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To: Sam Hill

Despite your tagline, I smell a troll.

Nope. I asked a perfectly legitimate question. Were the Nazis atheists? If not, what were they? I think they were all (maybe with a few exceptions) raised as Christians, attended Christian services/ceremonies/rituals, invoked the Christian God and Christian scripture in their everyday and public speech, etc. There is no question Germany before Hitler took power was a solidly Christian country.

And yes, Hitler was an adamant believer in evolution. Much of his theories is based on Darwinism as he understood it.)

Now I not only smell a troll, I hear a troll. I didn't ask that and you are repeating a frequently repeated error and anti-evolution creationist myth that has just as frequently been rebutted and shown to be false. And I generally speaking, don't respond to creationist trolls.

866 posted on 04/29/2006 5:29:24 AM PDT by ml1954 (NOT the disruptive troll seen frequently on CREVO threads.)
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To: ml1954; Right Wing Professor; Howlin; Deb; kcvl; Mo1; Enchante; nopardons; veronica; KJC1; ...
And yes, Hitler was an adamant believer in evolution. Much of his theories is based on Darwinism as he understood it.)

"Now I not only smell a troll, I hear a troll. I didn't ask that and you are repeating a frequently repeated error and anti-evolution creationist myth that has just as frequently been rebutted and shown to be false."

+++

I will bother to give you a better response than your post deserves.

I didn't say you had asked that. I am addressing the subtext of bringing Hitler into this conversation at all. It seems to rub some of the people here, such at the RWP, who are so proud of being atheistic evolutionists--that Hitler was an atheistic evolutionist.

So much so that RWP even felt compelled to lie about Hitler and make him out to be just the opposite.

Survival of the fittest, especially as it showed up in so-called Social Darwinism, is at the core of Hitler's political and philosophical thinking, as even the most cursory reading of him would reveal.

Yes, Hitler may seem to have bridled at man being descended from monkeys, but only slightly. (He was attracted to the idea that the moon split off from the earth during the time men existed, and this colored some of his thinking here.) But even in his questioning, he generally, albeit grudgingly accepted it.

I once possessed a work on the origins of the human races. I used to think a lot about such matters, and I must say that if one examines the old traditions, the tales and legends, from close up, one arrives at unexpected conclusions. It’s striking to realise what a limited view we have of the past. The oldest specimens of handwriting we possess go back three or four thousand years at most. No legend would have reached us if those who made and transmitted them hadn’t been people like ourselves. Where do we acquire the right to believe that man has not always been what he is now? The study of nature teaches us that, in the animal kingdom just as much as in the vegetable kingdom, variations have occurred. They’ve occurred within the species, but none of these variations has an importance comparable with that which separates man from the monkey—assuming that this transformation really took place.

That is about the extent of Hitler's doubts about evolution. The rest of his extant remarks and speeches are replete with his belief that evolution, the struggle of the fittest, was the law of nature.

The following, like the quotes hitherto, are from Table Talk, but there is similar evidence of his thinking everywhere:

Originally war was nothing but a struggle for pasture-grounds. To-day war is nothing but a struggle for the riches of nature. By virtue of an inherent law, these riches belong to him who conquers them. ..

That’s in accordance with the laws of nature. By means of the struggle, the elites are continually renewed.

The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest.

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.

++++

In any case, is it we who created nature, established its laws? Things are as they are, and we can do nothing to change them. Providence has endowed living creatures with a limitless fecundity; but she has not put in their reach, without the need for effort on their part, all the food they need. All that is very right and proper, for it is the struggle for existence that produces the selection of the fittest.

++++

One must not put a curb on individuals. On the contrary, one must avoid whatever might prevent them from rising. If one systematically encourages the selection of the fittest, the time will come when talents will again be, in a sort of way, the privilege of an elite.

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As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn’t imagine a better activity on nature’s part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle.

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It was with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914. Then I saw men falling around me in thousands. Thus I learnt that life is a cruel struggle, and has no other object but the preservation of the species. The individual can disappear, provided there are other men to replace him.

