On to the comment of the day, from the same place as the one below:
Assertion 6.14: Evolution is the basis for Nazism. Analysis
(i) Philosopher Philip Kitcher correctly points out that evolution, like all good scientific theories, is morally neutral...
That is an ironic argument, given that the Nazis argued that what they did was "morally neutral" because it was based on biological fact, i.e. scientific facts. It seems that those who want to egage in Darwinian forms of reasoning and philosophy want people to forget that so that they can rely on the same exact intellectually degenerate standards based on naturalism and similar arguments to this day.
Before going into the proto-Nazi nature of Darwinists given the material that you've provided, something is making me a little sad now. For you didn't pick up a challenge to cite your own imagination as "scientific" evidence in the Darwinian way (and factual, too!) based on the smallest of things about life, like the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly. What, are the tittles of Mommy Nature suddenly not titiliating enough? Ah well, the point of much of it is that you must know that when it comes to Life, pretenses of "neutrality" toward the subject are all false because the subject is not merely just an object and never can be...trying to assume it is so "scientifically" and objectively has been the business of proto-Nazi half-wits. So back to that, the Darwinian reasoning that you cite and the view toward biology and Life that is contained in it is especially ironic to cite here given that the same intellectual degeneracy helped Nazism succeed in technical ways that exponentially increased the effect of barbarism, given that the barbarians were technically proficient. I.e. the same argument of "moral neutrality" toward Bios/biology that the little fellow above tries to prop up was promoted in proto-Nazi and Nazi times based on the same reasoning and the same philosophy that makes biology into a mask for the urge to merge that some little fellows seem to have:
Biological thinking in Nazism:(The Nazi Doctors: Medical
“And they were all doctors like me, who tried to think biologically, biology as the foundation of medical thought. . . . We didn’t want politics—we were critical of politics—but [concerned] with the way human beings really are—not just an idea or philosophy.”
National Socialism as Applied Biology:
The nation would now be run according to what Johann S. and his cohorts considered biological truth, “the way human beings really are.” That is why he had a genuine “eureka” experience—a sense of “That’s exactly it!”—when he heard Rudolf Hess declare National Socialism to be “nothing but applied biology” (see page 31). Dr. S. felt himself merged...
Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :129) (Emphasis added)
Is it really a brute "scientific fact" at issue or do some little fellows just like feeling merged to overcome the "Jewish influence" of alienation? It seems that all that is essential and conceptual is alienating for some little fellows. As one put it:
Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
by Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :33) (Emphasis added)
Darwinists simply cannot seem to engage in conceptual thinking because they are usually trying to engage in "biological thinking" instead. That leads to them running in a Herd as well as scholarship of this form:
The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...(Ib. :7)(Emphasis added)
If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.
Anyone who has debated those trying to prop up the Darwinian creation myth these days knows that the apt summary of a historian has given Nazi reasoning matches Darwinian reasoning, which is often based more on a repudiation of the spiritual than actual evidence. Indeed, Darwinists have often said and written that their repudiation of the spiritual in negative theology is their best evidence. Panda's Thumb, anyone? They named their blog after an argument of the same structure, a repudiation of the spiritual is actually being cited as evidence and "scientific" evidence at that. I am merely calling a spade a spade when I point out that Darwinian reasoning is proto-Nazi by Nature. The ignorance and stupidity of the willful denial of the evidence of creation that goes on among Darwinists and the links to further degeneracy is truly amazing, for instance one of the avenues of misdirection used by charlatans such as this has been to try to associate ID types with Holocaust denial but I doubt that the little fellows have never debated a Holocaust denier because they seem to have little use for actual historical evidence.
Various people have appealed to the theory of evolution to lend respectability to their appalling moral views...But this fact says very little about evolutionary theory itself. Virtually any morally neutral, or even morally good, doctrine can be misused for evil purposes. (Kitcher 1982:196)
Intellectual history demonstrates that Darwinian forms of reasoning and the degenerate anti-philosophy that sits behind it that was dead at its conception was not misused or abused, instead it was applied, which lead to death. Apparently these dead in the head fellows who are willing to engage in so much charlatanism for their pseudo-religion of Darwinism simply refuse to admit to the historical evidence, once again. Perhaps instead they are busy believing that their own little imaginings about history can serve as valid historical evidence again and perhaps their own imagination is even becoming "scientific" evidence too!
