A friend noting our post re Michael Egnor’s thoughts on totalitarianism, sends this snippet:
When Stalin was a schoolboy, “he talked about books all the time. If he coveted a volume, he was happy to steal it from another schoolboy and run home with it.When he was about thirteen, Lado Ketskhoveli took him to a little bookshop in Gori where he paid a five kopeck subscription and borrowed a book that was probably Darwin’s Origin of Species. Stalin read it all night, forgetting to sleep, until Keke [his mother] found him.
‘Time to go to bed,’ she said. ‘Go to sleep–dawn is breaking.’
‘I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading.’ As his reading intensified, his piety wavered.
One day Soso [Stalin] and some friends, including Grisha Glurjidze, lay on the grass in town talking about the injustice of there being rich and poor when he amazed all of them by suddenly saying, ‘God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just.’
‘Sodo, how can you say such things?’ exclaimed Grisha.
‘I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.” He presented Glurjidze with a copy of Darwin.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Young Stalin” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p, 49.
Young Stalin at Amazon.
See also: Michael Egnor on the relationship between Darwinism
and totalitarianism Egnor: Philosopher Hannah Arendt is, in my view, the most perceptive analyst of totalitarianism. In her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she points out that Darwinism played an essential role in the rise of totalitarian governments in the 20th century.
The degree to which Darwin actually influenced such people is debatable but irrelevant to the quality of his theory. If you try to argue that it does have a bearing on the science then you must concede that Christianity is irrevocably tainted by the vicious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther.
Nazi party, anti-Semitism, Darwinism
During World War II went hand in hand
6.5 million Jews died
Multiple programs influenced by Darwinism like eugenics Were responsible
So Martin Luther was an amateur to such atheistic superstars as Stalin and Mao
Hitler Was a political whore and it is debated if he was even kind of Christian he very likely wasn’t and was using it to gain political power
I’m sure you’re very educated on Hitler’s perspective and more than likely judging by your knowledge you immediately assume he’s a Christian and he’s definitely a Christian you’re gonna say he is just a Christian and atheism had nothing to do about it
And I will simply say you were entirely wrong but that’s besides the point
The point is The past century saw some of the worlds greatest monsters in all of history emerge backed with the infallible science of Darwinism and atheism
If you don’t think that’s a fair assessment well I gave it about the same assessment you do when it comes to religion
AaronS1978,
Here’s a nice quote that sums it up.
Naturally anything is debatable, but some assertions are very unlikely to win the debate. 😉
-Q
Seversky:
No matter what is taught to brainwash the masses, macro-evolution is not a valid scientific theory. For any hypothesis to become a theory, something must be witnessed and replicated. Neither has happened, which makes it a hypothesis, just as the multiverse is a hypothesis for the exact same reason. Science is not about fact, but about best explanation based on the evidence available and understanding that any theory can be disproved later.
Macro-evolution has everything to do with the thugocracies that arose following Darwin’s Descent of Man. It was Darwin who wrote about the civilized races bringing about the extinction of the savage races. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Min, Kim, Pol Pot, etc., all ruled with the idea of the strong dominating the weak. It was, and is, might makes right.
Darwin does not allow for charity, since that weakens the species as a whole. Darwin does not allow for the weak to be cared for by the strong, but to be crushed by the strong. From Nazi Germany to the killing fields of Cambodia, Darwin influenced them all. If there is no God, then there can be no moral right and wrong. Right is whatever the strong says they are.
If we are nothing more than animals with no free will and no moral compass, then Hitler could not have been wrong, anymore than Stalin was wrong. It is only if you accept a moral compass unique to man that you can judge anything they did.
Immediately prior to the clipped portion in the OP, it is mentioned in the link that Stalin was at a church school where, prior to reading Darwin’s book, “Origin of Species”, Stalin was said to be ‘the finest choirboy’ and who also “saw the priesthood as his vocation to help the poor.”
Stalin’s love for the priesthood and the church apparently turned into a psychopathic hatred. Stalin, as dictator, tried his damndest to completely eradicate Christianity from Russia.
It is also interesting to note that the Soviet Union is estimated to have killed many more of its OWN PEOPLE than it lost in all of World War II ! The Soviet Union was estimated to have lost 16,825,000 people during WWII.