++++

The present system of teaching in schools permits the following absurdity: at 10 a.m. the pupils attend a lesson in the catechism, at which the creation of the world is presented to them in accordance with the teachings of the Bible; and at 11 a.m. they attend a lesson in natural science, at which they are taught the theory of evolution. Yet the two doctrines are in complete contradiction. As a child, I suffered from this contradiction, and ran my head against a wall. Often I complained to one or another of my teachers against what I had been taught an hour before—and I remember that I drove them to despair.

The Christian religion tries to get out of it by explaining that one must attach a symbolic value to the images of Holy Writ. Any man who made the same claim four hundred years ago would have ended his career at the stake, with an accompaniment of Hosannas...

One day finally, under the battering-ram of science, dogma will collapse. ...

What is contrary to the visible truth must change or disappear— that’s the law of life.

Does the knowledge brought by science make men happy? That I don’t know. But I observe that man can be happy by deluding himself with false knowledge. ...

++++

It’s senseless to encourage man in the idea that he’s a king of creation, as the scientist of the past century tried to make him believe. That same man who, in order to get about quicker, has to straddle a horse— that mammiferous, brainless being! I don’t know a more ridiculous claim.

++++

The Russians were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It’s a fact that we’re feeble creatures, and that a creative force exists. To seek to deny it is folly. In that case, it’s better to believe something false than not to believe anything at all. Who’s that little Bolshevik professor who claims to triumph over creation? People like that, we’ll break them. Whether we rely on the catechism or on philosophy, we have possibilities in reserve, whilst they, with their purely materialistic conceptions, can only devour one another.

++++

When I was a child, only actors and priests had shaven faces. At Leonding, the only civilian whose face was beardless was regarded as the most extreme of eccentrics. The beard gives character to some faces, but it’s easier to descry the true personality of a shaven man. By the way, the evolution that has taken place in the sense of sobriety seems to accord with the laws of nature. Hasn’t man gradually, through the ages, cleared away some of his hair?

++++

One must start by accepting the principle that nature herself gives. all the necessary indications, and that therefore one must follow the rules that she has laid down. ...

In aviation, too, we see that the natural laws retain all their original, value. The Zeppelin was on this account a completely artificial construction. Nature, obviously, has rejected the “lighter-than-air” principle; she has provided no bird with any sort of balloon, as she has done in the case of the fish. ... The current design of ships certainly does not conform to the laws of nature; if it did, then we should find fish furnished with some sort of propulsive element at the rear, instead of the lateral fins with which they are endowed. Nature would also have given the fish a stream-lined. head, instead of that shape which corresponds more or less exactly to a globule of water.

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By the law of nature, the most important person of a nation should be the best man.

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One may be repelled by this law of nature which demands that all living things should mutually devour one another. The fly is snapped up by a dragon-fly, which itself is swallowed by a bird, which itself falls victim to a larger bird. This last, as it grows old, becomes a prey to microbes, which end by getting the better of it. These microbes, in their turn, find their predestined ends. ...

The toad knows nothing of his previous existence as a tadpole, and our own memory serves us no better as regards our own previous state. That’s why I have the feeling that it’s useful to know the laws of nature—for that enables us to obey them. To act otherwise would be to rise in revolt against Heaven.

If I can accept a divine Commandment, it’s this one: 'Thou shalt preserve the species.' The life of the individual must not be set at too high a price. If the individual were important in the eyes of nature, nature would take care to preserve him. Amongst the millions of eggs a fly lays, very few are hatched out—and yet the race of flies thrives. What is important for us, who are men, is less the sum of knowledge acquired than the maintenance of conditions that enable science constantly to renew itself.

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It’s a mistake to think that man should be guided by his greed. Nature spontaneously eliminates all that has no gift for life. Man, alone amongst the living creatures, tries to deny the laws of nature.

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Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations. 

It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the role of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.

++++

I have always been an ardent disciple of the belief that, in a struggle between peoples, the people with the higher average morale must ways emerge victorious. In my opinion, that an inferior people should triumph over a strong is a negation of the laws of nature.

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To not know this, is to not nothing anything about Hitler. You, like RWP, seem to revel in making pronouncements on a subject about which you are ignorant.

Why is that?

887 posted on 04/29/2006 7:52:01 AM PDT by Sam Hill
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