Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – you’d think conservative Christians would know better than to lie

A common false claim by many Christians has to do with Darwin and evolutionary theory.  They want to so desperately conflate Social Darwinism with evolutionary theory, in order to try to scare people from accepting evolutionary theory and realizing that the bible is nothing different from any other silly set of myths.

I found this blog post, by “Brother Murf”, and it is one of the more extreme of its kind, with more false nonsense.  I confronted him with his nonsense and he doubled down “Darwinian was the impetus of his actions. Once set in motion, atheists are the gods of their own world. He was going to become a priest when he read THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES…”

I responded “Always good to see that some theists have no problem lying and bearing false witness, ignoring their bible as convenient for them. Stalin was a megalomaniac this is why he did what he did. He misused Darwin’s ideas. But nice try to lie about what atheism leads to. If Stalin had become a priest, he would have done the same with the bible.”

Now, we get into the fun parts.   He responded below.  I did a nice bit of research to show him that he is wrong.  I hated to waste that so here it is. Just the bits by dear Louisa McCord are worth it.  She was quite a piece of work.

“Not lying, my friend. The facts of history speak for themselves. Nor have I ignored the bible as you said. In this we agree, Stalin was a megalomaniac and it is highly probable that he would have done the same thing with the bible…perhaps, dare I go so far to posit, he may have even set in motion a new Inquisition? There was no misuse of Darwin’s ideas, he directly used their intended purpose. Most people fail to remember the full title of the book: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” He never actually touched on the “origin of species” and his theory was failing at best. Everything, without a moral lawgiver, became relative to the person. Man could speed up the natural selection process by killing off the “unfavoured races”…No, there was no misuse of that theory, as it was a partial impetus for the Civil War here in the United States to preserve the white mans favored status, it was the impetus for Hitler’s war against the Jews, Pol Pot’s killing of his own people, Mao Tse Tung’s killing of his own people…ahhhh, the list could go on, but I won’t because you have it all figured out…Godspeed to you.”

So, which is it, Murf?  “Stalin killed millions because he believed Darwin’s philosophy”  or “Stalin was a megalomaniac and it is highly probable that he would have done the same thing with the bible”.

you want to claim that atheism and evolutionary theory are at fault, and you falsely claim that Darwin’s book was intended to excuse genocide as a philosophy.   Evolutionary theory is not a way of thinking e.g. a philosophy, it is a theory that has been repeatedly proven true by observation and experimentation.

Do quote where in Origin of the Species it ever says that genocide is good.  Yep, the whole title is indeed:  ““On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” Favoured means “endowed with special advantages or gifts” and when you read the book you see that Darwin’s argument is that living creatures with characteristics that are favored in a certain environment they will live to pass along those favored characteristics to their progeny.  Also in this title the term race is used and is used in this definition “the descendants of a common ancestor : a group sharing a common lineage”  Both definitions are from Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Again, a Christian’s ignorance about what he speaks shows again that he needs to remain willfully ignorant to spread his false claims.

You also make a false claim that Darwin “never actually touched on the “origin of the species”.  That is all the book is about, how different species arise.  What you appear to be trying to do is claim that Darwin never touched on the origins of life.  He never meant to do that and you have invented a strawman to attack since you can’t actually address what Darwin actually says.

There is not one time that Darwin ever said or intimated “Man could speed up the natural selection process by killing off the “unfavoured races””  You’ve invented that to try to bear false witness against those who you disagree with.  It is a false claim made for your personal advantage, a lie.

Darwin was an Englishman.  He wrote “Origin of the Species” before 1859, when it was published and before the USCW ever started.  Your nonsense “No, there was no misuse of that theory, as it was a partial impetus for the Civil War here in the United States to preserve the white mans favored status,” tries to lie that Darwin intended it to be used to “preserve the white man’s favored statue”.  He never did.  Darwin knew that humans were equal.  He wrote this in The Voyage of the Beagle “I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.”

He also said this in a notebook of his “Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? — animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead. — respect.”

To lie and claim this man was for social Darwinism is simply despicable, a Christian using deception to spread his nonsense.

Now, who did try to use Darwinism for what became called social Darwinism and its still called that today?  Herbert Spencer was a sociologist who took Darwin’s theory of how species changed and tried to apply that to how humans and their social structure should work.  Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton was one of the founders of eugenics, not Darwin. You in your ignorance attack the wrong people in your desperation to denigrate evolutionary theory.  Spencer supported Lamarckism which was wrong, the claim that if I stretch my neck, my children will have a stretched neck too.  Spencer tried to put evolutionary theory onto subjects that it had nothing to do with.  Spencer was also one who supported disallowing marriage between the races.  Spencer used an idea to support his own ignorance.

Social Darwinism, not evolutionary theory, was used by Christians to justify the poor and the wealthy, people like John Rockefeller and later by someone like good Catholic Robert Bork ““In America, the rich are overwhelmingly people – entrepreneurs, small-business men, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc. – who have gained their higher incomes through intelligence, imagination, and hard work.” –  that there is some law of God that is represented when the rich get richer and poor are kept poor.

