D. James Kennedy: BUSTED!

Oh - What shysters would associate with *that* show?

Now for two completely random links:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archive...

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archive...

I think Coulter is being put on the back shelf, behind the can of beets, until after the elections, just as you see Republican candidates hiding their Republican affiliation on web sites and tucking the old pics of them with GW Bush into the bottom desk drawer. They still like to pull them out and look at them, but they don't want to be seen in public with them until after elction time.

Could it be that Coulter's never ending desperate need for attention has finally met its limit? Collins deserves a pat on the back despite his faith. He is not without some integrity. This certainly improves a dismal situation---slightly.

The fact that they're burying Coulter actually gives me a little twinge of hope. Hell, I'll take 'em where I can get 'em.

Wow... looks like they've lost the only two names with any street cred outside of their sad, incestuous little industry. I, too, am curious about the absence of Ann Coulter's name from the subsequent blurb.

Since when has a rightwing christian ever let a jewish person ever get in the way of their agenda?
The oil execs have been using Israel's security as an excuse to take over the middle east oilfields for years.
This incident won't even slow them down a bit.
In fact I say it'll embolden them like never before.
It'll piss off so many of the anti-semites on the right that they'll be making southern crosses by the thousands in no time.

MYOB'
.

Is it possible Coulter herself has withdrawn from the thing?

Perhaps Coulter was infuriated at having her name associated with such inflammatory propaganda and demanded that it be removed.

Dr. Collins was scammed by the scammer par excellence. Dr Kennedy. Fortunately for us we can call them on their lies and we see the results of that immediately. The best thing we can do is to pass this information about Kennedy to as many people as possible. He has marginalized himself by lying and now must be put in the spotlight. Why did Dr. Kennedy willfully lie? If this Darwin to Hitler idea has validity then why do so many scientists think it is such a detestable pile of nonsense? Dr. Kennedy has shown his true colors so many times before. Lying aobut this is just the type of xianity I expect from him. Maybe we should start by saying "From Liars for Xianity" The life and times of James Kennedy. Or "How to be Xian without changing a thing"

Well, it is well known what a stickler Coulter is for appropriate use of citations and quotes.

:O

Ann Coulter defines inflammatory propoganda.

"Perhaps Coulter was infuriated at having her name associated with such inflammatory propaganda and demanded that it be removed."

***Spit take**** Pshhshhhtttttttt!!!!!!!!

Nothing says that Mr Kennedy loves God more than the fact that he's breaking the commandments of "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness," "Love Thy Neighbor," and "Thou Shalt Not Take The Lord's Name In Vain," in order to gain more power over his percieved enemies and make a profit while doing so.
...
Hypocrite.

Rich... what are those links? They seem broken.

Maybe Coulter was being injected into the program in the same way Collins was -- without her knowledge -- and when she found out she demanded an appearance fee. Just speculation.

Or maybe ... maybe so many people have been drawing little hitler moustaches on her book cover photo that Kennedy's crowd got queasy.

take 2..

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1448

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1432

(again, completely random)

Coral Ridge has fired back:

Apologies for posting their garbage.

http://www.coralridge.org/specialdocs/PR_ADL_Darwin.htm

Coral Ridge Ministries Answers Anti-Defamation League Blast Against New Darwin-Hitler TV Special
Fort Lauderdale, FL, August 22, 2006 -- Coral Ridge Ministries issued a call today for "more history and less hysteria" in response to harsh, unfounded Anti-Defamation League accusations leveled against a new Coral Ridge Ministries produced television special linking Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler.

The special, Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which airs August 26 and 27 nationwide features historians and scholars who connect the dots between Hitler and the ideas penned by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species and later works.

When ADL National Director Abe Foxman, who has not viewed our television program, calls it "twisted" and asserts that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people," he ignores the historical fact that Adolf Hitler was an evolutionist.

"Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist," according to historian Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and a featured guest on the Coral Ridge Ministries television special. "He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas," said Weikart.

British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith wrote in the 1940s: "The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution."

Even leading evolutionist Niles Eldredge freely admits the link between Darwin and Hitler. Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has written that "social Darwinism," which he regards as an illegitimate offspring of Darwin's theory, "has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II--where eugenics was invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other 'reasons' Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust."

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler's thought. It was a "central aspect of his worldview," according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the Darwin-Hitler nexus. "It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology."

The argument for evolution's impact on Hitler is strengthened by the fact that Darwinian thought heavily influenced Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hitler was hardly alone in his racist ideas fueled by Darwin and his intellectual progeny, who include Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics which was a critical component of the Nazi killing machine. Hitler, according to Weikart, "was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, and geneticists in Germany were preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century."

Dr. D. James Kennedy, President of Coral Ridge Ministries and host of Darwin's Deadly Legacy, stated, "We have had nearly 150 years of the theory of Darwinian evolution. And what has it brought us--whether Darwin intended it or not? Millions of deaths, the destruction of those deemed 'inferior,' the devaluing of human life, and increasing hopelessness. Darwin's legacy has been deadly indeed."

