The Bryan article is well worth the reading; in many respects, it seems almost more relevant today than 86 years ago.

And, the Nazi Women’s mag is revealing!

The 1943 December cover is almost comically revealing: “Winter Solstice” issue indeed!!!

(I also don’t like the play on the Creche, with the idealised, growing Master Race family. The conjoined Soldier’s sacrifice on the plains of Russia panel suggests a very different version of “blood atonement” to me too . . .)

This is all so blatantly post-Christian.

GEM of TKI

I like your link:

“While the theistic evolutionist does not affirmatively deny God, he is more dangerous to the Christian faith than the atheist, because, while claiming to believe in a Creator, he puts God so far away that consciousness of God’s presence loses its power to comfort.”

Here’s another link to covers of a German women’s magazine during the Nazi era. Note the one for December 1943.

Thanks, as always.

Quite significant; and indeed, I did not know of the direct, in-office involvement of church delegates in Admiral Canaris’ Abwehr opposition movement, specifically Muller [who by "luck" survived], and Bonhoffer [also one of the key figures of Barmen], who of course did not survive.

Your linked articles are a test for the sincerity and seriousness of any who still retain the idea that Hitler’s nightmare was a product of his attachment to the Christian Faith.

Vladimir also gave a link which on following up, I ran across an old work by William Jennings Bryan. (Thanks, Vladimir.)

On reading it, I see that in his view the trends in the Nazi era were prefigured by the influence of Nietzsche et al in the WW 1 era, as reflected in Imperial Germany’s propaganda. This much despised, caricatured and dismissed man — BTW, I have gained significant respect for him on now being able to directly read his writings — raised some very, very serious points that 86 years later sound all too prophetically relevant.

I found this bit of a gem in the preface:

[[The special reason for bringing to the attention of Christians at this time the evil that Darwinism is do-ing is to show that| atheists and agnostics are not only claiming but enjoying higher rights and greater privi-leges in this land than Christians; that is, they are able to propagate their views at public expense while Chris-tianity must be taught at the expense of Christians . . . . Is there any reason why atheists and agnostics should not be compelled to do likewise? . . . The question in dispute is whether atheists and agnostics have a right to teach irreligion in public schools—whether teachers drawing salaries from the public treasury shall be permitted to undermine belief in God, the Bible, and Christ by teaching not scientific truth but unproven and UNSUPPORTED GUESSES [NB: Bryan points out just how many hundreds of times Darwin acknowledged that he was more or less supposing or guessing ("hypothesis" is a 50c word for "guess") in his key works, noting that for instance he used "we may well suppose" over 800 times in his two main works] which cannot be true unless the Bible is false.]]

Nearly ninety years later, the point still stings.

Similarly, in the main text, p 20 [pdf 27] Bryan notes:

[[Darwin does not use facts; he uses conclusions drawn from similarities. He builds upon presumptions, probabilities and inferences, and asks the acceptance of his hypothesis not-withstanding the fact that connecting links have not hitherto been discovered" (page 162). He advances an hypothesis which, if true, would find support on every foot of the earth's surface, but which, as a mat-ter of fact, finds support nowhere.]]

Again, nearly ninety years later, the point still stings. And, on reflecting on how a principal means of rejecting the inference to design is the imposition of a question-begging “redefiniton” that in effect science on origins must only infer to chance +/or necessity, we see the same issue still operates.

Last, on looking back in my vaults, I also ran across this summary. It is of course by a “Creationist,” Bergman, but raises such serious issues and documents such serious points that it is sobering reading indeed, reading that demands to be answered, not dismissed.

GEM of TKI

Here are some resources that conclusively rebut any claim that Hitler was a Christian. Note that they are from Cornell’s School of Law. They are PDF files.

Relationship of the German Churches to Hitler (they were against him.)

The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches (they wanted them gone).

Thanks.

Your just linked is especially intersting when it discusses the contributions of key figures linked to Darwin. I note here (I will now use double square brackets for blocks, given the busy gremlins]:

[[Galton: "I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets." - Galton, Memoirs

"[Eugenics] has indeed strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races… The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics… then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, which will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly forsee.” – Galton, Eugenics, its Definition, Scope, and Aims.

It strikes me that the Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence upon other nations” – Galton to de Candolle, 1884 (Pearson’s Life and Letters of Galton, vol.2, pg 209). ]]

–> Rather interesting, no?

Now, I have long understood, through Lakatos’ extension to Popper, that research programmes have cores and surrounding belts. Core theories and ideas have in them a considerable worldview level element, and the belt of surrounding models and subsidiary theories and approaches serves in part as a belt of protective armour.

Lakatos therefore spoke in terms of progressive and degenerative paradigms/programmes.

He highlighted the importance of predictive success, and of situations where in effect a research programme begins to find itself making ever more ad hoc patches to meet onward eme3rging observations. Beyond a certain point, things break down as they did with Ptolemaic astronomy.

