Quote:
Originally Posted by Daldolma
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Of course it does. The Holocaust was a prime example -- it was meant as a racial cleansing. They were trying to eliminate genetic pollution, for lack of a better term. That's based on science, just as much as anti-homosexual sentiment is based on religion. Both are completely convoluted misinterpretations, used by bigots with agendas to confirm and legitimize their own prejudices.
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Is it ever fair to hold a historical figure personally responsible for all the future unbidden and unforeseeable consequences of all that he or she has said or done? Was Jesus responsible for the Inquisition or Muhammad for 9/11? Can we blame Newton and his laws of motion for the damage caused by cruise missiles? And even where one can establish a chain of causal links between scientific discoveries and their subsequent abuses, does this mean that we must belittle the discovery or close down future research?
Protestant Christians are on the shakiest ground when using this argument, as it allows us to indict Martin Luther for the Holocaust, with his On The Jews and their Lies (1543), which was avidly quoted by Hitler. Chillingly, the first of ten recommendations from Luther was “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools...” Should we really blame Luther for Kristallnacht?
In fact, Nazi ideology was derived from a range of ideas and beliefs, which included anti-Semitism, militaristic Nationalism, anti-Capitalism and anti-Communism. The Nazis also blended a distorted German Christian tradition with Nordic mythology and derived their zest for eugenics as much from ancient Sparta as from any modern sources. The influence of evolutionary thinking on Hitler was, if anything, very minor: nowhere in Mein Kampf does he mention Darwin, natural selection or biological evolution. In fact, in the first edition of the book, Hitler comes across as a young Earth creationist, claiming at one point that “this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men”.
The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.
Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
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http://www.zimbio.com/Richard+Dawkin...onomics+Hitler