###

Coral Ridge Ministries has also published a companion book to the television special, Evolution's Fatal Fruit: How Darwin's Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions, which examines the social consequences of Darwin's theory. Written by Tom DeRosa, Executive Director of the Creation Studies Institute (an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries), the book explains how Hitler tried to use genocide to speed up evolution and reveals how the American eugenics movement is likewise indebted to Darwin.

To request review copies, or interviews with Dr. Kennedy, Darwin's Deadly Legacy producers Jerry Newcombe and John Rabe, or Evolution's Fatal Fruit author Tom DeRosa, please contact John Aman at j.aman@crministries.org or (954) 334-5330.

Coral Ridge Ministries is a Christian broadcasting organization with radio and television programming that reaches into 200 nations.

I transcribed all of the dialogue spoken by Ann Coulter in the lengthy promo for Darwin's Deadly Legacy that was broadcast last weekend after D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Hour. You can check it out in Liar, liar. She was prominently featured in that promo and is appears in the preview currently on the Coral Ridge website. I think you can expect to see Coulter's anti-evolution rant featured in Kennedy's propaganda video.

Coulter was taken off the list so it'll be a surprise when she jumps naked out of the cake shaped like the 10 Commandments tablets.

Oh, crap, now I blew the surprise, too.

Maybe Coulter was being injected into the program in the same way Collins was -- without her knowledge -- and when she found out she demanded an appearance fee.

Probably. Or she objected to being in an idiotic propaganda stunt that she didn't come up with?

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler's thought. It was a "central aspect of his worldview," according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the Darwin-Hitler nexus.

You know, California State University, Stanislaus, in the Central Valley city of Turlock, is a nice little college. I have good friends who teach there. Still, Turkey Tech is not the place to find "leading scholars" on the burning issues of the day. This shows the lengths to which Kennedy and his Ministry of Truth have to go in order to dress up their lies with a veneer of scholarship.

"Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist,"

I wonder if they'll mention that Darwin wasn't a social Darwinist.

Coral Ridge Ministries Answers Anti-Defamation League Blast Against New Darwin-Hitler TV Special
Fort Lauderdale, FL, August 22, 2006

Aw rats, I thought Kennedy would be turning over a new leaf after he got busted. I thought his next documentary would be called From Luther to Hitler or something. I thought he would be sprouting wings so he could fly out of his own

Wow... looks like they've lost the only two names with any street cred outside of their sad, incestuous little industry. I, too, am curious about the absence of Ann Coulter's name from the subsequent blurb.

While I have no personal stake in the issue, this comment is such a vicious, hateful slander that I feel as a human being I must speak against it.

...comparing these Demented Fuckwits to the incestuous is slandering the incestuous. :P

Or [Coulter] objected to being in an idiotic propaganda stunt that she didn't come up with?

Kayla--If that's the case, you have to wonder if Kennedy asked anyone's permission before dragging their names into this televised cesspool?

I wonder if they'll mention that Darwin wasn't a social Darwinist.

Have they ever noticed that Christ wasn't a Christian?

Perhaps Coulter was infuriated at having her name associated with such inflammatory propaganda and demanded that it be removed.

I seriously doubt it. Coulter spells "inflammatory propaganda" O-X-Y-G-E-N.

I suspect Gerry L's hypothesis is nearer the mark.

A few regular posters here and on PT have shown in hitler's own words that he thought he was doing Christian work. Maybe those posters could send the relevant quotations to CRM?

Richard Weikart should be appalled too.

I thought Weikart's book was, itself, a PR production of the Discovery Institute -- they certainly flacked it like it was, even awarding him "fellow" status. (Do all these evil things lead back to Discovery Institute?)

I wonder how it is that German historians decided Hitler got his stuff from Darwin, when Hitler himself denied it. I wonder if Weikart, like most other Discovery Institute Fellows, has citation difficulties. Has anyone ever read his book? Anyone?

Oh, and now he's citing Niles Eldredge? Does Eldredge know that?

Plus, Red State Rabble had an exchange with Weikart, which shows, to my understanding, that Weikart has no compunction against putting words in Darwin's mouth. He quotes Darwin out of context, and then stretches to put new, dastardly meanings to what Darwin actually said. For example, when Darwin laments that aboriginals will probably be reduced in number by collisions with European cultures with guns, Weikart accuses Darwin of advocating the stuff Darwin actually laments.

Go see: http://tinyurl.com/m6qja

I've read bits of Weikart's essays from his site. He is a very fuzzy thinker. Or
at least a fuzzy writer. I hope he's a fuzzy thinker, otherwise he is dishonest,
in the way he says that Darwinism must be overthrown or else you'll have to
kill your babies. Or something like that. He's full of dark implications, short
on actual application to the real world.

rich

So Darwinism has negative implications for human nature. Freudianism does too, I guess. All this materialistic science looks at man and sees him as a wretched, animalistic cretin. Even if it doesn't presume to posit ethical axioms.

Tell me again, how does this differ from the concept of original sin?

