[asa] More on the Darwin-Hitler link

This piece of nonsensical email was rec'd today:

Burgy

Date: August 22, 2006
From: Coral Ridge Ministries
By: John Aman

Coral Ridge Ministries Answers Anti-Defamation League Blast Against New
Darwin-Hitler TV Special

FORT LAUDERDALE, Aug. 22 /Christian Newswire/ -- Coral Ridge Ministries
issued a call today for “more history and less hysteria” in response to
harsh, unfounded Anti-Defamation League accusations leveled against a new
Coral Ridge Ministries produced television special linking Charles Darwin
to Adolf Hitler.

The special, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which airs August 26 and 27
nationwide features historians and scholars who connect the dots between
Hitler and the ideas penned by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species and
later works.

When ADL National Director Abe Foxman, who has not viewed our television
program, calls it “twisted” and asserts that “Hitler did not need Darwin
to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people,” he ignores
the historical fact that Adolf Hitler was an evolutionist.

“Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or
not Hitler was a social Darwinist,” according to historian Richard
Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and a featured guest on the
Coral Ridge Ministries television special. “He clearly was drawing on
Darwinian ideas,” said Weikart.

British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith wrote in the 1940s: “The German
Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has
consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory
of evolution.”

Even leading evolutionist Niles Eldredge freely admits the link between
Darwin and Hitler. Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, has written that “social Darwinism,” which he
regards as an illegitimate offspring of Darwin’s theory, “has given us
the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the
genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II—where eugenics was
invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other
‘reasons’ Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust.”

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler’s thought. It was a “central
aspect of his worldview,” according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the
Darwin-Hitler nexus.

“It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a
peripheral part of his ideology.”

The argument for evolution’s impact on Hitler is strengthened by the fact
that Darwinian thought heavily influenced Germany in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Hitler was hardly alone in his racist
ideas fueled by Darwin and his intellectual progeny, who include Ernst
Haeckel and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics which was a critical
component of the Nazi killing machine. Hitler, according to Weikart, “was
drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, and geneticists in
Germany were preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century.”

Dr. D. James Kennedy, President of Coral Ridge Ministries and host of
Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, stated, “We have had nearly 150 years of the
theory of Darwinian evolution. And what has it brought us— whether Darwin
intended it or not? Millions of deaths, the destruction of those deemed
‘inferior,’ the devaluing of human life, and increasing hopelessness.
Darwin’s legacy has been deadly indeed.”

Coral Ridge Ministries has also published a companion book to the
television special, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit: How Darwin’s Tree of Life
Brought Death to Millions, which examines the social consequences of
Darwin’s theory. Written by Tom DeRosa, Executive Director of the
Creation Studies Institute (an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries), the
book explains how Hitler tried to use genocide to speed up evolution and
reveals how the American eugenics movement is likewise indebted to
Darwin.

Coral Ridge Ministries is a Christian broadcasting organization with
radio and television programming that reaches into 200 nations.

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Received on Wed Aug 23 18:42:40 2006