Posted on 10/03/2013 12:54:16 PM PDT by kimtom
A trip through a major Holocaust museum will tell you most of what you need to know about the mindset of the fiends who murdered millions in the middle of the last century. Poster-size images of death-camp inmates – all staring blankly – attest to the monstrous worldview of the prisoners’ tormentors.
What, though, really explains the Nazi capacity for murder? How could “regular people” slaughter children? What possessed – pun intended – Hitler’s willing executioners to butcher women and old men?
I think Jerry Bergman has figured it out In a new book, “Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview,” Bergman (a university professor for four decades) presents fascinating portraits of the top Nazi killers, the men who planned the ghastly Final Solution.
Although “secular science” has issues with his conclusion, the data and analysis are unmistakable: Darwin did it.
The overall premise of naturalism – that everything in the universe is random and purposeless – is a damning indictment of the worst elements of Darwinian philosophy. This mindset has created everything from schoolyard bullies to the Third Reich. Bergman’s offers a devastating critique of Darwinian philosophy, and frankly, his profiles of Hitler and his henchmen are so riveting, you won’t be able to look away. Even though you want to........
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Genocide doesn’t have to be going after one’s own countrymen, it’s about exterminating a group. Has been attempted many many times in world history, long before we invented the word we had the method.
Do some learning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
I don’t accept wikipedia for anything other than birth dates, and I question some of those. I certainly don’t read it. I also think links are an inferior, lazy way to respond to an argument.
The term genocide did not even exist until the 20th century. If you can’t perceive the difference between an invasion/war and massive round-ups of citizens by its own government for the purpose of exterminating their race -
you can “not accept” it all you want. But out here in reality trying to wipe sections of humanity off the planet goes back as long as we’ve been subdividing humanity, the fact that it took us until the 20th century to come up with an English word for it just shows where our priorities were on that front: the doing not the describing.
I perceive the difference just fine. You’re the one that’s missing it. If you think the extermination of the Midianites, or Carthage, or the Anasazi, or the Tata Mongols, were just wars and not genocide you are simply deliberately and pointlessly confused.
re: “They didn’t kill in the name of Darwinism...they killed because they could kill. They were bloodthirsty psychopaths who would use any theory to justify their butchery. I’ve never read one account by any major commie who used Darwinist principles to justify thinning the herd. They just liked to kill people...period. Marxism more than satisfied their bloodlust.”
The Nazi’s actually taught social darwinism so I would say they DID kill at least partly in the name of Darwin. As to communism/marxism, Karl Marx wrote:
“Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle… Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, “teleology” in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.”
You are quite right when you say that communists did not kill in the name of Darwin, but they did need the Darwinian naturalistic view of the universe and man’s history to put away “outdated” ideas like “God” or “moral absolutes” - they needed a purely naturalistic explanation for the existence of man and the universe.
In no way was Darwin a Marxist, but marxists certainly needed Darwinian theory.
There is also truth in what you say when you point out that often mass murderers killed “because they COULD kill. They were bloodthirsty psychopaths”. I agree. The same could be said for people who used “God” as their excuse for all kinds of tyranny and crimes against humanity.
And again, with Christianity, there is NO excuse for atrocities because to do so violates every principle taught by Christ and the Apostles.
But, as I pointed out in my previous post, though believing in the naturalistic view/Darwinian view for the existence of the universe does not a barbarian make, the logic that flows from the idea that the universe has no ultimate reason for existence, that what exists is from pure randomness and chance, that the very laws of physics are pure happenstance - this ultimately finds its way to morality. If what exists in the universe is random and happenstance, then morality may be the same as well.
One can be a naturalistic atheist and choose to be moral. One can be a naturalistic atheist and choose to be a moral monster. Neither one violates any precepts of naturalistic Darwinism. It’s simply a choice of preference, like choosing vanilla over chocolate.
But, to say one believes in Jesus as God incarnate, and claim to follow his teachings and values in the New Testament, but then does horrific acts against humanity - that is a contradiction of all the precepts he taught - as well as the teachings and doctrine of the early Apostles.
Perhaps they were not merely wars, but they were wars. That’s the difference you’re not seeing.
Hitler didn’t need Darwin to justify his killing. If so, why would he murder the Jews who are maybe the most successful individual ethnic group in history? He hated non-Aryans. He was infected with hatred of any group that was not Aryan. Because he or other Nazis might have quoted Darwin does not change the fact that Darwin or no Darwin, Hitler wanted to kill a lot of people.
Considering the worship practices and the sexual immorality of the cultures in question...good riddance. For example,God was constantly condemning in the OT the worship of Chemosh where children were thrown down the gullet of a brazen cow whose super heated belly roasted them to death; condemning the nations round about Israel who did that as well as Israel when she fell into that practice. Carthage also had that same practice and God used Rome to destroy her.
A fight is facing us concerning Islam...and we can’t be “hoity-toity” about it! A fight is facing good men in America against progressivists who would turn our nation pagan and subject our very children to the whims of homosexual and pedophile sociopaths. The financial powers would turn us into virtual serfs. Our governing powers have lost their moral authority and only a morally aroused people can correct the situation. Our faces will have to become “as flints”, just as Moses exhorted Israel’s soldiers to become when they destroyed their enemies!