Sure, it's called Eugenics. It's nothing new, and didn't start with Hitler, nor Darwin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
People have always wanted to "improve" or "protect" the human race, or some small subset of it. The problem has always been, who gets to decide who is "superior", and who is allowed to breed or live? As an "enlightened" society, we've come to the conclusion that this isn't something we want to do, because it has lots of potential for abuse. That's why today we have the whole field of bioethics. Our scientific knowledge provides the potential for abuse, and so we remain on guard to prevent such abuse. Just because someone like Hitler takes an idea to its darkest extreme, doesn't mean that the idea is the "cause" of their monstrous acts, any more than a piece of knowledge is the "cause" of an act of virtuosity. It's the person, not the knowledge that's to blame.

Nerve agents are the source of seriously nasty chemical weapons. Yet anyone can buy them off the store shelves as insecticides. Should we demonize the developers of insecticides because some people use that knowledge to kill other people? Fire is a very useful took but some people use fire to kill other people.

Get over it.

All this materialistic science looks at man and sees him as a wretched, animalistic cretin.

Science does no such thing, that's just a lie you believe.

What Eugenicists fail to realize is that if a people aren't fit to live, they probably wouldn't be living. And if you breed the best people into a slightly better people and send the SBP's into war so that they might die, you lose the genes for the slightly better people and then the entire race would be slightly less good.

Max Udargo:

There are a lot of ways one could answer your question, but I think the most obvious answer is this: the evolutionary endorsement of common descent (and hence our animal nature) is based on facts about the natural world, and speaks to our unity with the rest of life, and this can be a very ennobling conception. Original sin is not based on facts, and claims that we are by our nature in someway degraded, alienated and isolated from the rest of Creation. It is, to put it mildly, not ennobling.

Comments? Scott

PZ:

If, as we hope, the dog-and-pony show from Kennedy's outfit is "blowing up in their faces", it is only because a lot of us stood together shoulder-to-shoulder in support of evolution, and took steps to take the challenge to them. I thank you for doing your part.

Scott

I don't know, maybe I'm just bored, but I am looking forward to watching the outcome of this trainwreck when it is aired. Is it too much to hope for that this destroys the careers of these shills? Probably...

Too bad the "donations" on coral ridge's website for acquiring the DVD and book are not voluntary like they are over at FotF....

This is just another case of the ADL pushing its personal agenda. Foxman considers himself and his organization as the final arbiter on how to use the Holocaust. Please consult him before you can say anything about it.

At its origin, ADL was an honest organization working for Americans, now it lobbies primarily for Israel. From their site,

"ADL seeks to explain the political and security issues confronting Israel, educates about the complexities of the peace process, urges support of Israel and explains why a strong Israel is important and valuable to the United States and the Western world. The League also combats efforts to delegitimize Israel by the Arab world, the international community and the media."

http://www.adl.org/focus_sheets/focus_overview.asp

This is typical self-serving ADL propaganda.

the evolutionary endorsement of common descent (and hence our animal nature) is based on facts about the natural world, and speaks to our unity with the rest of life, and this can be a very ennobling conception.

Another way of looking at it: While the naturalistic depiction is of humanity as being an animal like all other animals, humanity nonetheless has mananged to develop greater intelligence, imagination, and compassion than our nearest species relatives.

That doesn't mean that more should be read into that than there is: evolution did not have that as a goal, nor does evolution always mean mental uplift and improvement, nor do all of the individuals of humanity exhibit those better qualities. But progress does exist as a possibility; out of all of the potential results of evolutionary variations, there is hope for improvement in the natural world, and in a species' ability to understand the world and cooperate with each other.

The idea of original sin is ultimately a despairing one: That the best of God's creatures, by one single action, utterly destroyed all hope of goodness in this world, tainting it with a pollution that utterly stains it even today. There is the further sense that God has withdrawn from his creation, and the absolute best that he can do about the taint in the natural world is to eventually utterly destroy the world and every living thing in it.

Coulter probably didnt object to being used without her permission in a propoganda piece. She probably objected to not being paid.

Take a look at Coral Ridge's experts.
http://www.coralridge.org/darwin/experts.asp?ID=crm&ec=I1301

Coulter was taken off the list so it'll be a surprise when she jumps naked out of the cake shaped like the 10 Commandments tablets.

Oh, crap, now I blew the surprise, too.

If Coulter jumps naked out of a cake, the audience might face some other, more profound surprises.

But back (sorta) on topic:

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler's thought. It was a "central aspect of his worldview," according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the Darwin-Hitler nexus. "It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology."

Utter tripe. But wait! It can be salvaged with a bit of text replacement:
s/[evolution|Darwin]/Wagner/

Too bad the "donations" on coral ridge's website for acquiring the DVD and book are not voluntary like they are over at FotF....

You can get the show's compainion book, "Evolution's Fatal Fruit", for a donation of $1, but the DVDs & tapes all have fixed minimums.

I wonder how many of these right-wing nuts are social darwinists themselves? Don't they realize that selection among variants by competition underlie both evolution and capitalism? If they really believe their own argument against evolution, shouldn't they also be against capitalism?

At its origin, ADL was an honest organization working for Americans, now it lobbies primarily for Israel.

Patty Buchanan, is that you?

"You can get the show's compainion book, "Evolution's Fatal Fruit", for a donation of $1, but the DVDs & tapes all have fixed minimums."