We also have Louisa McCord, southern belle and defender of slavery as approved by this god since those people of color are less than she is, classic socialist Darwinism “If such be the Stowe and Westminster idea of a gentleman, we are unfortunate enough to have less convenient consciences, and singular as the fact may appear to this knowing fraternity, we are willing to state upon oath, or in any other, the most veracious manner possible, our fixed belief and certain opinion, that there really are a good many among our Southern inhabitants, men and women, who do what they think right, and are not living with a constant lie on their lips and in their hearts; who own slaves because they believe “the system” to be the best possible for black and white, for slave and master, and who can, on their knees, gratefully worship the all-gracious providence of an Almighty God, who has seen fit, so beautifully, to suit every being to the place to which its nature calls it. Ay, Mrs. Stowe, there are pious slaveholders; there are christian slaveholders; there are gentlemanly slaveholders; there are slaveholders whose philosophic research has looked into nature and read God in his works, as well as in his Bible, and who own slaves because they think it, not expedient only, but right, holy and just so to do, for the good of the slave—for the good of the master—for the good of the world. It is not only a New-England “Miss Ophelia” who “would cut off her right hand, sooner than keep on from day to day doing what she thinks wrong.” There are men, and women too, slave-owners and slaveholders, who need no teachings to act as closely as human weakness can, to such a rule. Southern hearts and Southern souls can beat high, and look heavenward, with noble and pure aspirations, blessing God for his mercies; blessing “the system” through which His wisdom obviates, what to man’s little intellect might seem insurmountable, evils, and blessing that beautiful order of creation, which ignorant bigotry, vainly, as yet, has striven to cast back into chaos. “ 

and “Make your laws to intefere with the God-established system of slavery, which our Southern States are beautifully developing to perfection, daily improving the condition of the slave, daily waking more and more the master to his high and responsible position; make your laws, we say, to pervert this God-directed course, and the world has yet to see the horrors which might ensue from it. The natural order of things perverted, ill must follow. “

and “It is a mere quibble to talk of his want of opportunities and instruction. Where were the white man’s opportunities and instruction, when the power of mind guided him to the destiny for which Heaven created him? when, by the sunlight of reason, he burst a bonds of ignorance, and, echoing the Almighty fiat, “let there be light,” saw the day beam, which still to the negro was darkness? What guide had he? what opportunities? what instruction? further than the God-given intellect which nature has denied to his lowlier fellow? The white man needed no leading strings. God created him for the leader and the teacher. The mind of the white man sprang by its own power to that eminence which to the negro nature is unattainable.”  UNCLE TOM’S CABIN“Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly.” By HARRIETBEECHER STOWE. Westminster Review.—July, 1852.—Contemporary Literature of America.

Funny how Hitler demanded that all books on evolutionary theory be banned.  There was a list of books that the Nazis banned, it was printed in Die Bucherei, the Nazi journal for their lending libraries.  Let’s look at what it listed as banned:

 

Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279

1. The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new German (H.G. Wells, Rolland).
2. The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism.
3. Pacifist literature.
4. Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writing supporting the Weimar Republic (Rathenau, Heinrich Mann).
5. All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig).
6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).
7. Books that advocate “art” which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (Grosz, Dix, Bauhaus, Mendelsohn).
8. Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk(Hirschfeld).
9. The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of “Asphalt and Civilization” literati! (Graf, H. Mann, Stefan Zweig, Wassermann, Franz Blei). [transl. note: a derogatory term for writers dealing with upper middle class urban society].
10. Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field.
11. Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life’s goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life.
12. Nationalistic and patriotic kitsch in literature.

[Source for German text: pp. 143-144 of Strothmann, Dietrich. Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik: ein Beitrag zur Publizistik im Dritten Reich. Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1968. Translation by Dr. Roland Richter. B

We also have this from another nazi black list for books

“c) Alle Schriften, welche die christliche Religion und ihre Einrichtungen, den Gottesglauben und andere einem gesunden Volksempfinden heiligen Dinge verhöhnen, verumglimpfen oder verächtlich machen.

c) All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk.”

Considering that conservative Christians agree with this, that evolutionary theory threatens Christianity,  you seem to be in quite alliance with Herr Hitler.  Read Mein Kampf to see how Christian Hitler was.  I have.

Again, a Christian tries to make false claims and insist that Hitler was influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory when he wanted to exterminate the Jews, the disabled, homosexuals, when all of that exhortation came from the bible where it says that the disabled cannot be in this god’s presence, that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ and where it exhorts the murder of homosexuals.

Pol Pot and Mas Tse Tung are as Stalin, a megalomaniac, and again, using social Darwinism of Spencer et al, not Darwin’s evolutionary theory. You fail again, Murf, since they, like Stalin would have done the same with religion as you admitted above.

That he also lied about Einstein on his blog is no surprise.  These particular Christians do anti-theists favors constantly by their actions.

Addendum”  This what Murf responded with

Not one quote from Darwin to support TrueChristian(tm) lies.