(ii) Creationists, most of whom are fundamentalist Christians, should be able to understand the point by considering some of the horrendous moral doctrines others have taken Christianity to be their basis for, and asking whether or not this means that Christianity must therefore be evil or incorrect...
Essential Christian reasoning can be known from Christian texts just as Darwinian reasoning can also be known, given that it can be proven that the Nazis engaged in Darwinian reasoning as opposed to Christian reasoning.
Yet although the Christian Church has a checkered history, it is evident that Christians can claim - quite justifiably - that the evils result from perversions of religious doctrine.
With justification drawn from its own texts and tradition. The reason these fellows cannot seem to do the same in the case of Darwinism and Darwinian reasoning and so instead are relying on a misdirection (Say, let's look at the perversion of Christian principles and reasoning instead or somethin'...) is because the eugenics movement and Nazism was not a perversion of Darwinian reasoning but instead its application given the state of science of its day. And it is not "science" that is holding back its application these days because Darwinian reasoning is still prevalent among scientists, instead it is once again the "wise lack of consistency" typical to those who try to be half-wits about half of the time.
(iii) Philosopher and historian Michael Ruse notes that while Germans from Bismarck to Hitler did seem to absorb a "bastardized" form of Darwinism, this form "bore little resemblance to anything to be found either in The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man" (Ruse 2000:81).
Now they finally get to the point, yet there's nothing there. No evidence is cited of this sort: "Darwin said this, but as you can see from the historical evidence the Nazis said and did this instead." Etc. Why do you suppose that is?
Moreover, explains Ruse,
it does not take much to see that there could have been no simple relationship between any philosophy based on evolutionary ideas and the ideology that was so important for the national socialists (Kelly 1981). Apart from anything else, evolutionism -- Darwinism in particular -- stresses the unity of humankind. The Victorians were quite happy to put themselves at the top of the evolutionary tree -- others, including Slavs and Jews, came lower down. However, ultimately, we are all part of one family.
Wrong, the metaphor of a tree clearly also represents the possibility of divisions or a degeneration away from an original purity as well as a lack of being"fit," i.e. one branch of Darwin's so-called Tree of Life could become corrupted and so in need of being pruned off so that the tree will not die and so on. I'm still waiting on the vast contradictions between Nazi attempts at "biological thinking" and the mentally retarded forms of Darwinian reasoning that seek to accomplish the same thing by failing to admit that organisms are living things and the like.
A consequence like this was anathema to Hitler and his cronies. It is revealing that although [German evolutionist Ernst] Haeckel (like so many of his countrymen at the time) was anti-Semitic, his solution to the Jewish problem was one of assimilation rather than elimination.
Evidence? I suppose it depends on what you mean by so-called "assimilation." Isn't it curious that these are the same fellows that still cling to Haeckel's frauds? They do not seem to mind associating themselves with someone who helped shaped the worldview of a proto-Nazi generation so that more and more youth would attempt to engage in biological thinking.
E.g.
I remember vividly a scene during a school picnic when I stood surrounded by a group of schoolboys to whom I expounded the gospel of Darwinism as Haeckel saw it.Goldschmidt claims that his experience of embracing this Darwinian worldview…was typical for educated young people of his day, and abundant testimony from his contemporaries confirms this. In 1921 the physiologist Max Verworn stated, “One can state without exaggeration that no scientist has exercised a greater influence on the development of our contemporary worldview than Haeckel.”(From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany
Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enthusiastically adopted Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applied the struggle for existence to humans in many of his writings. He believed the most important aspect of Darwinism was the animal ancestry of humans, which would “bring forth a complete revolution in the entire worldview of humanity.
by Richard Weikart :11)
The prophet of “biological thinking,” the stygian stench that follows him is only appropriate given that he sought to invert what goes on in the womb:
To be sure, other movements, Marxism and Soviet Communism, for instance, have also claimed scientific validity. But only the Nazis have seen themselves as products and practitioners of the science of life and life processes—as biologically ordained guides to their own and the world’s biological destiny. Whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudo science and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time….(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
The contribution of the actual scientific tradition to this ethos was exemplified by the quintessentially German figure of Ernst Haeckel, that formidable biologist and convert to Darwinism who combined with ardent advocacy of the Volk and romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism. He was to become what Daniel Gasman has called ‘Germany’s major prophet of political biology.’