Cheap bas#@&%s! Guess I won't be adding their stuff to my eBay account. FotF is MUCH more generous.

This whole situation, just like all creationists activities, boils down to them attempting to "prove" the existence of their God by disproving established scientific fact. Of course they have no qualms with lying and cheating to advance their aims. I mean seriously, is their God that weak? Is he that puny that they have to lie to prove he exists? What does that say about their faith? What does that say about their God?

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.

I am shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Has anyone inundated CRM's site with disapproving letters yet? I propose we do so and make a case out of this ASAP.

Oh, and now he's citing Niles Eldredge? Does Eldredge know that?

I am wondering the same thing, and I hope someone will contact him to find out what he thinks. He's not in my Rolodex.

Someone needs to write up something for the mainstream press and really make this thing come around and bite CRM inthe ass.

If, as they assert, (ab)using a scientifc theory about the diversity of life to support extermination of large groups of people makes the theory bad/evil/whatever, then things like 9/11 can, with much less mental gymnastics, quite easily lead us to the idea that religion is bad/evil/whatever, right?? :D

Of course, we know how they will react, but they want to eat their cake and have it too, and we should not let them get away with this very obvious hypocrisy.

Cheers.

Why is the ADL concerned only about Collins? There are probably other people featured in the show who do not want to be in it, either.

I think that under the "fair use" doctrine, Collins and others might not have any legal recourse if Coral Ridge Ministries insists on including them in the program against their will.

To me, the most important question is whether the historical facts presented in the show are accurate. Which historical facts are selected and how they are interpreted are different matters.

I feel that the connections between social Darwinism and Nazism should be discussed openly. There is no question in my mind that social Darwinism or something similar influenced the Nazis, but I feel that this TV show exaggerates that influence. And I don't feel that this influence counts against Darwinism -- Darwinism should be evaluated just on its own scientific merits.

ADL's Foxman does not explain how the show insults the Nazis' victims. All he said was, "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people." But the ADL was silent when a book titled "IBM and the Holocaust" claimed that Hitler needed IBM's help to carry out this plan -- see http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

To the ADL, anything that in its opinion "trivializes" the holocaust is verboten. The ADL has its own ax to grind and should not be taken seriously.

And what about the Darwin Day Celebration's efforts to associate Darwin with Lincoln? Isn't that propaganda too? What in hell connection is there between the two men other than a shared official birthdate?

Adolf Hitler also used words. Let us not forget that it was Gutenberg's printing of the Bible that greatly expanded Western literacy -- and those Bibles were printed from cotton rag paper made from the clothing left by those dying in the Black Death.

So clearly, reading, literacy, and printing the Bible lead directly to the Black Death and Nazi Genocide.

I'm going to stop reading right now... er, now... now. Now.

The BIG question -- what could Collins have possibly said that could be interpreted as supporting the theme of this TV program? I am really curious. Honest.

Harbison, I showed you from the ADL site that it is an Israeli front group. What more proof do you need? Foxman seems to think that "Holocaust" is a registered trademark by the ADL.

I have great faith that evolution will deal with these occultists.

Science does no such thing, that's just a lie you believe.

You keep working on those reading comprehension skills, you hear?

Comments? Scott

I don't know. Reading my post I can see how the point might not be clear at first, but it certainly seems to me that by the final line it would be obvious.

It had simply occurred to me that all this whining about the negative social implications of materialistic sciences that see humans as animals doesn't make much sense when their alternative is a worldview that regards humans as sinful creatures who are born bad. How is that any better?

Sigh. I don't see how it is any better, okay?

Although it occurs to me now that Original Sin is the problem to which they have the solution. So they would rather humans accept that they are wretched creatures for the right reason. If you are a wretched creature because grandpa was a monkey, then what good is Jesus going to do you?

(And yes, I understand that grandpa wasn't a monkey and we didn't descend from monkeys, etc.)

Did anyone else notice that in the original WND article, the caption "The results of Darwin's theories" underneath the picture of a Holocaust prison camp has no question mark, but after ADL released their response, and WND rejoined, they changed the caption so that it says, "The results of Darwin's theories?"

Interesting and politically-correct maneuver, eh? Elsewise, WND would almost classify as a bastion of fringe stupidity...

They're desperate to associate Hitler with social Darwinism (which has little to do with real Darwinism, let alone modern evolutionary theory, which has evolved quite a bit since Darwin's day) in order to distract people from his avowed Christianity. And the way his rise to power was only possible because of the longstanding tradition of hating Jews, sponsored for centuries by Christian churches.

If there was one primary cause of the beliefs of the Nazis and their ability to rise to power and act on those beliefs, Christianity is that cause.

Now, of course, this is not to say that any modern Christian is responsible for Nazism. Most of them weren't even born yet. Indeed, this form of reasoning simply underlines the invalidity of collective-responsibility reasoning.

But the main reason some Christians are so frantic to pin Hitler on someone else is to detach him from themselves. (This is similar to the way they describe Stalinist/Maoist socialism as "atheist" - ignoring the way it deifies its leaders and its roots in religious authoritarianism.)