In the case of the grand scale evolutionary materialist research programme, the materialism is obviously a worldview and hte narrative of cosmological then planetary then chemical then biological then socio-cultural evolution is a chain of deeply worldivew-tinged explanatory models. And, the rot reason why inference to design once it might cut across the chain of evolutionary models just outlined, is forbidden, is because of the begged worldview level question. (Newbies, kindly cf. basic discussion here.)

As my excerpt from my always linked APP 6 just above shows, I believe that evolutionary matrerialism has run into serious trouble when it sought to explain mind [and morals] on reductionistic materialistic grounds. Indeed, that is precisely what Provine implied when he asserted that there is no free will and there is no ultimate foundation for ethics. For, with no power of responsible choice there is no foundation for reasoning and knowing, much less choosing to do the right.

Such “reasoning” immediately cuts its own throat. It CANNOT be correct, given the basic facts of our experience of the world as thinking, choosing, reasoning, knowing, morally bound creatures.

But, if we turn evolutionary materialistic “Science” into a god, then we lose our ability to think straight: Per logic, if one accepts error as truth, then if one sees real truth, one is often inclined to reject it as contradicting what one knows.

Next, given the undermining of morality, and the easy excuse for ignoring the plea of the powerless, it fosters the sort of thinking and behaviour that easily become tyrannical. In short, through its worldviews core, “science” can easily become a component of an ideology that may reveal its inner incoherence and dangers.

Worse, given the etymology: “Science = knowledge,” those who do not know enough to understand just how provisional scientific knowledge claims historically and philosophically are, can then become absolutists who in zeal for “science” become blind to the errors and abuses they carry out.

I guess over in Russia — as I recall — you know all about that already.

GEM of TKI

On this page you will find sufficient reason to open up and pursue the historical examination of Darwinism, Darwinians, and their role in the social ills of the last 150 years.

I had hoped that someone else would have taken this up from Sparc at 116. No-one has, so I note on select points:

1] “We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order”

This first runs into Justinian’s opening of the Corpus Juris Civilis:

PREAMBLE. OF THE INSTITUTES OR ELEMENTS OF OUR LORD THE MOST HOLY EMPEROR JUSTINIAN.
IN THE NAME OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST . . . . It is expedient that the Imperial Majesty not only be distinguished by arms, but also be protected by laws, so that government may be justly administered in time of both war and peace, and the Roman Sovereign not only may emerge victorious from battle with the enemy, but also by legitimate measures may defeat the evil designs of wicked men and appear as strict in the administration of justice as triumphant over conquered foes. [cf Rom 13:1 – 10.]

[That is, CJC was a specifically Christianised (of course, rather imperfectly so . . .) precis of some 1,000 years of Roman case law, digested into a more or less coherent whole. Also, we should understand that “spiritual” in Hitler's conception has very little to do with the same term in a Christian context.]

2] “The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination . . . The good of the state before the good of the individual.”
This is of course highly manipulative language, and embeds within the ellipsis a denunciation of Jews that is profoundly un-Christian. But, the underlying deceptive and manipulative agenda is aptly brought out by excerpting the 1934 Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Christians:

In fidelity to their Confession of Faith, members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches sought a common message for the need and temptation of the Church in our day . . . . In opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the German Evangelical Church by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices, the Confessional Synod insists that the unity of the Evangelical Churches in Germany can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit. Thus alone is the Church renewed . . . . We publicly declare before all evangelical Churches in Germany that what they hold in common in this Confession is grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the German Evangelical Church. It is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the “German Christians” and of the Church administration carried on by them [i.e. Under Nazi leadership]. These have become more and more apparent during the first year of the existence of the German Evangelical Church. This threat consists in the fact that the theological basis, in which the German Evangelical Church is united, has been continually and systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective by alien principles, on the part of the leaders and spokesmen of the “German Christians” as well as on the part of the Church administration. When these principles are held to be valid, then, according to all the Confessions in force among us, the Church ceases to be the Church and th German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible . . . . In view of the errors of the “German Christians” of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the Church and also therefore breaking up the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths . . .
In short, as soon as he attained power in 1933, Hitler was actively subverting the Church through injecting Nazi ideas and requiring a racialist and ideological loyalty that is alien to the historic Christian Faith. In this deception, sadly, he had the support of apostate church leaders forming a false church hierarchy.
So, the cited words from the declared Nazi party platform, in proper historical context, do not at all carry the weight that Sparc would put upon them, but instead reflect a counterfeiting of the historic Christan faith by the Nazis and their henchmen.
3] Implications and issues of evolutionary materialism . . .

