Hitler, Evolution, and Christianity

I wanted to wait until I had a little free time to respond to this. I'm off today.1. I wasn't talking about eugenics. In the OP, I gave evidence from Mein Kampf that Hitler used and perverted the idea of natural selection, applying it to races rather than species. I later gave evidence from his speeches that when speaking to general audiences, he concentrated mostly on anti-Semitism, claiming that the Jews were destroying Germany through "internationalism." His point was that the Aryan race was superior and it was morally correct for them to dominate other races. We cannot, he says, escape Nature. That we can conquer Nature is a perverted Jewish idea (I've been surprised how often he returned to the idea that we should live according to Nature). To live according to Nature means to live according to the rule of "survival of the fittest." That is natural morality. Also, it is natural for a race to remain pure, just as it is natural for species to have separate gene pools.Your idea has been that what matters is how the Nazis convinced the masses, not what they "really" thought, even if we could know that. You also said that they convinced the masses through traditional nationalism and religious tie-ins.My point is that their nationalism was thoroughly racial in their propaganda, based on the idea of the superior Aryans.Hitler also made Christian references, but from what I've seen this was not his most frequent type of demagoguery. Also, his Christian references are bizarre perversions of Christian doctrine.But apart from propaganda, we want to know their ideology, their motives for doing what they did once they gained power and where these ideas came from. In above messages, I outlined the Nazi ideology, according to Hitler. Life consists of struggle between races for living space. The superior race is destined to dominate and populate the world while the weaker races will be eliminated or be enslaved. Aryans are the makers of high culture. Whatever helps the Aryan race to dominate is good.International Marxism is unnatural, says Hitler. So is democracy, another Jewish invention.2. Hitler's use of Christianity: Sometimes Hitler referred to himself as a Christian in his public speeches but Christianity was not a part of Nazi ideology. On the contrary, Christian ethics is in direct opposition to Nazism. In "Table Talk," Hitler reveals exactly what he thought of Christianity. He despised it. Sometimes he had the idea that after they had won the war it would be wise to just let Christianity die out little by little; at other times he said he would exterminate it. Christianity is unnatural.3. Marxism used Darwinism in a quite different way. The animal kingdom is dog-eat-dog. So is capitalistic enterprise. But society should be socialized to eliminate this animalistic system. So Marx did not use the idea of natural selection. What he used was the idea of evolution, as I show in the quote from Engels above.The reason that Marxism is "scientific" is that it is based on the principle of evolution, which Marxists refer to as "dialectics." Just as there is dialectics in the animal world, there is also dialectics in the history of the evolution of human society. Marxism uses Darwinism to make the claim that dialetical materialism is scientific.So both Nazism and Communism misuse ideas lifted from Darwinism. In the case of Nazism, it is social Darwinism of the racial variety. In the case of communism, it is the idea of evolution, which allows Marxists to say their system is scientific.Neither of these movements were religious. They were secular and pseudo-scientific.Marx wrote a clever novel. Hitler wrote a stupid novel. Their discourse was artistic, camouflaged as science.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 06-24-2005 09:43 AMThis message has been edited by robinrohan, 06-24-2005 09:45 AM

This leads me to a more general issue, which is the relationship between attitudes toward science in the first half of the 20th century versus the second half (from the 70s on, say). It was thought with the Scopes trial in the 30s that the matter of education about evolution had been settled. I think we can affirm that the attitude toward evolution in those days by the public was rather different from what it is today. "Creationism" went underground for awhile, but then re-emerged some half century later. Why did this happen?It happened, I would tentatively argue, because of pseudo-scientific disasters such as Nazism and, more importantly, Communism--atheistic communism, the influence of which spread across the world. A cultural shift occurred in the US in which Godless communism got linked in the popular mind with science, but particularly with Darwinism, because communism exuded pseudo-Darwinian ideas.Fundamentalism with its creationist ideas re-emerged and this time it began to develop some political clout--not a lot, but enough to make one uneasy.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 06-24-2005 11:19 AM

Besides the association of TOE with Godless communism, there were also other influences of a domestic nature, such as the rise of crime of all types which peaked in the 80s (since then there has been a decline). This rise of crime was associated with Godlessness, among other things.What could have caused this Godlessness, this immorality? Obviously it begins with the education system where traditional values are being tampered with. For example, in biology courses an atheistic theory of evolution is being taught which is directly opposed to religion and hence opposed to morality. Thus the rise in crime.Creationists of the world, unite! Fight those communists who claim that we are nothing more than ugly smelly monkeys!

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I thought this thread might be useful to you with all the citations from Hitler's speeches and, more importantly in my view, from "Table Talk."One of my points was that whatever Hitler might have said in his speeches, in his private conversations, recorded in "Table Talk," he revealed what he really thought about Christianity. He despised it.My other point was to show that Nazism is really a kind of social Darwinism except that it differs from certain other versions in being based on race. The fittest race, as it were, deserves to rule because it's natural, and what is natural is right.

Posts # 102, 103, 104, and 107.

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