Re: ICR and its slurs

Russell Stewart (diamond@rt66.com)
Thu, 22 May 1997 09:58:54 -0600

>It may be right (I haven't performed such a test myself) that today there
>is no tendency among evolutionists towards racism. But there is another
>form of evidence which confirms a connection between evolution and racism:
>history. And it's a historical fact that in no country Darwinism was
>received faster and more enthusiastically than in Germany.

And it's also a historical fact that the antisemitism that the Holocaust
was rooted in was founded by religious prejudice well over a thousand years
ago.

Again, this goes back to what I was saying before. People who are going
to support racist and genocidal policies will twist whatever they can to
support their beliefs. Evolution happened to be in existence, so Hitler and
his people perverted it into something that seemed to support them. They did
the same thing with religion, as when Hitler wrote that he believed he was
"doing the work of the Lord" by removing Jews from human society.

>And it's also
>that Hitler's Social Darwinism was one of the main principles in his
>ideology and was firmly connected to his racist views which he justified
>by appealing to the fact of evolution.

Yes, but you've got your causality mixed up. Let me ask you this: would
Hitler have been any less of a murderous tyrant if there had been no such
thing as a theory of evolution?

>> > Personally, I still understand how some people WITHOUT racist
>> >predispositions can plausibly correlate a naturalistic and non-theistic
>> >"survival of the fittest" mentality with racism.
>>
>> Just as I can understand how someone without racist predispositions can
>> plausibly correlate a biblical mentality with racism. But that that's
>> just blind speculation.
>>
>But the former isn't speculation.

No, it's using correlation to try and prove causality. You should know better
than that.

>If the way of creating is to select the
>fitter group/'population' and and extinct the other then we have clearly a
>struggle between different races. The point is that evolution gives racism
>a 'scientific' backing which was and is important in a society you
>believes that science is the way to find out the truth or where it is one
>of the most damning judgments when you say that something is
>'unscientific'.

This sentence is a little too convoluted for me to understand. However, as
to your claim that evolution gives racism a "scientific" backing, that makes
about as much sense as saying that Newton's theory of gravitation gives me
a "scientific" backing to murder people by pushing them off of cliffs.

_____________________________________________________________
| Russell Stewart |
| http://www.rt66.com/diamond/ |
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| Albuquerque, New Mexico | diamond@rt66.com |
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If Rush is Right, then I'll take what's Left.