I'll do the translation if need be.
Posted on 04/07/2009 12:17:49 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Judaism in the Year of Darwin
David Klinghoffer BeliefNet April 5, 2009
Link to Original Article
Welcome to the year of Charles Darwin. In coming months, the secular world will be celebrating two anniversaries relating to the originator of evolutionary theory. February 12 marks what would have been his 200th birthday and November 24, the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.
The cultural and political battle over evolution in the United States will intensify. Yet I believe many Orthodox Jews feel that it somehow isn't "our fight." Darwin argued that a purposeless, unguided process--natural selection operating on random genetic variation--explains the whole history of life's development. But frum Jews have no doubt that life was purposefully designed by our Creator.
Though I'm a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the think tank best known for advancing intelligent-design theory, I can appreciate this response. However, permit me to argue that the Darwin wars are very much our fight, as Jews, or should be.
Begin with the fact that Hitlerism was no less than an exercise in applied Darwinism. To whip up his fellow citizens in the service of a race war against the Jews, Hitler relied on the language of Darwinian biology.
In the coming year's celebrations, you can bet that the nastier parts of Darwin's writing will be safely ignored. As a young man, during his adventures as a naturalist aboard the Beagle exploring the coasts of South America, Darwin had his eyes opened to the good points associated, as he came to see it, with genocide.
In 1833 he made the acquaintance of General Juan Manual de Rosas, who was busy liquidating the Indian population of southern Argentina. "This war of extermination," Darwin wrote in a cheerful letter home, "although carried on with the most shocking barbarity, will certainly produce great benefits; it will at once throw open four or 500 miles in length of fine country for the produce of cattle." The "extermination" (a favorite word of Darwin in his writings) of failed races, whether animal or human, is a great theme in his books and a key feature in the advance of the evolutionary process as he conceived it.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin prophesied: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
Evolutionary theory was embraced and championed in Germany faster even than in England, Darwin's native country. Hitler felt its influence, as the important biographers of him agree. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: "The basis of Hitler's political beliefs was a crude Darwinism." Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant "extract[ed] the elements of his world view" from various influences including "popular treatments of Darwinism."
The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, "Nation and Race," where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is couched from the start in Darwinian terms. He writes: "In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right of opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a mean for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of higher development." He praises "the iron logic of Nature" with its "right to victory of the best and stronger in this world."
But what if the strong (Aryans) choose not to dominate and exterminate the weak (Jews)? "Eternal Nature," he writes, "inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin's laws.
Hitler calculated that an appeal to the Germans against the Jews would be most likely to succeed if framed in scientific-sounding evolutionary terms. Mein Kampf was hugely popular and influential, selling six million copies by 1940.
Nazi propaganda hardly sought to hide the Darwin connection. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, "In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply." Between 1939 and 1941, German physicians empowered by the state under the Action T4 plan murdered 70,273 children and adults who had been observed to suffer from debilitating mental or physical conditions.
It should not have been surprising that Hitler under Darwin's influence would follow up by seeking to destroy the Jews. Not because Darwin was an anti-Semite (he wasn't), but because his worldview is all about explaining life and its mysteries in purely natural, material terms, leaving no room for God. In Mein Kampf, when his use of Darwinist rhetoric is most pronounced, Hitler decries the Jews for their "effrontery": "Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature." In Darwinism, Nature sweeps all before her.
Judaism says just the opposite. Torah is marked by the call to defy Nature, to do the hard work of bending our personal natures to God's will. It is almost as if Hitler, following the logic of Darwinism, sensed that Torah and thus the Jews who uphold it must be his ultimate, eternal foes.
Today, the skinhead and Neo-Nazi subculture is full of Darwinian chatter. Whether on aggressively Hitlerian web sites like Stormfront.com or in the writings of the racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana politician David Duke, discussions of evolution as a proof of white supremacy are common.
Darwinian science has otherwise mostly lost its anti-Semitic edge, but its leading contemporary spokesman, Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, can't be matched for his hatred of the God of Israel and for his attack on the intelligent design of life. His latest bestselling book, The God Delusion, rails blasphemously at the Creator that he denies.
But it's not our fight, as Torah-believing Jews? Historically our rabbis have certainly indicated that it is. Long before Charles Darwin was born in 1809, similar debates were being fought in Europe over scientific challenges to the belief that God created and designed the world. In medieval Spain, the science of the day was carried on by Aristotelian philosophers who denied that the universe had a beginning. So there could be no Creator in any sense recognizable to a Torah Jew.
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, among other Jewish philosophers, knew it was necessary to directly address the challenge of this scientific doctrine. In the story he tells in the Kuzari, the religiously searching Khazar king stages a debate between a rabbi and an Aristotelian scientist-philosopher. (A Christian and a Muslim also participate briefly.) The philosopher denies that God intentionally created the world but instead argues that a series of natural causes explains the existence of everything. That is Darwinism in a nutshell. Yehudah HaLevi saw it as totally normal and desirable that a rabbi should engage in an extended and very well informed disputation over such issues.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lived to see Darwin's influence spread rapidly across Europe after the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. In his Torah commentary, Rav Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian thought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we all live. Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most grotesquely animalistic fashion, Hirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learning to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal" (Numbers 25:3).
Western culture has since become widely convinced that human beings, just like animals, lack moral choice and responsibility. Applied Darwinism results in the widespread, easily observable failure to distinguish between people and animals, a moral disease we may call animalism.
Both the elite and mass media are rife with it. So the rights of animals become a sacred cause, justifying even violence in their defense, while ascribing a unique dignity or worth to men and women is increasingly suspect. If human beings lack such a dignity unique to them and transcending whatever condition their body may be in at a given moment--fetus, child, or adult, sick or well, conscious or "vegetative"--then extinguishing a human life when it seems convenient to us becomes very easy to justify.
