Posted on 06/14/2009 5:38:00 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Whitewashing Darwinism's Ongoing Moral Legacy
Is it somehow petty, offensive, exploitative, and beyond the pale to point out how the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, who murdered a guard on Wednesday, writes about evolution in his sick manifesto? Should it be considered beneath one's dignity to quote the man and let his words speak for themselves?
James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist, who served more than 6 years in a federal prison for attempted kidnapping. All this is fair game to report. Everyone agrees to that. But the fact that he writes of "Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool" -- that's somehow inappropriate to note in public?
That seems to be the message from the media, which has ignored the fact, and from some readers who have responded to my blog on the subject. I realize the topic is uncomfortable for all sides in the evolution debate. So let's try to step back and consider this rationally.
It's historically undeniable that Darwinian thinking forms a thread linking some of the most reprehensible social movements of the past 150 years. I and many other people, including professional historians (which I'm not), have written about this repeatedly and from many different angles. By all means check out my own most recent contributions on the theme of "Darwin's Tree of Death."
From Darwin's own musings on the logic of genocide, to his cousin Francis Galton's influential advocacy of eugenics, to the Darwin/monkey statuette on Lenin's desk, to Hitler's Mein Kampf with its evolutionary theme, to the biology textbook at the center of the Scopes trial that advocated racism and eugenics, to the modern eugenics movement right here in the U.S., to recent school shootings in which the student murderers invoked natural selection, to yesterday's tragedy at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and much more along the way -- the thread is persistent, if widely ignored.
Should it be ignored? No, it shouldn't. I will give you an analogy. Our culture is very comfortable reminding us often of atrocities committed in the name of religion -- whether it's the Crusades, the Inquisition, or 9/11. Ironically, the day of the Holocaust Museum shooting, an interesting new Jewish web magazine, Tablet, published a fascinating scholarly essay by Paula Fredriksen about how under the Nazis, some German theologians tried to fit Jesus into a Nazi mold. They drew on anti-Jewish writings widely available in Christian tradition.
Is it "beyond the pale" to point this out? No, of course not. So what's the difference? I would say it's not only appropriate to document the dark side of religion. It's necessary. The Anti-Defamation League commented on the Holocaust Museum shooting, pointing to this "reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger."
Exactly. It's also the case that ideas have consequences and knowing those consequences can rightly prompt us to look with renewed skepticism at a given idea, whether religious or scientific. 9/11 was a good reason to go back and take a second look at Islam. Not to reject it, but to consider it critically. The Crusades are a good reason to do the same with Christianity. Not to reject it, but to think twice. That's all.
Why would the incredibly popular and influential work called Mein Kampf not be a reason to think twice about Darwinism? Not to reject it, but to get yourself properly informed and make up your own mind rather than simply go along with the prestige culture and media view.
The legacy of Mein Kampf included the murder of 6 million Jews. As Richard Weikart meticulously documents in From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's book was part of a stream of intellectual influence that began with Darwin and continued through to Hitler. It's with us today and it played a part in the demented thinking of James von Brunn, "a peripheral but well-respected figure among American white supremacists," as the ADL notes.
If you want a good chill, Google the phrase "natural selection" as it appears on the popular neo-Nazi website Stormfront.org. Here, I've done it for you.
It doesn't negate the point to remind me that Hitler put his own wicked spin on kindly Charles Darwin's words, one that Darwin himself would absolutely repudiate. Nor that evolutionists like James von Brunn have a crude grasp of evolutionary theory. Nor that today's evolutionary scientists, unlike their fairly recent predecessors, do not truck with racism (though some certainly do truck with anti-religious agitation, reserving special venom for the God of the Hebrew Bible).
All these same things could be said about religion-based haters of today and centuries past. They too distort their tradition. Yet they emerge from it, and so, again, that's a sound reason to give a second, skeptical look to the relevant religious traditions.
What's not reasonable is to give Darwinism's social influence a special pass, forbidding any mention of it as somehow out of bounds. Very far from reasonable indeed, it's nothing less than a cover-up.
INTREP
==So, this shooting is blamed on evolution?
If you read the article at all, you obviously didn’t read it very carefully...otherwise, you wouldn’t allow yourself to make such obviously erroneous statements....unless, of course, as an Evo you view honesty as nothing more than an illusion generated by chance plus survival.
I am sorry that your faith is so shallow that it is threatened by a theory.
When you want to make a serious argument, let me know.
Well, Darwinists of today never go over the question that Darwin’s theory would implicitly ask: do we have a common ancestor or did we have a yet higher and better ancestor who went astray and mated with apes yielding our current “multicultural” kind?
Communists and Nazis completely agree on our “multiculturality”, by the way. For some reason Nazi self hate stopped short of submitting to their own laws of killing their own “impure”. Communist self hate stops short of commiting themselves to the wilderness they claim they survive best. Nazism is also more homosexual in inclination yet forbade it allegedly. Communists’ humaneness also allows for homosexual behavior yet has little concern for the human condition of those submiting to the behavior. Communist self-sufficiency and progressist themes also contradict their goals of honoring the “savage man” theory origins of ours (notwithstanding that he can be savage yet enjoy fruits of modernity in humane ways etc.)
