Topic: Evolution
Quote: So what? Some of the greatest crimes in history have been led by people of faith. Take the Crusades for one, the religious knights killed every last man, women, and child in Jerusalem. It doesn't discredit Christianity does it?
Response: It is true about the crusades , the inquisition etc, Those crimes were committed in the name of Christianity.\nHitler was going by the book.\nThere are wondeful social effects of Christianity. Evolution has none.\nDarwin warned against allowing "the weak members of civilised societies [to] propagate their kind"\n"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." (Darwin, Charles R. [English naturalist and founder of the modern theory of evolution], "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," [1871], John Murray: London, Second Edition, 1922, reprint, pp.205-206) [top]\n"Haeckel was the chief apostle of evolution in Germany. Nordenskiold (1929) argues that he was even more influential than Darwin in convincing the world of the truth of evolution. ... But, as Gasman argues, Haeckel\'s greatest influence was, ultimately, in another, tragic direction-national socialism. His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science-all contributed to the rise of Nazism. The Monist League that he had founded and led, though it included a wing of pacifists and leftists, made a comfortable transition to active support for Hitler." (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University], "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78).
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