The social consequences range from animal-liberation terrorism to modern eugenics, right-to-die initiatives, euthanasia, abortion and more. In the state where I live, Washington, voters just this past November overwhelmingly approved an assisted-suicide law, the second in the nation (after Oregon). It permits doctors to help patients identified as "terminally ill" to take their own lives.
And this is not our fight? The Darwin-Hitler connection would be enough reason to acknowledge the evolution debate as one in which religious Jews have a profound stake. The moral and hashkafic aspects of the fight make it, without any doubt at all, ours, perhaps more than it is anyone else's.
Thanks for the verse- there’s several others as well- it is VERY evident that modern judges don’t care a whit about upholding hteir sacred oath of office
Liberal ideology is outright defiance of God’s laws.
There is no way a liberal that claims to be Christian can justify his ideology against the “main and plain” of the scriptures.
Godwin’s Law in action.
"...But frum Jews have no doubt that life was purposefully designed by our Creator...."
C'mon, one of the many things that sets Jews apart from our christian friends is that Jews have doubt and encourage doubt. It is this skepticism that has kept us ahead of the game in educating our youth. If we don't continue to "preach" a skepticism to our children, we will surely perish.
Here we have in a nutshell the modern liberal Jew's understanding of Jewishness: the modern, skeptical, naturalistic reaction to chr*stian "faith" and biblicism. In other words, Judaism is defined by chr*stianity rather than by itself--a phenomenon I call "J*sus envy."
The modern world simply cannot get into its head that the Biblical Israelites of the Book of Joshua were Jews. Moderns read Joshua and see Cossacks, or medieval Spanish inquisitors, or Baptist Ku-Klux Klanners, but they don't see Jews.
As far as the modern world is concerned, the "Biblical Israelites" evolved into medieval Catholic bigots who in turn evolved into Southern Baptists. "Jews," on the other hand, seem to have popped up out of nowhere a mere two thousand years ago, killed J*sus, established the American Civil Liberties Union, received the first Nobel Physics Prize, and began writing the libretto to Die Dreigoschenoper.
How old did he think the earth was?
Did he believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis?
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin prophesied: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
I'm guessing you didn't read this bit. Can't stand in the way of progress, and all that.
This was replaced at Harvard, post-OoS, with the “evolved case-law” legal theory. One with no basis and subject to the whims of “smart people” like judges who could arbitrarily change the laws because they knew better.
Sheer balderdash. Where do you get this nonsense?
Yeah, it’s like we stuggle with G-d or sumthin.
If he believed Genesis, then he should have followed through and acted consistently with those beliefs. Consistent application of biblical beliefs involves self-sacrifice, love and concern for your neighbor. We are accountable to God for all that we do and will be judged accordingly.
Consistent application of Darwinism involves shooting your neighbor, impregnating his wife and seizing his property.
Ideas have consequences.
I agree with that balderdash. How do you explain the last 150 years of legal theory? This is well known to legal scholars, and I imagine evolutionary legal scholars agree with the facts as well as any creationist. They just rationalize that the abandonment of objective law is a 'good' thing.
==Most Jews are just too educated and intelligent and know the Bible too well to be Creationists.
Like the Christian church, Judaism has been infiltrated by materialists who have duped many into believing that Darwin’s materialist creation myth = science. However, just like the classical teaching of the Christian Church, the classical Rabbis (who I think we can all agree knew the Hebrew Bible VERY well) overwhelmingly taught the following:
Classical Rabbinic Teachings
The vast majority of classical Rabbis hold that God created the world close to 6,000 years ago, and created Adam and Eve from clay. This view is based on a chronology developed in a midrash, Seder Olam, which was based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis. It is considered to have been written by the Tanna Yose ben Halafta, and cover history from the creation of the universe to the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. This chronology is widely accepted among most of Orthodox Judaism today.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewsevolution.html
So, attempting a scientific explanation puts one in league with Hitler, David Duke and the Stormfront whackjobs? This article is a complete, over the top, load of crap.
The more educated someone is the less likely they are to believe in Creationism.
Jews are usually quite well educated. Thus they, as a group, are unlikely to be Creationists.
Creationism is the domain of the ill educated, the under educated, and the ignorant; as your many postings from Creationists sources shows.
They don’t know science, and they don’t know how to write, and their arguments and juvenile name calling and conspiracy mongering.
Not quite. It is perfect logic... Darwin was an atheist. Hitler was an atheist who accepted Darwin’s philosophy because it fit in so nicely with his atheism—human life has no intrinsic value. In fact, humans are nothing more than animals.
Atheism leads to the loss of any respect or concern for human life (especially that of the weak and helpless), leads to moral relativism (you decide what is evil and good), and immorality reigns because there is no afterlife, therefore, no need for reflection and remorse for actions on earth.
Hitler was evil and Darwinism can lead one into evil and when it becomes the prevalent religion as it did in Germany, it is evil. Watch Ben Stein’s movie, “Expelled”. Without the intertwining ribbon of Judeo Christian religion, Darwinism is evil.
Wow..
I'll do the translation if need be.
So, attempting a scientific explanation puts one in league with Hitler, David Duke and the Stormfront whackjobs?
Scientific explanation? What scientific explanation would that be?
Wow, did you come up with that all by yourself, or believe you did?
John Bunyan wrote about that same argument by atheists,
330 YEARS AGO.
Nothing new under the sun, and those who think they are the “elite” and “the highly educated” are just retreads of old arguments.
Meanwhile, this hasn’t changed either:
Col 2:8
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.
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