In any case, quick quoters of Darwin in Darwin’s favor are hypocriticaly quick to also unsubscribe their own lives from it. The ideologue again avoids first hand litteracy and avoids the conflict of interest issues. The “meat-o-logies” of this flesh above that (Nazis), or this flesh for that flesh (equalitarianists) often avoid hard questions of prudent policy and care for the improvement of the health and healing of the sick, including themselves. It’s ridculous but modernity is but a thin artificial convenience hiding strangely well our inherent recent primitiveness from memory. It’s all repressed subconsciously yet there and never healed, ready to spring out any minute into orgies of genocide at the hands of day dreamers whose power wielding abilities allow them to stay aloof or imagining with very live lives.
Darwood’s materialist creation myth isn’t even a theory. It is, as E. Mayr points out, nothing more than a long argument, completely devoid of observable, repeatable data...hatched by a med-school dropout, turned clergy dropout, turned amateur naturalist...who had a religious axe to grind which amounted to nothing more than “God didn’t do it.”
I never see evolutionists make up inane arguments like these to support their ideas. Pathetic!
“I show how Darwin himself in The Descent of Man provided the rationale for what became the eugenics movement”
—The eugenics movement wasn’t at all popular until the early 20th century. The reason is that the true rationale didn’t exist until the discovery of Mendelism. As Davenport put it in 1911:
“Formerly, when we believed that factors blend, a characteristic in the germ plasm of a single individual among thousands seemed not worth considering: it would soon be lost in the melting pot. But now we know that unit characters do not blend”
So if one is looking for someone to blame, don’t forget Mendel.
“True, Darwin does goes (sic) on to indicate that we can’t follow the dictates of “hard reason” in such cases without undermining our “sympathy… the noblest part of our nature.” But such misgivings represented a lame objection at best.”
—“Lame”? Apparently the Discovery Institute is now publishing articles in defense of Social Darwinism. The author of this article is much more of a Social Darwinist than Darwin.
Darwin didn’t think such compassion was lame. Darwin donated money throughout his life to aid missionary work which aided the poor and contributed to abolitionist organizations. I guess that was all “lame” of him.
he’s a one trick pony desperately searching for approval from his mutual admiration society.
“Darwood’s materialist creation myth isn’t even a theory. It is, as E. Mayr points out, nothing more than a long argument, completely devoid of observable, repeatable data...”
—Mayr was quoting Darwin, who in Origin called the book “one long argument” because it incorporates observed data from myriad fields of science (biogeography, comparative anatomy, embryology, taxonomy, paleontology, etc) and explains it all under a single theory.
“who had a religious axe to grind which amounted to nothing more than “God didn’t do it.”
—A religious axe to grind? What evidence is there of that? He was married to a Christian, had his children go to church, donated money to missionaries, even donated money to have churches built, and the reason he waited so long to publish his theory was probably out of fear of offending anyone. As I’ve said before, psychology and mind reading are not your strong suit.
Though his rantings are garbage Freud's ideas have become ingrained in the thinking of evolutionary psychology.
Seems to me you could make an equally strong—or equally ludicrous—case that Brunner was advocating that people reproduce after their own kinds. He must have been strongly influenced by the Bible.
Back then Barbarians had more luxurious lives, however. So there was some usage of religion needed by some for the sole sake of not looking Barbarian. Now modernity has allowed such people to discard religion as being “antiquated” in their goal of looking less barbaric. Additional Faustian deals with such as Darwin and other vulgarized “sciences” have yielded their poor results of temporary empowerments.
What is Christianity? What were the Crusades’ intent? Christianity is not sectarian against those letting it be, but certainly will shake dust from under its foot when crossing hostile illiterate groups. Jesus did not employ force but nor submited to it, God forbid, for it is the same. He also forbade Himself and others the testing of God: life is not some game, but something to undertake in its earnestness, even if it is meant to be met temporarily in flesh. Thus He did not fling himself down a cliff when tempted by the Devil, nor did He come down from the cross as when taunted to use divine powers. In fact He avoided being part of such barbarity and descent into participation or life in lawlessness, illiteracy or repent to His tormentors.
Before His crucifiction He also gave the disciples blessings to carry money, weapons and legal documentation, and other enforcement means for their own self defense, knowing all along that they still did not understand what He was doing.
Christianity is definitely a defended faith in all aspects, a language of variables (whereas the OT is lived by physical example of such application of variables) and motivating in litteracy of all such things. It does not impose a music to its followers, save for its formative church stages, but ultimately seeks to inspire music from its “followers”/leaders.
In short, survival of the fittest. Sounds like Darwinism not creationism.
Carroll H., is that you?
==I have an Uncle who is a certified lunatic.
Must be a Darwiniac.
Hitler believed that through selective breeding that a “kind” could change somewhat and improve, but that speciation was not possible. He makes this clear in both his public writings and in his more private utterances.
In short, precisely what most Creationists agree with.
I put together a post explaining this here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2259552/posts?page=43#43
Nope, your flavor.
Creationists are the definition of sanity, everybody knows that d:op
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