I have, of course, several times, cited Provine’s chilling words in his 1994 debate with Phil Johnson:

There is no intelligent design in the natural world. When mammals die, they are really and truly dead. No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which DARWIN came quite clearly. (Stanford University Debate with Phil Johnson, April 30, 1994)

The underlying issue, I have long summarised:
________
. . . [evolutionary] materialism [a worldview that often likes to wear the mantle of "science"] . . . argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature.  Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance.
But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this picture.  Thus, what we subjectively experience as “thoughts” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically as unintended by-products of the natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains.  (These forces are viewed as ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance ["nature"] and psycho-social conditioning ["nurture"], within the framework of human culture [i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism].)
Therefore, if materialism is true, the “thoughts” we have and the “conclusions” we reach, without residue, are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, or validity . . . . Thus, evolutionary materialism reduces reason itself to the status of illusion . . . .
In the end, materialism is based on self-defeating logic . . . . 
In Law, Government, and Public Policy, the same bitter seed has shot up the idea that “Right” and “Wrong” are simply arbitrary social conventions.  This has often led to the adoption of hypocritical, inconsistent, futile and self-destructive public policies. 
“Truth is dead,” so Education has become a power struggle; the victors have the right to propagandise the next generation as they please . . .
_______

Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink?

GEM of TKI

I have taken a timeout here over a few days to see if some balance would emerge.

It seems it has not, and so, I now make a general remark and comment on a few specific points, especially in Sparc at 116 above.

A: In General

I observe that it is now a commonplace among the so-called new atheists and their fellow travellers to attempt to reassign the roots of Nazism to “creationism” [as if Hitler et al looked to the Bible for their worldview's ideological and ethical foundation!] and more particularly to”Christianity,” often by making reference to obscure texts or facts out of context. In commenting on this tendentious practice, historian Richard Wiekart, an expert on the Nazi era and its roots, has aptly remarked:

The reason why people care about Hitler being a Darwinist was because his version of Darwinism influenced his murderous ideology. [NB: Cf above all the way back to 43, including t6he chain Darwin, Nietzsche, Hitler, one of many networks of ideational influence that connect Hiter to Darwin's thought] It wasn’t incidental to his mass murder . . . Darwinists have to distance themselves from his social Darwinist views, so they campaign against it as against heresy. Also, it’s remarkable how many websites run by atheists and anti-religious people prominently feature articles about Hitler being a Christian, and they blame Christianity for Hitler and the Holocaust.

It’s also remarkable that many Darwinists idolize Darwin so much that they cannot come to admit that he was a social Darwinist (though many scholars, to their credit, have conceded this).

Observe, again: “. . . IT’S REMARKABLE HOW MANY WEBSITES RUN BY ATHEISTS AND ANTI-RELIGIOUS PEOPLE PROMINENTLY FEATURE ARTICLES ABOUT HITLER BEING A CHRISTIAN, AND THEY BLAME CHRISTIANITY FOR HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST.”

Now, across the 2,000 year history of Christianity, there have been many sins and abuses condoned or carried out by people who have named Christ’s name, or who have claimed to be acting in his name. None of these can find any grounds for their misbehaviour in the teachings of Christ and his duly sent out apostles. Indeed, just the opposite. For instance, in Rom 13:8 – 10, Paul explicitly teaches, in a civil society application of the Golden Rule: “he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law . . . LOVE DOES NO HARM TO ITS NEIGHBOR. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

No-one setting out on oppressing or harming his neighbour — a concept that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan shows extends across racial, religious and political lines of enmity – can properly claim to be following Christ’s teaching. And, even more specifically, John teaches: “12 Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. . . . 14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. 15 ANYONE WHO HATES HIS BROTHER IS A MURDERER, AND YOU KNOW THAT NO MURDERER HAS ETERNAL LIFE IN HIM.” [1 Jn 3:12 – 15]

It is plain, then, that Hitler, whose life was in large part shaped by hate and manifested itself in mass murder, was precisely not a disciple of Christ. Indeed, his very concept that Jesus — whose claim to be a Messiah, biblically, necessarily rested on descent from David [cf Rom 1:1 – 4 etc] – was an “Aryan” not a Jew, is itself highly revealing on where Hitler got his ideas from.

Indeed, let us now cite Ch XI of his notorious Mein Kampf, which I of course refuse to link:

___________

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents . . . Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for IF THIS LAW DID NOT PREVAIL, ANY CONCEIVABLE HIGHER DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIC LIVING BEINGS WOULD BE UNTHINKABLE.

The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice . . . .

In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. AND STRUGGLE IS ALWAYS A MEANS FOR IMPROVING A SPECIES’ HEALTH AND POWER OF RESISTANCE AND, THEREFORE, A CAUSE OF ITS HIGHER DEVELOPMENT.

IF THE PROCESS WERE DIFFERENT, ALL FURTHER AND HIGHER DEVELOPMENT WOULD CEASE AND THE OPPOSITE WOULD OCCUR. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health
________________

To see the telling roots of this discussion, we need only read Descent of Man, chs 4 – 7; especially Darwin’s discussion of the contrast between the Irish, the Scots and the English [“Saxons”], with a glance back at the impact of the Irish potato famine.

But of course, from time to time, it suited Hitler to try to manipulate Christian terms and texts to try to gull the German people. This brings us to . . .

[ . . . ]