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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
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2008-04-16-22:52 - Evolution III
I’m reluctant to say anything is the “most absurd” claim made by creationist. The competition for that honor is very high. However, one that is certainly in the running and one of the primary themes of the propaganda film Expelled is the claim that evolution caused antisemitism and the holocaust There are so many problems with this it is hard to know where to start. So let's start in the beginning.
The first historic of antisemitic killings was in Alexandria, Egypt under the Roman Empire in 34CE, almost 1800 years before Darwin was born. Pogroms continued off and on through the middle ages and into the Renaissance. In the 16th Century Protestant leader Martin Luther wrote up his plan to deal with the "Jewish problem."- Their synagogues and schools should be burned to the ground
- Their houses should be “razed and destroyed”
- Their “prayer books and Talmudic writings” should be confiscated
- Their rabbis should be “forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb”
- They should be denied safe-conduct on the highways
- usury should be prohibited to them and their gold, silver, and cash should be taken from them
- finally, they should be subjected to harsh labor
It sounds a lot like a rough draft of what the Nazis did and he wrote it almost 200 years before Darwin was born. So clearly you don't need the theory of evolution for violent anti-Semitism.
Belief in creationism is no protection from anti-Semitism either. The man who said this:Jews are not pioneers. They do not go conquering the wild world or overpowering the hazards of nature. They settle among other civilisations, preferably among the rich. They tend to migrate from poorer to richer lands.They do so always as a group, immediately forming their own separate community. and The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. Was Maciej Giertych, a creationist who was actually interviewed in the movie Expelled. And the man who said this:For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will. Well, that was Adolf Hitler himself in Volume Two, Chapter X of Mein Kampf.
Further if you were to actually look at the rhetoric used by the Nazi you won't find many references to Darwin or Evolution. The whole concept of eugenics is about artificial selection not natural selection after all. Hitler did often talk about the Jews as a disease. The term "racial hygiene" was also a very common phrase used by the Nazi propagandists. So if creationists really want to strike a blow against Nazi rhetoric, perhaps they should stop washing their hands.
1 comment | >>let me tell you this about that!
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