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :441)
This was the very opposite of the policy endorsed and enacted by the Nazis...Truly, as scholars have shown, national socialism owed far more to the Volkish movements of the nineteenth century, and particularly to the so-called redemptive anti-Semitism of the group of Wagnerians at Bayreuth, than it did to anything to be found in the writings of evolutionists (Friedlander 1997). (Ruse 2000:81-82)
More charlatanism, it seems that those with the urge to merge cannot help themselves.
The late Carl Sagan adds a few comments....
For those who became bored with the incessant misdirection of these half-wits away from the thinking organism as such, Sagan added a few bits of his own form of drivel.
As to the list of material "causes"...for that matter, there would have been no Hitlerism if the pattern of matter that we call "Hitler" did not exist in history. Is that an argument against the power of the individual thinking organism to cause an unfolding/evolution of events that are good or evil? For some reason half-wits assume that someone must be arguing against material existence as well as any unfolding of events ("Why that would just be poof, there it is or somethin'.") if they point out to obvious spiritual realities like organisms desiring, experiencing, selecting and choosing based on their own sentiments and sentience. Why, the very notion of intelligent selection must be opposed to material existence according to those with the urge to merge, so how could it exist? Etc. Natural selection as the Darwinian way of denying that organisms are selecting and choosing was always a mentally retarded idea. It was dead at its own conception in the minds of some mentally incompetent organisms...yet they continue with it!
It was also mentioned Darwinism was used by communists...
It is not as clear as in Nazism, so I assume that these charlatans would have a grand old time with their red herrings and so on. Yet it would still be obvious that the general milieu of scientism based on the forms of "reasoning" or "thinking" that they still want to try to engage in was a key factor in all forms of socialism.
I can't resist an irony at the end:
...a better appreciation for evolutionary biology probably would have prevented many innocent in the Soviet Union from starving.
He may as well declare that Darwinian reasoning leads to am understanding of the Soil and the Blood more in tune with Nature than the Marxian.
Note that Marxism and its heretical branch still tended to share a common Darwinian vision anyway, e.g.:
Marx's friend Engels put it this way:("In the Interests of Civilization": Marxist Views
"Among all the nations and petty ethnic groups of Austria there are only three which have been the carriers of progress, which have played an active role in history and which still retain their vitality—the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars.For this reason they are now revolutionary. The chief mission of all the other races and peoples—large and small—is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."
(Engels, “Der Magyarische Kampf”;trans.
as “Hungary and Panslavism” in
Blackstock and Hoselitz: 59)
"Hugh Lloyd-Jones comments that, 'remarks about Lassalle sometimes recall the tone of Goebbels.' W. H. Chaloner and W. 0. Henderson claim that Marx 'detested his own race. 'Max Geltman writes that Jews 'never knew that Marx had called for their utter disappearance from the face of the earth.' And Robert Payne remarks that Marx’s 'solution of the Jewish question was not very different from Adolph Hitler’s.''
of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
By Diane Paul
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1.
(Jan. - Mar., 1981), pp. 115-138)
Why are there these historically verifiable similarities in vision based on Darwin's metaphoric Tree of Life, that he couldn't seem to admit was made up of living organisms? You aren't really fully taken in by the charlatanism of these half-wits, are you? Do you notice the missing evidence, the missing comparisons of Darwinian reasoning and texts to the supposed "perversion" of them in history? Why is it that Darwin's own version of perishing races found in the Descent of Man reads a lot like Engels vision? The supposed perversion of the correct version does not seem to be much of a change, that's probably why some fellows cannot seem to cite actual evidence to make comparisons. Perhaps we should imagine a different history and then cite our own imaginations as evidence while murmuring that is all that is "natural" and therefore our own imaginations define the truth about history? That seems typical to Darwinian "reasoning," after all.
Do you suppose that Christians arguing against a "perversion" of the Christian version of things would be as lacking in Christian reasoning, texts and tradition as these little fellows seem to be or that they'd sit about with arguments of this mentally incompetent structure: "Well, Darwinian reasoning was perverted this one time or somethin', so look over here at this and this! This one time, people burned witches or somethin'." (That red herring was a little ironic given that as the Inquisition spread there is evidence that the old superstitious/folk practice of witch burning decreased.)
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