Posted on 08/22/2006 2:04:20 PM PDT by js1138
ADL Blasts Christian Supremacist TV Special & Book Blaming Darwin For Hitler
New York, NY, August 22, 2006 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today blasted a television documentary produced by Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries that attempts to link Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to Adolf Hitler and the atrocities of the Holocaust. ADL also denounced Coral Ridge Ministries for misleading Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute for the NIH, and wrongfully using him as part of its twisted documentary, "Darwin's Deadly Legacy."
After being contacted by the ADL about his name being used to promote Kennedy's project, Dr. Collins said he is "absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy's program utterly misguided and inflammatory," he told ADL.
ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement:"This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.
"It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of 'Christian Supremacists' who seek to "reclaim America for Christ" and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law."
The documentary is scheduled to air this weekend along with the publication of an accompanying book "Evolution's Fatal Fruit: How Darwin's Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions."
A Coral Ridge Ministries press release promoting the documentary says the program "features 14 scholars, scientists, and authors who outline the grim consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution and show how his theory fueled Hitler's ovens."
There are millions of liberals in this country who view the number 1 problem in the world as overpopulation of the human race. Many of them rationally believe that if a few billion people would die earth would be a better place. Of course as long as it was not them. In the absence of religion you can rationalize anything as being good.
But by using the term 'supremest' the ADL is engaging in the exact same idiocy, trying to link Christianity to the NAZI's.
On this very thread, we have a poster from an obscure sect of Christianity who rationalizes slavery as being good. Of course, other Christians have rationalized it as being evil. In fact, just 150 years ago, most of our major Protestant churches split over the issue. One must conclude that from religion you can rationalize anything as being good.
This thread is about a misguided attempt to blame Nazism on science, using fraudulent documents.
Free Republic should be somewhat sensitive to to use of fraudulent documents.
D. James Kennedy is not 'Christianity'.
Guilt by association is a tactic leftists decry when it was used by the anti-Communists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet it is a tool they use with great frequency and no shame.
You need to parade yourself before our resident Christian fundamentalists, and they will deign to tell you if you're an authentic Jew or not.
And then they're distinctly resentful that ADL is suspicious of fundamentalists!
"But by using the term 'supremest' the ADL is engaging in the exact same idiocy, trying to link Christianity to the NAZI's."
But js1138 favors pinning Nazism upon Christians, so fraudulence isn't quite so protest-worthy.
I missed your concern for when Dan Brown used fraudulant documents to slander Christianity in the Da Vinci Code. Oh I know it was 'fiction', but it was touted as being based on facts.
This thread is about a misguided attempt to blame Nazism on science, using fraudulent documents.
Free Republic should be somewhat sensitive to to use of fraudulent documents.
Point to where I have defended the DaVinci code. I haven't read it and have no interest in it. I understand, however, it is a work of fiction, like the documents being discussed here.
The difference is that, in this case, a well known clergyman is participating in a fraud. Not merly a writer of fiction trying to make a quick buck.
It is about the connection between National Socialism and the racial theorists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau, Madison Grant, and others who applied Darwin's theory of natural selection to the human species. The influence of the "scientific racists" on Hitler and his cohorts is undeniable and well-documented.
using fraudulent documents
Whether the book, Conversations With Hitler, was fraudulent is unknown. None of the posters who have denounced the book have proven that it was a fraud. In any case, National Socialism derived its beliefs from a number of sources: the distorted Darwinism of the so-called scientific racists; the concepts of superman and the will to power from Nietzsche; class warfare concepts smuggled in from Marxist and utopian socialism; the romantic nationalism of the 19th Century. In numerous statements of Hitler and his associates and through many actions of the Third Reich, there was a palpable hostility to Christian churches and Christian theology. Unlike the Soviet Communists, the National Socialists took some pains to hide their anti-Christian bias in their public statements.
Free Republic should be somewhat sensitive to to use of fraudulent documents.
FR should also be sensitive to attempts to smuggle leftist ideology, such as the idea that National Socialism derived from, and was even a logical consequence of, historic Christianity and Western culture, into a conservative forum.
It's amazing that you would have to point out to nominally educated people the following two facts:
(1) The Torah is a Jewish document, written in Hebrew, that predated the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
(2) There is no agreed-upon secular standard of morality. It is all completely random opinionating.
To which I will append some other observations:
(1) The morality of Darwinism is simple: there is no morality - the fundamental reality of life is that the fittest survive. Therefore, human beings must maximize their fitness in order to survive and any behavior which maximizes this fitness is imperative. There is no right or wrong - there is survival and there is extinction.
(2) Hitler was not a Christian of any description nor a believer in the Bible. You made reference to Alfred Rosenberg, the individual whom Hitler entrusted with the task of authoring the official, state-sanctioned statement of Nazi ideology, entitled The Myth Of The Twentieth Century.
Rosenberg's work is explicitly anti-Christian and explicitly promotes an "enlightened" philosophical form of paganism.
Would a Christian make the possession of a specifically anti-Christian book a necessity for members of his political party? Would a Christian make the performance of specific pagan rites based on such a book mandatory for members of his personal bodyguard and the state's special forces?
The answer to both questions is obviously no.
(3) There is a clear link between Darwin and Hitler. One of Hitler's favorite books was The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Hitler eulogized this man in an official party address as "The Prophet Of The Third Reich" and suggested that reading his book was an essential part of any Nazi's philosophical education.
Chamberlain was an Englishman who was such a Germanophile that he became a German citizen, married Richard Wagner's daughter and wrote all his works in German - including anti-English propaganda during WWI.
Chamberlain was a "scientific" racist who drew upon Gobineau, Darwin, Galton in support of his theories.
It's obvious that the title of Roseberg's official Nazi monograph is a play on the title of Chamberlain's book.
Hitler championed the work of Roseberg and Chamberlain, Roseberg drew on Chamberlain's theories for his work and Chamberlain drew on Darwin and others for his work.
It was their choice to make the allianace, and, therefore association, not mine.
This whole thread is a guilt-by-(false)association thread, claiming that Hitler was interested in evolution when he specifically stated that Aryans were created by God as a superior race and wanted to "purify" them by selective breeding.
I'm more than old enough to remember WWII and don't need revisionist nonsense.
I think you mean to say "some" Christian Fundamentalists. Not all by any means have the attitude you describe.
Certainly they have. The Original German does not contain the key statements denouncing Christianity.
You are sucking FreeRpublic into the slime pit with Dan Rather and CBS.
when you suddenly have third hand translations of remembered conversations between two mass murderers -- that contradict every recorded and published statement by them -- the least you can do is go back to the original language.
On the face of it, the statement is self-evident. Kennedy is not Christianity, nor is any one individual, even Jesus Christ or the Apostle Paul. However, if you mean to say that Kennedy is not Christian, please explain where his teachings, or those of the conservative Calvinist denomination (Presbyterian Church in America) to which he belong differ from Scripture.
Why do you think he hated Darwinism?
You get A but not B and C.
He probably never heard the word "Darwinism" in his life.
Selective breeding is not anti-Darwin any more than beer or pizza is.
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