The Nazi’s didn’t completely carry out Hitlers orders to commit genocide on the Jews. Do you really think that failure to carry out genocide makes the order to do it less immoral.
Take your Darwin fish...erase the name and put Rome on it. As Christ was to Rome, so shall it be with Darwinism. Your fish is swallowing a poison pill!
I don’t think it was the first genocide ever COMMITTED by a people, but it might have been the first where it occurred to someone to write it all down so that some “twits” in the 21st century can say “tut tut” and “tsk tsk” at such “barbarous” people.(..while ignoring the barbarism of our own times..such as Islamic extremists eating the hearts of their enemies.)
People are evil in their hearts and the evil cultures Israel faced needed to be dispatched. Sometimes God himself takes responsibility such as his direct destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah!
God will take the initiative again ultimately which ends with Christ’s direct rule upon the Earth. Blood and fire will again be a part of the establishment of HIS reign. If such “bloodiness” troubles you, just remember that He poured out his own blood so that people may yet escape the judgment to come. His poured out blood and resurrection thus establishes his moral authority to reign and judge the world as he wills! That is the message of the Bible, accept it or reject it as you will. He hasn’t come to save nations but to save individuals and to separate out for himself a redeemed people from all the tribes and nations of the world. The nations are nothing...his redeemed are everything!
Just remember though...Gengis Khan was not Tamerlane and I’ll bet Khan would have put a stop to what Tamerlane did. Khan showed that he had reached a rough understanding of power and its limits such as his acceptance of religious conscience so long as it didn’t threaten his rule. Tamerlane abused his power.
“makes the order to do it less immoral”
So from religious or philosophical lens do you derive your sense of what is moral or immoral?
Religious instructions and commandments wouldn’t need to exist if they weren’t trying to reign in basic human nature. We don’t need commandments to eat or defecate because our human nature already compels us to do that.
Which means the capacity for evil is part of our basic nature. Humans have a compelling instinct to form groups. And they have a strong instinct to fight with other groups. It makes sense from a survival perspective. If your land is going to be invaded by outsiders, how will you get strong enough to fight them off? You’ll do it by splitting up into your own factions within your country and warring with each other, weeding out the weak and making the survivors stronger. Then, if evolutionary theory holds, the offspring of the survivors will all be stronger than the ones who didn’t survive.
Human beings who didn’t have this instinct would have been wiped out by invading tribes long ago and removed from the gene pool. We carry the genes of the ones that were not wiped out into today.
People have the ability to form into separate groups on almost any basis whatsoever. Geography, national identity, religion, politics, race, schools, or even competing sports teams. That versatility is a sign of how powerful the instinct is. A group is defined as much by who is left out as who is let in.
So there isn’t a great mystery to why Hitler did what he did. Wars have been fought for millenia because we are instinctually driven to fight them. The way in which we decide to split into groups of “us” and “them” is fairly insignificant. Almost anything can be used as a reason.
So in your view, everyone who does not believe that the universe is only about 6,000 years old, that grass and fruit trees were in existence before the sun, and that a rain storm lasting 40 days and 40 nights created a flood that covered Mt. Everest, or at least Mt. Ararat is a Communist or a Nazi or both.
re: “Because he or other Nazis might have quoted Darwin does not change the fact that Darwin or no Darwin, Hitler wanted to kill a lot of people.”
True, but remember that Hitler and Nazism believed in racial, evolutionary superiority, the Aryan “superman” - who, because of that superiority deserved to rule everyone else.
Yes, he killed Jews, but he also killed many others based on the social Darwinian idea of “useless eaters” such as the mentally retarded, the elderly, gypsies, the terminally ill - these were seen as a drag on the evolutionary growth of humanity and the Reich.
Look, as I said, I do not blame Darwin for Hitler or Marxism, but the idea of naturalistic evolution allows for whatever moral platform you may want to create as it removes such ideas as “moral absolutes” and that altruism is actually an impediment to evolutionary progress. One can believe in “morality” without belief in God, but what morality will it be?
Again, I’m not disagreeing with your premise that Darwinism does not necessarily lead to Nazi beliefs or Marxism, and that people can be motivated by many things other than Darwinism to account for their brutal behaviors, but those ideas do not violate Darwinist naturalism either.
The Golden Rule seems a pretty good basis to start from.
Darwin posited a theory, nothing more.
Men are responsible for the evil men do.
The folks on this thread are positing a theory of their own, that is basically a variant “demon theology” - a bizarre and corrupt religious view that people are good, it is demons that cause them to do bad things - get rid of the demons and all is well.
That way the evil that men do isn’t their fault it was “demons”
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is neither good nor bad in itself, it’s the faulty theology that evil comes from some external force to corrupt a “basically good” man created in God’s image - and then letting men assign who or what constitutes and “evil force” that is the whole root of this argument.
Fortunately we have lots of help on this thread - people that are of such stunning virtue, rivaled, maybe, only by Jesus Himself, who can tell the rest of us that THEY are the ones who know who and what is evil and what we should do about it.
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