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."
Your quote credits Darwin with the invention of a term and goes on to cite an abberant political policy that employes the term.
That is like crediting newton for the behavior raelians.
When grammatical nitpicking does not work, you revert to silly pictures. Very good.
I admire your library of pictures and skill in posting them.
Actually, the linkage of Drawin to Hilter could be correct, but it is still ad hominem -- if the intent is to discredit Dariwn's theory of evolution by that process.
Ad hominem is a fallacy of irrlevance. Its form is to discredit the man. But in actuality, that's irrelevant to the correctness or incorrectness of his theory.
If we assume that Hitler derived all of his evil notions from Darwin, it still doesn't say that the theory of evolution is scientifially in error. The link between Hitler and Darwin would have some historic interest, but no scientific usefulness.
I agree that many animals, especially the primates, show ethical behaviour. So much so that it is obvious that the difference between our behaviour and theirs is a matter of degree. However that degree is very large.
"Actually some social insects will also self sacrifice for the colony."
I understand that, but it has nothing to do with my questions.
"So are bacterium who do not self sacrifice or otherwise have morals that I can tell, are bacterium not created by God because they have no morals ?"
How do you get that from my post? I said nothing about all creations of a God having morals. Nor did I say that all organisms without morals are not made by a God.
The statement I was questioning was 'If Evolution is true then there are no morals to follow'.
This is an untrue statement.
We as humans have a set of morals we consider worthy of following. Some consider them to be absolute in all respects, some consider them to be relative in all respects and still others consider them to be a collection of both absolute and relative morals.
Now, now matter where those morals originated, we *do* have them. They are a big part of our social structures.
God may have given them to us directly, God may have let us develop our own set of morals through Evolution or God may not exist and our morals are a direct result of Evolution. If God has not directly contributed to our morals then he/she can safely be ignored for this argument. This leaves us with two considerations. God exists and gave us our morals, or God does not exist and our morals are the product of a natural process. The only process we understand and recognize that is both necessary and sufficient to produce behaviour patterns in organisms is Evolution (the uppercase 'E' signifies I am speaking to biological evolution, not to abiogenesis or the evolution of stars or the Big Bang). There may be other natural processes out there that will do the job but we have yet to encounter them.
If God exists and we have a set of morals then God could have given them to us. He could also have produced many organisms to which he did not supply a set of morals. However this isn't my point.
If God does not exist (or allowed Evolution to supply us with morals) and we *do* have the set of morals we have, which some consider absolute but others do not, then those morals must be the product of a natural process. As mentioned above this, at this point, would be Evolution.
If Evolution is true and we are nothing more than technologically advanced apes our morals would not change since they must be the result of Evolution.
The argument that, without God, we would necessarily act out our 'animal nature' (to some this means acting like our ape relatives) is false.
Go ahead.
placemarker
> I admire your library of pictures...
OBB's Law:
By the time a crevo thread gets to 500 posts or so, its practical value in terms of rational discussion drops to nil.
Thus... pictures.
Then perhaps you would take the time to explain your argument. The fact that Hitler and Darwin are not here to post is completely irrelevant.
Using Hitler's behavior to discredit a branch of science makes no more sense than asserting Newton was wrong because the Raelians thought they could hitch a ride on a comet.
Hitler's behavior does not discredit Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Nor did the behavior of various Communist dictators who were unquestionably believers in evolution.
> I agree that many animals, especially the primates, show ethical behaviour. So much so that it is obvious that the difference between our behaviour and theirs is a matter of degree. However that degree is very large.
Agreed. Scarlet the cat (Google for the story) demonstrates that often enough *cats* show greater capacity for altruism and knowing self-sacrifice than humans.
> If Evolution is true and we are nothing more than technologically advanced apes our morals would not change since they must be the result of Evolution.
Untrue. The process of evolution has led to the human species beign able to examine possibilities and project outcomes such that we can have some fair notion of long-term cause and effect, with a consequence that we develop a sense of empathy. (This appears to be well in advance of what the other critters think, though until we develop telepathy, we can't be sure.) Also, humans have developed the ability to record history, and can thereby learn from the past as we project scenarios into the future.
Thus, morals may (and do) change over time, as the result of our ability to learn from the past. What worked, what did not, how do present and projected future conditions work into that.
200 years ago, slavery was moral. 150 years ago, exterminating entire, inoffensive mammalian species was moral. 100 years ago, the wimmins not voting was moral. 65 years ago, carpet bombing enemy cities was moral. Morals change as we advance and learn.
> By your law, you should have intervened about 100 posts ago.
I'm under no compuslion to intervene. I'm a conservative infidel. I let people do as they choose so long as they don't harm others.
> debating Zionist Conspirator...
An amusing waste of time, that is.
I'm not aware of any communists that promoted evolution. The competent Russian biologists were killed or imprisoned for teaching genetics.
"Scientific theories stand or fall on their logical merits, not on how human agents apply them."
Then why strain credulity, denying the (perhaps unforeseen) societal consequences of certain scientific theories? Everything I've read points to science having run, screaming, away from eugenics, once all the many Nazi atrocities began coming to light. Did eugenics fall on logical merit, or did the application of eugenics, taken to its logical extreme, create societal consequences so utterly inhuman, as to place eugenics into some special, pariah-class memory hole, for the scientific endeavors you'd rather forget?
Science describes processes. Eugenics is a goal -- a value judgement. Surely you can't pretend you don't know the difference.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.