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."
then eugenics/genocide is also competely natural part of evolution just 'environmental variables'.
I take that wording to mean, they saw it interfered (egocentric none the less) by selecting (sematics???)against their population leading them into extinction...and took active role to be the 'superior' race.
I would say it's just better hidden. Sweden has been sterilizing retarded people for some time. I'm not clear whether they ever quit. Here in the States, birth control is a requirement for living in a group home.
I don't know of any culture that hasn't practiced eugenics, if only passively.
Eugenics is the study of attempting to improve the human race by selective breeding; its rationale is to remove bad or deleterious genes from the population. Scientific racism attempted to identify good or beneficial genes, as well as bad or deleterious genes, based upon human racial characteristics. So, eugenics was hardly a goal, it is a process, a means to an end. And, that end was, in German, "Hoherentwicklung," a higher state of evolution.
> I don't know of any culture that hasn't practiced eugenics, if only passively.
The US does to this day. Consider: I'm ugly and weird. And the hot wimmins just refuse to breed with me. This is thus eugenics, with the end result of breeding fewer weird ugly people.
That's called female choice. Darwin called it sexual selection.
Doesn't really eliminate ugliness, though. As with the war on terror, the defenders only have to make one mistake.
"I would say it's just better hidden."
Better hidden, since the advent of WWII, because ... ? Has the practice been adjudged as lacking scientific merit?
Also from Chapter 5, "The Descent Of Man:"
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment…Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
> That's called female choice.
No it's not. It's eugenics, pure and simple. Just like removing religious texts from courthouses is persecution of Christians. So there.
> Doesn't really eliminate ugliness, though.
Sure. Some fugly guys are *rich*.
You stated the goal, "improve the human race." The process wouldn't make sense without the goal. There can be many ways to attempt to "improve the human race." So the definition of the ultimate goal doesn't really describe or constrain the methods or process along any specific lines.
Chance mutation and natural selection, Darwin's theory of evolution, doesn't really apply to human intervention in breeding. So we're really getting far afield of Darwin's theory anyhow.
And can you find anything factually inaccurate in that quote from Darwin? Society and technology *have* allowed those who otherwise would have died from genetic defects to grow up and reproduce.
Had I been born a thousand years ago, my crappy eyesight would have led me to walk right into a band of barbarians.
The Nazi practice of killing the brightest, most talented and productive members of society lacks scientific merit.
There's some current public policy based on the notion that we shouldn't be increasing welfare payments every times someone has another child.
Eugenics takes many shapes and forms. If your highest goal is survival of the species, diversity is probably more valuable than purity. Science doesn't set these kinds of goals; it merely describes how things work.
You really don't understand that criticizing D. James Kennedy is not the same as criticizing Christianity? Maybe this discussion stuff isn't really your thing.
Entwicklung in German means a number of different things, including development, production or generation, or processing. 'Höherentwicklung' (sp!) usually just means a more advanced stage of development. There is no necessary connotation with biological evolution.
Jones became a student pastor for Somerset Methodist Church in 1952. On the side, he would visit and invite people from predominately black churches to attend his services. His message of integration and equality was an odd quality for a white preacher in the '50s. Eventually he'd built up a large enough following that he split off into a new independent church, the “People’s Temple.” Shortly afterward he became an ordained minister under the Disciples of Christ (DoC).
He was always part of the radical fringe of liberal Christianity up to that point.
At the time, Disciples of Christ claimed one and a half million members. Hardly a "fringe".
Two years after his ordination he wrote a book entitled The Letter Killeth
The title was "The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Giveth LIFE".
which rejected the inerrancy of the Bible,
It pointed out the inconsistencies, errors, indecencies in the Bible, particularly the KJV.
All well known and acknowledged by Christians today, except for literal fundamatists.
calling it "myths",
the word 'myth' (your quote) is not found in the "The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Giveth LIFE".
declared that Jesus was not God and not the Messiah,
Nope.
... not even those who had lived and worked with him for four years recognized the very same Jesus when he appeared in a different likeness on the road as His followers departed from the tomb. Imagine! they thought they had been speaking with a gardener.7 Can you not see the mystery? God never appears the same way twice.
He was disfellowshipped from the Disciples of Christ.
Nope. The DoC has a congregational "bottom-up" hierarchy. There's no central authority to 'dis-fellowship' a member church. It was expected that Jones' church would be voted out of the organization at the next General Assembly, but that hadn't happen before the events in Guyana.
Hitler's public acts of promoting the anti-Christian work of Alfred Rosenberg as the Reich's official philosophy,
Privately, Hitler was close to Rosenberg's views, but in public, he had to distance himself to curry favor with the Catholic and Protestant churches.
his requirement that all members of his SS engage in specifically pagan rituals
That was neo-pagan Himmler.
and his appointment of an openly anti-Christian pagan as head minister of the State Church
Nope. Ludwig Müller was little known Lutheran minister until the NSDAP "helped" him get elected to the position of Reich Bishop of the Deutsche Christen (DC) in 1933.
- a man who publicly suggested that the Bible on the pulpit of each state church be officially replaced with a copy of Mein Kampf
Nope. That was Rosenberg and atheist Martin Bormann.
- all this is proof to me of Hitler's actual religious convictions and it was obvious to millions of German Christians as well.
Indeed.
"The Nazi practice of killing the brightest, most talented and productive members of society lacks scientific merit."
Suffice it to say, they would not have agreed, as they believed themselves to be the brightest, most talented and productive members of their society. You're engaging in historicism, here. Applying our values and logic to early-mid-twentieth century Germany will certainly lead to a confused understanding of the actual nature of that time and place.
You asked about scientific validity. You didn't ask about pseudoscientific validity.
Physics continues to work, even if individuals peddle free energy machines. Eugenics works, even if some versions are politically or morally unacceptable, and some versions simply stupid.
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