Quote:
Originally Posted by chtulu
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Is it ever fair to hold a historical figure personally responsible for all the future unbidden and unforeseeable consequences of all that he or she has said or done? Was Jesus responsible for the Inquisition or Muhammad for 9/11? Can we blame Newton and his laws of motion for the damage caused by cruise missiles? And even where one can establish a chain of causal links between scientific discoveries and their subsequent abuses, does this mean that we must belittle the discovery or close down future research?
Protestant Christians are on the shakiest ground when using this argument, as it allows us to indict Martin Luther for the Holocaust, with his On The Jews and their Lies (1543), which was avidly quoted by Hitler. Chillingly, the first of ten recommendations from Luther was “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools...” Should we really blame Luther for Kristallnacht?
In fact, Nazi ideology was derived from a range of ideas and beliefs, which included anti-Semitism, militaristic Nationalism, anti-Capitalism and anti-Communism. The Nazis also blended a distorted German Christian tradition with Nordic mythology and derived their zest for eugenics as much from ancient Sparta as from any modern sources. The influence of evolutionary thinking on Hitler was, if anything, very minor: nowhere in Mein Kampf does he mention Darwin, natural selection or biological evolution. In fact, in the first edition of the book, Hitler comes across as a young Earth creationist, claiming at one point that “this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men”.
The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.
Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
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http://www.zimbio.com/Richard+Dawkin...onomics+Hitler |
You need to re-read that article, because it's not saying what you think it is. It's arguing that the abuses of scientific discoveries are not grounds for belittling or ceasing scientific exploration, and that you can't use events like the Holocaust to tarnish the theory of evolution.
I agree completely. It's exactly the point I've been making regarding religion. The fact that someone misinterprets something and uses it for evil does not make the entire institution evil. If the US government comes out with a law that "Man may not harm other man", and some asshole interprets that to mean crimes against women are legal, is the US government the problem? Of course not. When you talk about religion, you act as if it's some hyper-organized ruling party. Who determines what is "religion"? In the opinion of the vast majority of religious people in America, it's some combination of God (and His scripture), Jesus, and Mohammad. If you can find me a single quote in the Old or New Testament, or from the lips of Jesus or Mohammad, that addresses abortion or stem cell research, we can call off this argument. The fact is, no such quote exists. It's a Rorschach test. If you read the Bible and determine abortion is ungodly, it's because you were pro-life before you ever sat down with the book. Similarly, if you believe in ethnic cleansing and eugenics, it's because you were a bigot before you knew the difference between a dominant and recessive allele.