Re: [asa] More on the Darwin-Hitler link

And that was followed by this release tonight:
http://www.coralridge.org/specialdocs/PR_CRMRejectsADLAttack.htm

Randy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carol or John Burgeson" <burgytwo@juno.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 6:30 PM
Subject: [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 Thu Aug 24 21:02:29 2006