So the ADL despises Kennedy?

What else is new? They despise Christians generally, almost as much as PZ does.

But unfortunately, be that as it may, Darwin realls WAS a racist. sexist, Victorian elitist.

Of course, the defense often is that he was a product of his time.

Granted.

And so he was a rascist, sexist, Vitorian elitist.

And he praised the work of Francis Galton, best known in our own time as the father of eugenics and loved by Hiter, in The Descent of man.

When so called christians spew this kind of hate and intolerance, I always have to remind myself that we were given a free will by God, hopefully to do and choose thr right thing.
If we take their logic further, then how do they explain all the Holy wars fought before Darwin?
How many people have been killed and tortured in the name of religion or race
BD(before Darwin)?
Shouldn't the US be included with Hitler because of our Adventures in Iraq?
We don't like their leader, their religion or their politics so we are killing them to make them more like us????

Far more were killed after Darwin that before, Diane.

Practitioners of atheistic a secular philosophies killed 100 million people in the 20th dentury alone, far outstripped the deaths from so called religious was in the past 2000 years.

(The Black Book of Communism, Harvare Univeristy Press.

Also see War Against the Weak, www.waragainsttheweak.com)

Goldstein, you fail to note that the Anti-Defamation League does not hate Christians at all, let alone "hate them as much as PZ does." The Anti-Defamation League has no tolerance for those Christians who abuse their own faith in order to promote hate and Anti-Semitism, or who attempt to politically manipulate tragedies in order to turn a profit, like what Mr Kennedy is doing right now.
...
Furthermore, if Charles Darwin was a racist like you claim, why was it that he thought that the American slave-owners were fat hypocrites for claiming to be God-Loving Christians, or that he often argued with Captain Fitzgerald of the Beagle that slaves were not, in fact, happy with their lot? If Charles Darwin was a racist, then does that make Queen Victoria an even bigger racist because she ran an empire that made a point of exploiting all of their colonies with a bare minimum of concern for the various indigenous peoples there? People who call Charles Darwin a racist appear extremely hypocritical when they don't mention Queen Victoria being racist, also. They also appear quite hypocrital in that they never seem to get around to mentioning that George Cuvier, a Creationist contemporary of Darwin, was a racist, too, given as how, unlike Darwin, Cuvier thought that Africans were of a different (and inferior) species than Europeans.
...
Also, Goldstein, did you honestly expect Charles Darwin to openly denounce his cousin?

Fascism has nothing to do with atheism or Darwin.

Indeed, Fascism involves deification of the "Grand Leader," and how "The Grand Leader Is Never Wrong Because (God/Party Doctrine/Grand Leader) Says So!"

Essentially, their argument amounts to the logical fallacy of guilt by association. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/guiltbya.html

IMO, thier argument is logically equivalent to asserting that the Theory of Flight is responsible for events of 9/11/01 and should therefore be discarded.

The fact that terrorists used the knowledge of flight to perpetrate such a heinous act, does not implicate the theory or those who developed and refined it.

Likewise, even if Hitler used evolutionary theory (or Social Darwinism) to his twisted ends, the theory itself should not stand accused by association.

The concluding statement (the theory of evolution should be discarded into the dustbin of history) is a consequence of the belief that evolutionary theory has produced nothing of value. No doubt they will site Math 7:15-20 (figs don't grow on a rose bush).

The Holocaust was simply the end result of 2000 years of Christian Anti-Semitism, the secret desire to deal with the Christ Killers who we all know took the blood of innocent Christians for their evil ritual. This was all part of the World Zionist plan for global domination.

Don't rightly know where Darwin fitted in all of this, but I sure as hell know how the majority of the Catholic and Protestant churches reacted to the Nazi regime. With silence or approval.

Of course, the defense often is that Darwin was a product of his time. Granted. And so he was a rascist, sexist, Vitorian elitist.
Posted by: Goldstein

So when are you going to Washington to crusade against the Monument of:

"...and I will say that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing.
[Cheers and laughter.]"
- Abraham Lincoln; Fourth Presidential Debate with Stephen Douglas, September 18, 1858

And have you dropped the "Emanuel" (with one "m") before the "Goldstein"?

If one wanted to make a historical correlation between one instance of human culture and mass slaughter -- as some commenters are doing above connecting pre- versus post-Darwin slaughters -- it would be far more logical and easy to tie mass slaughters of civilians with industrialization than with a scientific understanding of evolution.

After all, a dictator who had tanks, guns, bombs, communications, roads, and fairly centralized industrialized agriculture could just as easily slaughter his own population if he believed in Darwinist evolution or if he believed that he himself created the Universe.

What matters are the tanks, guns, bombs, communications, roads, and industrialized agriculture, not society's views on "evolution."

King Leopold slaughtered the innocents in the Congo with guns and with fear, not with lectures on the Origin of Species.

Coulter isn't off the list - she's the featured star at the top of the release:

Ann Coulter is stunned. How is it, she asks, that she could go through 12 years of public school, then college and law school, and still not know that it was Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that fueled Hitler's ovens.

