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From a review of Weikart’s Death of Humanity: One stunning factoid

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From Tom Woodward at Themelios, in a review of Richard Weikart’s Death of Humanity:

there is throughout the book a proper sense of what I call “deep-shock” to see what these secular thinkers have actually said in writing. Many of the vignettes and quotes from secular crusaders moved me, stopping me in my mental tracks. These shocks were hammer blows of reality—wake up calls that prompted me to jot my reaction and resolve on the margins of many pages.

One shock, from US Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was especially stunning. Holmes, in commenting on a recently published book he had read, said, “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate fact—force…. Nor do I see how a believer in any kind of evolution can get a higher formula than organic fitness at the given moment” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to Harold Laski, May 13, 1926, in Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935, 2 vols., ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953], 2:837). Is it any wonder, then, that Holmes, holding such power as a jurist, was a pivotal figure in some of the most embarrassing moves in US history—moves designed to promote a new world of racial purity through eugenics and sterilization of the “unfit” among us? More.

Of course, we can pretend it is not so if we like.

See also: Physics needs Darwin? Ken Miller should hear this

Is the term Darwinism a “scientific slur”?

Announcement: Human Zoos–new documentary will premiere in Houston, April 18

and

Evolution News slams “sloppy” IV theistic evolution book by BioLogos advisor

Comments
Thank you for bringing this quote to our attention, News. I have used it to update my very first UD post from March 2006. See here.Barry Arrington
April 30, 2018
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