Guess I'll just throw away my master's degree, then.
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
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.
As an extension of the preceding 80 years of U.S. legal theory, and the 400 year development of common law that preceded it.
This is well known to legal scholars, and I imagine evolutionary legal scholars agree with the facts as well as any creationist.
What's an "evolutionary legal scholar"?
They just rationalize that the abandonment of objective law is a 'good' thing.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
They don’t know science, and they don’t know how to write, and their arguments and juvenile name calling and conspiracy mongering.”
You mean, similar to the drivel you offered above? It is usually best to proofread your text if your intent is to malign another’s ability to communicate.
Onfray writes not a single word about any of the fifty-two atheist mass murderers of the twentieth century, he does not even mention Stalin or Mao, despite devoting more than six pages of the book to inaccurately claiming that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, based in part upon the Gott mit uns (God with us) belt buckle that the German army inherited from the royal house of Prussia. He is obviously unaware that it was not Hitler who gave the Wehrmacht that motto, but Otto von Bismarck, whose imperial standard contained the slogan in 1870; similar Gott mit uns buckles from World War I further prove the falsity of Onfray’s argument. Moreover, the Wehrmacht were not Nazis—the 950,000-strong Nazi army personally sworn to Hitler was the Waffen-SS, and their motto was not Gott mit uns but Meine Ehre heißt Treue” (My honor is named loyalty)
- Vox Day The Irrational Atheist
Someone was actually PAID to write this Godwin's Law parody.
And as long as we are going to be going with “guilt by association” what are we as Christians supposed to think of these statements by Hitler?
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith” Adolf Hitler Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” Adolf Hitler, October 24, 1933
“I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.” Adolf Hitler, “My New Order”
==The more educated someone is the less likely they are to believe in Creationism.
And that same person is also far more likely to be an atheist. What does that tell you, Allmendream?
==Jews are usually quite well educated. Thus they, as a group, are unlikely to be Creationists.
No, Jews are usually quite liberal, therefore they are unlikely to be orthodox/observant.
Are you saying the classical Rabbis are not educated? I was invited by a university friend of mine (who just happened to be in Jerusalem at the same time as I was there...no kidding!) to a meeting sponsored by the orthodox Rabbis of Aish HaTorah. They believed that God created the world around 6,000 years ago. These Rabbis had PhDs from MIT, Yale, etc, and were quite brilliant. Are you saying these guys were not educated...please!
That’s at least a theory, and more than just nekkid faith, but some important facts left out are: A. Hitler was raised in a strong Roman Catholic family, attended parochial school, served as an altar boy and considered becoming a priest.
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b2hitlergi.htm
Although the Nazis also twisted the writings of Nietzsche, the music of Wagner while manipulating the Church—and the cross itself for their symbol—as well as other things, atheism in itself probably did not account for his diabolical, irrational hatred of Jews in that he and his party had the unqualified support of Rome and local ecclesiastics, and keeping in mind that over the centuries this is time of year when we Christians would begin gearing-up for the “hunting down the `Christ-killers’” season.
“Oh, thump the tub slowly, and play the fife lowly
And play the dead march as you carry me along
Take me to the green valley and lay the earth o’er me
For I’m a poor cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong”
Maybe I missed something. Are you saying that you are a Christian?
And, I am not sure that we are to think anything of the statements you mentioned. Our guilt by association lies with the association we have with Jesus Christ. The writings of a madman such as Hitler are irrelevant to that relationship.
99% of Jews accept evolution. This one Klinghoffer does not a trend make.
Ted Beale is an idiot. Take another look at that photo. Do you notice the funny symbol at the bottom? It ain’t Prussian.
The more educated someone is the less likely they are to believe in Creationism.
Do you deny this?
My point is that by denying the obvious statements of Hitler where he was utilizing the traditional pogrom language of European Christians intent on whipping up violence against Jews; we deny the reality of there being an dark underbelly of “Christian” thought that is deeply and vehemently antisemitic.
Have your read Martin Luther? Hitler seemed to inherit Luther's thinking on what to do about the “Jewish problem”.
“What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly_and I myself was unaware of it_will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.” Martin Luther “On the Jews and their Lies”
If what you mean by education is being unconstitutionally brainwashed into the religious beliefs of the Temple of Darwinistic Materialism.
By educated I mean that if you look at...
high school drop outs
high school graduates
college graduates
post graduate degree.
You find less Creationists in each successive group. Thus, the more educated you are, the less likely you are to believe in Creationism.
Since the vast majority of students attend public schools and universities, and since ALL of our public schools and universities brainwash America’s children into Darwood’s materialist creation myth, it stands to reason that they would parrot the “line” they have been taught by their Darwiniac overlords.
-snip-
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life...."
--http://www.hitler.org/speeches/02-01-33.html
______________________________________
The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, is creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.
The advantages of a personal and political nature that might arise from compromising with atheistic organizations would not outweigh the consequences which would become apparent in the destruction of general moral basic values. The national Government regards the two Christian confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality.
-A. Hitler, Speech to the Reichstag, March 23, 1933
http://www.hitler.org/speeches/03-23-33.html
Guess I'll just throw away my master's degree, then.
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
The more educated someone is the more likely they are to accept the evidence for evolution and to reject Creationism.
And do you think that biology departments teaching biology to university students who wish to learn it and sign up for the class is “unconstitutional”?
Most ignorant statement of the week award! (turning logic on its head with his every post!)
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