"I never knew about the link between Darwin and Hitler until after reading Richard Weikart's book," said Coulter, a popular conservative columnist and a featured expert on the new Coral Ridge Hour documentary, Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which airs August 26 and 27. Hitler, she said, "was applying Darwinism. He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection along."

Coulter is among those who appear on Darwin's Deadly Legacy, a disturbing look at the historical impact of the theory of evolution and the shaky scientific ground on which it rests.

They got her mug on the page!

"Eugenics is applied Darwinism," said Coulter. "And it sticks out like a sore thumb that all of these German eugenicists preceding the Nazi regime were enthusiastic Darwinists."

Far more were killed after Darwin that before, Diane.

A fan of false causal fallacies I see. Try again, Goldstein. There's no way you can point to Darwin's theories of biological evolution and make the case that he says society is structured this way as well. Oh, and eugenics != evolution, so go back to the hole you came from and read some actual science.

Christians practicing their faith were responsible for:

-The Inquisition
-The slaughter of the Cathars and the Bogomils
-The flaying of Hypatia
-The Crusades
-St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre
-Many other vile acts of cruelty

See, that's how you make a causal argument. I could say that this means Christianity is evil, but I'll leave it at that.

I don't think that social Darwinism directly caused the holocaust, but I do think that social Darwinism helped cause the Nazi programs for eliminating mentally and physically impaired people, homosexuals, etc.. So I think it can be argued that social Darwinism helped create a "slippery slope" of believing that it was morally OK to exterminate undesirables and that this slippery slope was a contributing cause of the holocaust.

Anyway, as has been pointed out on this thread, the ADL does not have a copyright on historical interpretation of the holocaust.

stanton obviously did not read my posts about the racist ADL.

He should do so.

social Darwinism helped create a "slippery slope"

Ok, but was Darwin's theory of natural selection about social constructs? NO! Try again, Larry.

I heard Kennedy interviewed on Fresh Air. I can't decide whether he is a particularly dangerous con man who knows exactly what he's doing, or if he is truly stupid enough to believe that crap he spews. His whole argument for a Christian theocracy seems to be rest solely on the fact that the word "Creator" was used in the Declaration of Independence. Which to Kennedy means the Founding Fathers were obviously fundamentalist Christians who intended America to be a fundamentalist Xian theocracy. In any case that interview has to be heard to be believed. You should check it out sometime. He is truly a wackjob.

"Eugenics is applied Darwinism," said Coulter. "And it sticks out like a sore thumb that all of these German eugenicists preceding the Nazi regime were enthusiastic Darwinists."

well actually eugenics is a result ultimately of the work that Gregor Mendel did. He is considered the father of genetics.

And Mendel was... a monk!

Christianity, j'accuse!

"Since when has a right-wing Christian ever let a Jewish person ever get in the way of their agenda?"
I can't help but notice that this can be taken in an entirely different context -- something along the same lines as Ambrose Bierce definition of a Christian as "one who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin."

bernada: It would help if you were to provide a link to these posts, rather than tell me about them and think that I'm going to wade through Google to find them. Furthermore, I strongly doubt that the Anti-Defamation League attempts to trivialize catastrophes for a profit like the way Mr Kennedy does on a regular basis.

râ¬nato: Gregor Mendel worked with peas, only. Francis Galton postulated a lot of ideas that go into Modern Eugenics, but, the idea of Eugenics is very old, given as how conquering civilizations segregated themselves from their conquered victim civilizations, as well as people like the Spartans leaving weak babies to die from exposure. In fact, the abbot who succeeded Gregor Mendel in St Augustine's Abbey in Brno burned all of Mendel's pea heredity notes, claiming that it was unbecoming of a Christian to engage in such a frivolity.

"Eugenics is applied Darwinism," said Coulter. "And it sticks out like a sore thumb that all of these German eugenicists preceding the Nazi regime were enthusiastic Darwinists."

well actually eugenics is a result ultimately of the work that Gregor Mendel did. He is considered the father of genetics.

And Mendel was... a monk!

Christianity, j'accuse!

JackGoff said ( August 23, 2006 05:17 PM ) --

"social Darwinism helped create a "slippery slope"

Ok, but was Darwin's theory of natural selection about social constructs? NO! Try again, Larry.

OK, I will try again.

The Wikipedia article on social Darwinism says,

Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Darwin's name and Darwin's works were widely read by Social Darwinists, the theory also draws on the work of many authors, including Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Darwin distanced himself from social darwinism in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism#Theorists_and_Sources_of_…

People are often blamed not for things that they themselves did but for things that they helped set in motion. A good example is native Americans' condemnation of Christopher Columbus.

I think that the ADL is trying to cover up history.

People might want to know that Larry Fafarman is in fact a Holocaust denier. He has said in several places that "it wouldn't have been logistically possible" for the Nazis to kill all those Jews. Perhaps it's best to keep this in mind when reading his thoughts on things like the ADL.

Ick. Thanks for the heads up, George. Still, Larry, your point is moot because social darwinism wasn't really the basis for Hitler's pogroms. It was anti-semitism coupled with eugenics. Not really based on Darwin since Darwin was not about engineering society. It might have been based on the insanities and misreadings of OTHER PEOPLE, but they were not Darwin.

râ¬nato: Are you blind, or illiterate? Gregor Mendel was not the founder of Eugenics.

