You just don’t give up, do you, Dan?

Earlier, Davidf said “...you [Dan] don’t withdraw your charges when they are shown to have no basis.”

Not one of your arguments has stood so far, and you don’t even have the courtesy to withdraw them when they fall. Instead, you simply repeat them with different wording. For example, I had already been through the whole ‘Social Darwinism’ bit with Runner in the previous thread (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7684&page=0#121766), and yet here you are again, pedaling the same misinformation.

<<I see that it’s [Darwin’s book] subtitled ‘Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.’>>

Darwin’s use of the term “races” simply refers to varieties of life. The book barely refers to humans at all.

Darwin was actually quite 'liberal' for his time. Despite the fact that he looked down on non-white European people (as all whites did in those days), Darwin staunchly opposed slavery and worked as a missionary to better the lives of the native Tierra del Fuegans.

So your deliberately misleading and disgraceful smear campaign has failed.

Using your flawed logic with the so-called (yet non-existent) “influence” that Christianity has on modern science, you'd think that slavery would now be more widely accepted in correlation of the widespread acceptance of evolution. Yet it’s not. Why is that, Dan?

The Bible Belt of the United States fought hard to keep slavery, yet you don’t link Christianity to racism.

<<So Hitler never referenced Darwin or used the word ‘evolution’ in Mein Kampf. Yet he claimed that the climax of history would be the survival of the fittest race – the Aryan race.>>

What Hitler was doing was ‘Selective Breeding’, not ‘Natural Selection’. That’s a point that Sancho was making earlier when you clearly demonstrated that you’d missed it completely, by saying: “That stuff you said about selective breeding has little if anything to do with the concepts of microbe-to-man evolution.” – Exactly!

Continued...

...Continued

If Hitler was trying to replicate/control evolution, and used the phrase “the climax of History” in regards to the survival of the Aryan race, then this is a good example of why people would need to be educated on what evolution actually is, (rather than remaining ignorant of it as you choose to) as this is a clear indication that Hitler didn’t have a clue about what evolution is – if that’s what he was referring to at all – because evolution has no climax. The species we see today aren’t finished products as Creationists think they are.

Evolutionary theory shows us that long-term survival is strongly linked with genetic variability. Social Darwinist programs advocate minimising genetic variability, thus reducing the chance of long-term survival in the event of environmental change.

Evolution teaches the very opposite of racism as it shows us that we are biologically all one race.

And besides, what does any of this have to do with the truth of it all?

<<The tragedy today is that people are still being influenced by Haeckel’s discredited embryo drawings. Our abortion clinics use them to explain how embryos go through the fish and other recapitulation stages on their way to becoming human.>>

Now that’s an outright lie. The use of Haeckel’s drawings stopped shortly after they were discredited. You have no idea of what you’re talking about, do you?

You’re trying to make it sound the Darwin’s hypothesis of the relationship between embryology and evolution was based on false drawings, yet Darwin referred to real embryos long before Haeckel even drew the pictures.

I'll await your nïave, logically flawed and over-simplistic response.

I won't hold my breath for a withdrawl of the falsehoods though.

Dear George,

I have been a physicist. I can understand and work with Einstein’s ideas. I have no feeling for mysticism of any kind.

The way Hitler defined Jews affected Jews. However, one must consider how Jews define themselves. Neither Hitler nor Lustiger were part of the Jewish community.

Some Christians regard Jews as unfulfilled because they have not accepted their revelation. They don’t understand that Jews have a religion, culture and tradition and don’t need their revelation. Most attendees in my synagogue’s conversion classes are Christians. When they become part of our community they have left Christianity. Lustiger left our community and perpetuated misunderstanding by claiming to be a Jew. In Jewish eyes he is no longer one of us.

I trust what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about where his ideas came from more than I trust Lustiger to tell me where Hitler’s ideas came from.

I think it important not to regard the Holocaust as uniquely evil. It grew from ideas common in our society. The Nazis were human, and what happened with them could have happened anywhere given roughly the same social circumstances. One can externalise evil and think it is something outside of us. Judaism maintains that there is a yetzer ha tov, a spirit of good, and a yetzer ha ra, a spirit of evil in each of us. In each of us there is a little Hitler. In Hitler was a bit of good.

Solzenitsyn, an Orthodox Christian, wrote:

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Orthodoxy is less influenced by dualism than western Christianity that sees evil as external possibly in the form of a devil.

Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

We don’t need devils to create evil.

Dear Dan,

You referred to Hitler’s reading of Darwin. I pointed out that there is no evidence that Hitler read Darwin. You wrote of other matters. There is still no evidence. Please address the point. You made a false claim and didn’t acknowledge it.

You wrote:

“Earlier there was discussion on Einstein’s thoughts and views of religion. If we dig a little deeper and look at some other famous scientists, which of these did not overtly state a Christian testimony: Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur”

Of course many of those scientists stated they were Christians. They had to profess Christianity to attend university.

Let’s dig deeper yet. Most knowledgeable people would agree that the three greatest scientists are Newton, Darwin and Einstein. For most of Christendom’s domination Einstein would not have been allowed in a university because he was a Jew. Darwin became an atheist. Newton denied the Trinity and was afraid of repercussions if he did so openly.

The Inquisition confined Galileo. It was only 400 years later that the church admitted he was right.

Remember Giordano Bruno. Bruno was born five years after Copernicus died. He thought of the Infinity of the Universe. He tried to spread the ideas of Copernicus. He wrote many books on many themes. He might have been the greatest scientist of all. He was kept in a dark dungeon for eight years and then taken out to a market place and roasted to death by fire. Bruno is a martyr to truth and science.

Charles Freeman's "The Closing of the Western Mind" tells how the adoption of Christianity as an official religion by the Roman Empire ended the spirit of free enquiry in the ancient world and brought the Dark Ages. It was only when the western world renewed contact with the spirit of the classical world in the Renaissance and threw off some of the constricting influence of Christianity that science could freely advance.

Christianity has in general opposed the free enquiry required for scientific investigation

david f,
Thank you for the David Vital’s, ‘A People Apart' recommendation’ – I’m sure it will be instructive and of interest. Obviously, you have a far greater understanding of what it means to be a Jewish than myself and most ‘outsiders’. I hope to learn more.

I think your timely quote from the “prophet of freedom” has a cutting edge. He was good, as he was able to offend both liberal and conservative. He also wrote, “[Western society] has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, and each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.” He was also particularly scathing of the American anti-war movement and accused them of complicity in the genocides that followed in Southeast Asia after the U.S. military withdrew from Vietnam.

Barack Obama is also, to some degree is a man of the moment, “... I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don’t always act with justice uppermost on our minds. But the fundamental premise of Israel and the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is, I think, a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world.” Obama’s depth may be greater than that of his rival but both wholeheartedly agree on the above premise.

Just when the posts to this thread were becoming civilized and polite out comes AJ Philips with his rude, arrogant, abusive rants. If he wants some engagement on these pages he should modify his tone, for who would want a conversation on his level?

Peter Sellick