘racial hygiene’. Without over-simplifying the lines that connected this body of thought to Hitler, he demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibitions and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientists, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power.” — Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of The Coming of the Third Reich
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“This is one of the finest examples of intellectual history I have seen in a long while. It is insightful, thoughtful, informative, and highly readable. Rather than simply connecting the dots, so to speak, the author provides a sophisticated and nuanced examination of numerous German thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were influenced to one degree or another by Darwinist naturalism and their ideas, subtly drawing both distinctions and similarities and in the process telling a rich and colorful story.” — Ian Dowbiggin, Professor of History, University of Prince Edward Island and author of A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America
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“This is an impressive piece of intellectual and cultural history—a well-researched, clearly presented argument with good, balanced, fair judgments. Weikart has a thorough knowledge of the relevant historiography in both German and English.” — Alfred Kelly, Edgar B. Graves Professor of History, Hamilton College, and author of The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914
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“This is truly a well-crafted work of intellectual history, and one directly relevant to some of the most consequential ethical discussions of our present time. Christians and all people of good will would do well to ponder these arguments, recognizing how easily the best and brightest can commit the worst and darkest under the progressive banner of biological ‘health and fitness.’ The book should provoke much debate and discussion, not only among historians but among ethicists and scientists too.” —Thomas Albert Howard, Associate Professor of History, Gordon College, author of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University
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“The philosophy that fueled German militarism and Hitlerism is taught as fact in every American public school, with no disagreement allowed. Every parent ought to know this story, which Weikart persuasively explains.” —Phillip Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance
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“If you think moral issues like infanticide, assisted suicide, and tampering with human genes are new, read this book. It draws a clear and chilling picture of the way Darwinian naturalism led German thinkers to treat human life as raw materials to be manipulated in order to advance the course of evolution. The ethics of Hitler’s Germany were not reactionary; they were very much ‘cutting edge’ and in line with the scientific understanding of the day. Weikart’s implicit warning is that as long as the same assumption of Darwinian naturalism reigns in educated circles in our own day, it may well lead to similar practices.” —Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and co-author of The Soul of Science and How Now Shall We Live
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“Richard Weikart’s masterful work offers a compelling case that the eugenics movement, and all the political and social consequences that have flowed from it, would have been unlikely if not for the cultural elite’s enthusiastic embracing of the Darwinian account of life, morality, and social institutions. Professor Weikart reminds us, with careful scholarship and circumspect argument, that the truth uttered by Richard Weaver decades ago is indeed a fixed axiom of human institutions: ‘ideas have consequences.’” —Francis J. Beckwith, Associate Director, J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, and Associate Professor of Church-State Studies, Baylor University
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“Richard Weikart has provided bioethicists with an excellent resource in From Darwin to Hitler.” —Center for Bioethics and Culture Newsletter
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“Weikart has written a significant study because it raises key ethical questions in broad terms that have contemporary relevance. His historicization of the moral framework of evolutionary theory poses key issues for those in sociobiology and evolutionary pscyhology, not to mention bioethicists, who have recycled many of the suppositions that Weikart has traced.” —H-Net review on H-Ideas
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“. . . Richard Weikart’s excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable chapter of cultural and intellectual history . . .” —National Review
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“This important work of intellectual history will act as a catalyst for rethinking the scientific and social forces that shaped the racial policies of the Third Reich.” —Choice
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“This book will prove to be an invaluable source for anyone wondering how closely linked Social Darwinism and Nazi ideologies, especially as uttered by Hitler, really were.” —German Studies Review
It would seem that these Darwinian Evolutionists are honing up their skills of — Eugenics — first on those in positions of education and science and other public areas, to “do away with them” as “useless eaters” in society.... LOL...
After those comes the practice of Eugenics on the rest of those in society.