Are you blind, or illiterate?

Are you? Because I didn't see anyone say he was.

What is it with trolls and satiric irony? That part of their brain must have been destroyed from all the time they spent huffing their own ass fumes.

I blame Herr Chimp.

George Cauldron said ( August 23, 2006 07:35 PM ) --

People might want to know that Larry Fafarman is in fact a Holocaust denier. He has said in several places that "it wouldn't have been logistically possible" for the Nazis to kill all those Jews. Perhaps it's best to keep this in mind when reading his thoughts on things like the ADL.

That is an outrageous lie! For starters, I consider myself to be a holocaust revisionist, not a holocaust denier. Also, I never said that the holocaust "wouldn't have been logistically possible." What I said was that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis generally had no reliable way of identifying Jews.

Anyway, your point is not relevant to the present debate. Neither side in this debate is trying to deny or revise the holocaust. Your attack is ad hominem. And what is especially ironic about your attack is that I am actually defending Darwinism here.

Larry Fafarman wrote:
"That is an outrageous lie! For starters, I consider myself to be a holocaust revisionist, not a holocaust denier. Also, I never said that the holocaust "wouldn't have been logistically possible." What I said was that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis generally had no reliable way of identifying Jews."

Do realize that you're conveniently ignoring the fact that the Nazi government happened to have records concerning the heritage and births of German citizens, as well as government records taken from the countries it conquered, also. With the aforementioned documents detailing the ethnicity of those citizens.

What is your hypothesis on the Nazis knew who to make sew the Star of David on their clothing to identify themselves as Jews?

junk science, if you were paying attention, I was wondering if râ¬nato is blind or illiterate, given as how he insists that because Gregor Mendel was a Christian monk, as well as the father of Modern Genetics, the blame for Eugenics rests on Christians.

Given as how I've been trying to say that Eugenics has been around longer since either Prague or Brno were first founded, I'm wondering if he passes his time snorting permanent markers.

That is an outrageous lie! For starters, I consider myself to be a holocaust revisionist, not a holocaust denier

Cool. Instead of saying "the holocaust never happened", you're offering "the Nazis only killed a few Jews, because I think it would have been impossible for them to have really killed six million, though I have no evidence for this, and am calling everyone who claims otherwise a liar".

Swell. My opinion of you is much higher now.

the blame for Eugenics rests on Christians.

Do you know what being facetious is?

Mr Goff, it would greatly help if there was a way to distinguish tone in written language, so that a reader can distinguish someone trying to be facetious or sarcastic from someone who is an actual moron.

Stanton said ( August 23, 2006 09:41 PM ) --

Do realize that you're conveniently ignoring the fact that the Nazi government happened to have records concerning the heritage and births of German citizens, as well as government records taken from the countries it conquered, also.

This is off-topic here and I don't want to clutter up this thread by discussing it.

I did not even raise the issue -- someone else did. I only responded in self-defense.

I plan to eventually have an article about the holocaust on my blog,
http://im-from-missouri.blogspot.com/ There I will answer the questions that you raised.

Would the ADL have objected to this TV program if the ADL did not support Darwinism? The ADL supports Darwinism mainly because the ADL views teaching or even mention of criticisms of Darwinism in public schools as a violation of the separation of church and state. The ADL strongly supports the Darwinist Kitzmiller v. Dover decision and Jewish groups have in various court cases filed amicus briefs opposing the teaching or even mention of criticisms of Darwinism in the public schools.

stanton, I gave the link in my first post here.

As to your statement, "The Anti-Defamation League has no tolerance for those Christians who abuse their own faith in order to promote hate and Anti-Semitism, or who attempt to politically manipulate tragedies in order to turn a profit"

Isn't "politically manipulate tragedies in order to turn a profit" exactly what the ADL does with the holocaust?

The ADL is a zionist bureaucracy that doesn't represent anyone but its staff.

"The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) was created in 1913 in reaction to the lynching of Leo Frank, falsely convicted of murdering a Christian girl and then dragged from a Georgia prison and hanged after the governor commuted his sentence. ADL has consistently seen its role as combating antisemitism, which, in the ADL view, can appear in new forms and guises. ADL thus focuses not only on monitoring discrimination against Jews, but also on anti-Israel activity, left- and right-wing radicalism, and violations of church-state separation, as well as interfaith work and Holocaust education. Unlike the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and other community-relations organizations, the ADL is not a membership organization, and therefore its staff is uniquely involved in policy formation."

http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=841097&ct=…

"new forms and guises", "anti-israel activity". In other words any criticism of Israel is a form a anti-semitism for the ADL. Look up the ADL site. It has pages and pages on opposing anti-Israel activity, even a guide:

"Fighting Back: A Handbook for Responding to Anti-Israel Rallies on College and University Campuses"

It is clear that ADL has one interest, Israel, and all the rest is just window dressing.

I suspect that the application of eugenics is as old as humanity, insofar that conquerers often tried to swamp conquered peoples by killing the men and boys and taking their women. In fact, this is stipulated in the bible IIRC!

