'Darwin caused the Holocaust'... ACoulter, Coral Ridge Ministry's video

[bobbieinok]

http://blogs.salon.com/0003494/2006/08/20.html#a633

....

The TV show was inspired by book by Richard Weikart, who lays out his case in a trailer:

----Adolf Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along, and he wasn’t the only one. He was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, geneticists, in Germany were also preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century. Natural selection was a guiding idea for Hitler and the Nazis, in fact if you read just about any books about the Holocaust, you come across the word “selection”, because in the camps that’s exactly what they did, they used the term, and the term was related directly to Darwinian terminology, that when you went to the camps you went through a selection process. They were selecting this person to survive, and this person to go to the gas chambers.----

However, Weikart does not tell us whether the idea of the fittest organism being the most likely to survive in a given environment is in fact a myth created by proto-Nazis, or whether it is true but immoral and wicked for us to make such an observation. PZ Myers at Pharyngula responds:

----How absurd can you get? Racism, anti-semitism, and ethnic cleansing long preceded Darwin, and the idea of selection was common to anyone who had domesticated and bred plants and animals. ----

PZ also draws attention to the programme’s line-up (his emphasis, links added):

----The one-hour program features Ann Coulter, author of Godless; Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler; Lee Strobel, author of The Case for a Creator; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial; Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box; Ian Taylor, author of In the Minds of Men, and Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.----

Collins has recently become a religious believer, and his book The Language of God is to be published in September. However, Collins’ new Christian faith is somewhat mystical, and he is not a proponent of either “Intelligent Design” or of the Young Earth Creationism promoted by Kennedy and his allies. So why is he now apparently lending support to a fundamentalist project which, judging from the trailer, is concerned purely with using hysterical and slanderous rhetoric to promote fear and hatred of science and scientists? The answer: he's not –

....

[ulysses]

1. stupid social misunderstandings of Darwin preceded the Holocaust.

These people should read The Mismeasure of Man.

[arcane1]

5. excellent book!!!

:thumbsup:

[whistle]

2. Anne Coultergeist is a perfect example of Darwin's reverse evolution

...she has regressed bad to the swamp slug

[Liberal Veteran]

3. Hmm. I wonder who was to blame for the slaughter of the indigenous......

...peoples of America then? Or the selling of Africans as free labor in the Southern States? Or the Inquisitions?

[Cobalt-60]

9. Wasn't it Bill Clinton?

I don't have the details, but I'll ask my freepie Friends.
Bill is their answer to everything.
They obey preachers that talk to God himself, so they couldn't be wrong.

[xchrom]

15. conservatives think the slaughter of first nations people was a good idea.

so no one to blame there.

and selling africans -- well that is just good ol'economics at work -- to a conservative that just makes sense.

so only liberals, progressives, aand nazis have it wrong in their universe.

makes me puke:puke:

[MrModerate]

4. Anyone who would appear on the same platform as Coulter . . .

(literal or figurative) is to be scorned. The ID nuts and creationist crazies I can understand, but not forgive.

Regarding Collins? Perhaps he now believes in hell, and if so, I wish him comfort in his new faith.

[DinahMoeHum]

6. "Crackpot Christianity" - Walter C. Uhler

Part I
http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/crackpot.html

Part II shows where "...where "...a scapegoating Christian Supremacist teams up with a horse-faced intellectual slut to advance their crackpot Christianity and obnoxious conservatism..."

http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/crackpot2.html

:evilfrown:

[Boojatta]

7. What was the direction of evolution before Hitler?

Adolf Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along, and he wasn’t the only one. He was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, geneticists, in Germany were also preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century. Natural selection was a guiding idea for Hitler and the Nazis, in fact if you read just about any books about the Holocaust, you come across the word “selection”...

Did Hitler consult statistics that indicated that fewer and fewer Jews were succeeding in such areas as business, academia, or music and more and more Jews were inheriting traits that prevented them from being able to earn a living and caused them to starve to death without reproducing?

Are we supposed to believe that Hitler was simply impatient?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. Newton caused the WTC to collapse.

Stupid gravity.

[ulysses]

17. LOL!

:D

[Cobalt-60]

10. Ridiculous

More than a thousand years ago Europe's legal system consisted of trial by combat.
Their justification was religious, and the result was the strong dominating the weak.
You didn't have to pay legal fees if you lost because you were dead.
Charles Darwin had nothing to do with it.

[Cameron27]

11. Does anyone really think she believes anything she says?

Without being outrageous, she's just another hole in the air.

[and-justice-for-all]

12. Christianity caused the Black Plague.

[Annces]

13. I just watched a little of Coral Ridge show on Sunday morning

and they are pushing a book called Marketing of Evil, about how evil our society is with trying to give rights to lesbians and women's right to choose.

In the same show, the minister was talking about how the sheeple should not get upset about how high gas prices go, just keep paying it, because it is not important.

I think the evangelical churches have an exchange program with the Cheney administration. The administration helps them condemn women's right to choose, and the church helps keep the masses in line.

I sent them an email, it got me pissed.

[and-justice-for-all]

14. Lie, Lie, Lie!!! thats all these fuckers do!!

I really want to set up dialog between myself and local congregations; someone needs to step right in the middle of the sespool with heavy duty germicide to clean it up as much as possible.

They are obviously causing all the unessacary roughness in socity, its like history repeating itself..Them and their doministic attitude, they next Church recruiter that comes to my door is getting a mega-dose of reallity!

[LostinVA]

16. The US invented Eugenics, not Darwin or Nazis