Datheron

Woo hoo! Strawman-athon! Fallacy-a-mania! Yet another theist claiming that atheists are basically living a lie.

Which makes me wonder - what good is meaning if it isn't self-derived?

lpetrich

One can turn this around and ask if believers in everlasting happiness after death are willing to send themselves off to that alleged place.

Doubting Didymus

Sorry to backpedal the conversation, but I had to respond to this:

The poster is severely, horribly misled. A more accurate sentence would be:

So crimes have been committed in the name of gods (the crusades) and in the name of gods (september 11) and in the name of gods (the holocaust).

To quote directly from mein kampf:

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the jews. I am doing the lords work."

- Adolf Hitler

From a speech to the Reichstag, 1938.

Please learn something before you commit slander.

Mike

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the jews. I am doing the lords work."

- Adolf Hitler

You're just as gullable as the Nazi's if you believe this. Hitler was a master propagandist if you hadn't noticed. The holocaust was influenced in part by the then popular notion that natural selection had run it's course and it was now time for the powerful and great of the world to do the selecting. Hitler was trying to assure the establishment of his Aryans by eliminating the breeding power of the Jews. It was survival of the fittest Hitler style. Historians and Jews alike acknowledge that the Holocaust was influenced in part by the eugenics movement of the time. The bible asserts that the Jews are the covenant people and will be restored, not obliterated, in the end. Hitler was a liar, and those who followed him believed the lie because he promised to put them at the top of the food chain.

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Mike ]

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Mike ]</p>

Goliath

WJ,

I am an atheist, and I have never made--nor will I more than likely ever make--such a claim.

Please attempt to learn what atheism is before you attempt to attack it.

Sincerely,

Goliath

Goliath

Mike,

Unsupported assertion that the holocaust had ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Darwin.

Sincerely,

Goliath

DarkBronzePlant

Nowhere does Darwin, or evolutionary theory, suggest that natural selection can "run it's [sic] course," so if there's any truth to your unsubstantiated claim that this was Hilter's thought process, then he wasn't basing it on Darwinian evolution.

Also, interesting way to tie the term "survival of the fittest" (again, a popular term not actually used by Darwinian evolution) to Hitler. How's about I turn around and say "Hitler was playing God." There! Hitler's attrocities were caused by God!

Mike

Good point. Darwin didn't suggest that people could select once natural selection had done it's best work, but he did use the word "select." Critics at the time pointed out that the word "selection" inherently implied agency, or conscious direction, and thereby contradicted Darwin's usage of the word "natural," which implied undirected change. Darwin argued that the apparent contradiction would be forgotten as the phrase gained familiarity. He was only partly right. His followers divided into two camps: those who forgot that he emphasized non-directed, natural forces, and emphasized themselves the "selection" aspect (based on Darwin's dependence on examples of changes brought on by selective breeding in livestock). Darwin himself probably hoped they would forget that "selection" was dependent on agency (a higher power, such as a cosmic breeder who chooses or selects who lives and who dies), and many did forget that flaw in his analogy of using the livestock breeders to explain the mechanism of evolution. But others did (and do) take this idea of selective breeding and apply it to the so called right of superior classes of people to supposedly improve the human stock by choosing who lives and who dies. This philosophy is still surviving among some genetic researchers.

You are also correct that Darwin didn't coin the phrase "survival of the fittest," but such a notion was in part based on Darwin's work.

So you're right (back to the point), it wasn't Darwin who caused the holocaust, any more than it was Christ who caused the crusades. I never made that claim, but suggested that the fact that many attrocities committed by liars that have been done "in the name of" someone or something else, may not alter the actual meaning implied by the originator of an idea. And that examining the actual meaning intended by an idea may be more beneficial than examining a specific political agenda that CLAIMS to be based on that idea. Whether it originated with Christ, or Darwin, or Marx, or "science" the meaning of the idea should be examined independent of the claims of supposed adherents. My original point (at the risk of being redundant) was that INSTEAD of looking at what atrocities have been justified by the supposed adherents to a particular philosophy, we would do well to look at the philosophy itself, in the context of what implications it has for understanding the meaning of our existence.

y'all missed the whole point...but what should I expect from simians?

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Mike ]</p>

lpetrich

The idea of selective breeding of humanity is at least as old as Plato, who proposed it in his Republic, in analogy with what livestock breeders do. And Plato lived 2200 years before Darwin!

And the might-makes-right ethic that Mike describes is also older than Darwin; Thucydides (a bit earlier than Plato) describes his fellow Athenians negotiating with the inhabitants of the city-state of Melos, who refused to take Athens's side in the Peloponnesian War. He pictures the Athenians as offering a might-makes-right justification for their position.

Something of this sort can be seen in Aristotle's justification of enslaving prisoners of war; he believed that some people are naturally fit to be masters, and some naturally fit to be slaves, and one way to see who is fit for what is to see who wins a battle.

Doubting Didymus

References, please.

Are you aware that slander is an actual crime, even on the internet?

As for hitler, the fact that he used propaganda does not mean that everything he said was a lie. The fact that he was born into a catholic family, was raised catholic, and spoke as a catholic for his entire life is plenty of evidence for me to believe that hitler genuinely believed in catholicism.

Additionally, the quote I listed above is plenty of evidence that hitler himself genuinely believed that the holocaust was godly work. I have never seen anything that directly links social darwinism to hitler. Such claims require evidence, which I now request from you.