Christians everywhere should feel shamed that D. James Kennedy considers himself a brother to them all. (Isn't there supposed to be a group of goats at the "final judgement?" If so, then Kennedy belongs in that band of evil "believers.")

Social Darwinism is the foundation of fascist and the American Republican party (the strong/rich survive and fuck you if you slip up). Doesn't mean in anyway that Darwin was a social darwinist. These conservative christians are the all time champions of cognitive dissonance.

Wonder if they'll mention re: the Nazis... that the swastika is a variation of the Christian cross, that their belt buckles had "God be with us" on them, all Hungarian Nazis had a Christian cross on their uniforms, Hitler swore that the reason the assassination attempt on his life failed because "God is behind us!" or that Hitler has not been excommunicated by the Catholic church. So is Jesus responsible for the Nazis?

What I'm at a loss to reconcile is how the Nazi concept of racial purity would derive from evolution, which is a mechanism that relies on things like genetic drift and recombination. I mean, I understand how people who don't understand Darwinism can come up with wacky theories based on their flawed knowledge (garbage in, garbage out) but populations that are genetically pure tend to concentrate and magnify their flaws, don't they?

". . . .So I think it can be argued that social Darwinism helped create a "slippery slope" of believing that it was morally OK to exterminate undesirables and that this slippery slope was a contributing cause of the holocaust.

Substitute "Christianity" for social Darwinism, "muslims" for undesirables and "Iraq war" for holocaust and you can justify the death of 100,000 Iraqis in the current Bush crusade. The idea that non-Christian brown-skinned persons are lesser persons that it is morally acceptable to exterminate is one of the cornerstones of Kennedy's belief system.

To connect Darwin's theories to the Holocaust is as much a bastardization of the original intent as using the Bible or Christianity to persecute Jews (ala the Inquisition) or to defend slavery.

So Hitler believed in evolution? He also believed in the tenets of Christianity. Are we to draw the same conclusions about Christianity that Mr. Kennedy professes about Darwinism?

Love it.

'Eugenics is applied Darwinism', thus Evolution is evil.

How about...

'Stoning is applied Newtonism', thus Gravity is evil?

Given the ADL's recent comments, I'm now waiting for various Wingnuts' heads to explode as they struggle to keep both them and the ID crowd happy at the same time.

Suppose Darwinism/surivial of the fittest-secular humanism was truly the only catalyst for the rabid anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party, and eventually the Holocaust itself. One must remember that anti-Semitism didn't just magically appear in Germany in the late-1920's. The Nazis brilliantly exploited, and blamed the Jewish minority for the German defeat in the First World War to create rage and support for the Nazi Party among Germans. During the severe economic hardships of life in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's, the Jews were singled out as prospering at the cost of Christian Germans.

But what does reality have to do with anything today?

To connect Darwin's theories to the Holocaust is as much a bastardization of the original intent as using the Bible or Christianity to persecute Jews (ala the Inquisition) or to defend slavery.

But the Bible does endorse (or, at least, condone) slavery. Modern Christianity may reject it, but it's in there, so using the Bible to justify it isn't a bastardizatoin of the Bible, it's the same old bastardization of humanity that it always was.

I'm with you on the rest of your point, though.

Well Hitler also was a confirmed salad and apple man. I think that makes a pretty convincing case linking the Holocaust to Social Vegetarianism, which should of couse be relegated to the dustbin of history.

And yes, I am an unpaid volunteer spokesperson for the Cased Meat industry, a confirmed Sausagian, though not a Social Saugasian.

Various religions can be tied to any number of wars carried out in the name of God. So, "no church, no war?" Anyway, if in fact Coulter withdrew her name from this fiasco of a program, it wouldn't appear to be because she doesn't believe in the Darwin-Hitler connection (unless they completely misquoted her). But in any case, the response from the ADL isn't going to stop these people. My question is, are there not some grounds to sue these people and TBN to have this offensive trash removed from the waves??? It's a gross distortion. Darwin and evolution theory can't be held responsible for Hitler's psychosis. And Coulter's comments regarding the ACLU are nothing but insult.

Many Christianists say they believe and "Western Values". Yet, they reject science and reason, concepts which go back to the Ancient Greeks. This "Darwin to Hitler" argument sounds like something a textbook in Saudi Arabia might say.

It should be noted that Hitler and many Nazis were fascinated by the book of revelations. In fact. Much of Nazi ideology was quite similar to the "End Time" beliefs propagated by Christian Conservatives

Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwin or Evolution
(unless you are an idiot of course)

Larry Fafarman writes:

People are often blamed not for things that they themselves did but for things that they helped set in motion. A good example is native Americans' condemnation of Christopher Columbus.

I think that the ADL is trying to cover up history.

But Columbus demanded gold of the native Americans and cut off their hands if they could not deliver it, thereafter enslaving the remainder. What exactly would force us to to say, "Well, hacking off people's hands out of greed and enslaving and murdering innocent people, that's OK, but the stuff that other people did later, that gave Columbus a bad rap" The stuff that followed in Columbus' case was just more of the same:

...from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.