Whereas on the other hand, ‘purges’ of their OWN PEOPLE resulted in the loss of at least 61 million people in the Soviet Union.
Such horror visited upon the Soviet people is simply beyond comprehension.
Apparently Stalin took his psychopathic hatred towards God to his death bed.
It is also interesting to note just how miserably Stalin failed in his endeavor to eradicate Christianity from Russia. Just a few decades after the fall of the Soviet Empire, “Today, 71 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox.”
Whatever justice in hell that Stalin now endures, his failed war against Christianity must be among his most unbearable torments of all.
Of supplemental note, “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.”,,,
Bornagain
There were roughly 40,000,000 who disappeared under Stalin’s reign throughout the Soviet Union. Among those were Americans who were convinced to go to the USSR who ended up giving up the American citizenship. Not one of those former Americans have ever been found. The total dead is closer to 100,000,000, which makes him the biggest mass murdered in the history of the world.
My dad actually has a portrait carved in wood of Stalin in our summerhouse. It was too heavy to hang so hes just standing near the dinner table.
BobRyan,
I think the 100 million estimate for Stalin is too high. It’s estimated that about 85 million died directly or indirectly in WW2. According to the Wall Street Journal, the total death toll from Communist purges is about 100 million:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810
For Stalin, published estimates of the people who died in his purges range from 680,00-1.2 million (Wikipedia) to 20 million (a post-Soviet Russian paper) to other estimates as high as 40 million.
As for Mao Zedong, estimates go much higher, perhaps 65 million. I found this interesting quote regarding what Mao considered a “major accomplishment” of the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1976. He wanted to get rid of what he considered his number one enemy, the intellectual:
BrunoAr, you might want to keep the Stalin wood carving safe. It might come in handy the future as a shield! 😉
-Q
At post 1 Seversky states,
Actually, contrary to what Seversky thinks, and as I pointed out in this series of posts the other day,,,,
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/michael-egnor-on-the-relationship-between-darwinism-and-totalitarianism/#comment-707831
,,, the degree to which Darwin influenced Marxist/Socialist ideology is not debatable. Darwin’s theory was very much a crucial plank upon which that murderous ideology was based. To repeat, Karl Marx himself stated that, “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”
Furthermore,
Thus Darwin’s theory did indeed play a crucial role in the formation of Marxist/Socialist ideology and the subsequent horror that followed that atheistic ideology. The only people who would even dare try to say that this fact of history is ‘debatable’ are people who a determined to believe Darwin’s theory to be true no matter what horrid consequences may result, and have resulted, from it.
Furthermore, and again directly contrary to what Seversky believes, morality is very much relevant to “the quality of (Darwin’s) theory.”
As I further pointed out the other day on that other thread, Charles Darwin made several anti-altruistic and/or anti-morality statements in his book “Origin of Species”,
Thus as Charles Darwin himself made clear in his own words, morally noble altruistic behavior of any type is simply completely antithetical to Darwin’s ‘let the strongest live and the weakest die’ theory. And as I further pointed out in that series of posts the other day, each of those ‘scientific predictions’ by Charles Darwin has now been falsified by advances in science. In short, extremely sophisticated altruistic behavior, contrary to what Darwin predicted, is found to be rampant within molecular biology.
Thus directly contrary to what Seversky wants to believe, morality and/or altruistic behavior is very much relevant to the ‘quality of his theory’. And Darwin’s theory is once again found, as far as the science itself is concerned, to fall way short of the mark.
At post 1 Seversky goes on to further remark,
HUH???
First off, as AaronS1978 pointed out in post 2, “Martin Luther was a (rank) amateur to such atheistic superstars as Stalin and Mao”. Secondly, without Christianity, Seversky simply has no objective moral basis in which to argue that the antisemitic writings of Martin Luther were inherently evil.
Seversky’s atheistic/materialistic worldview is a world of “no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Apparently Seversky sees no problem freeloading off the objective morality of Christianity in order to try to argue that Martin Luther was as evil as Stalin was.
Shoot, forget Martin Luther, I’ve seen Seversky, much like Richard Dawkins has done, become a ‘raging moralist’ when it comes to God Himself. Seversky could have easily written this following statement by Richard Dawkins
The irresolvable dilemma for Dawkins, (and Seversky), in their tirades against God is, once again, without God they have forsaken any objective moral basis in which they might be able to differentiate evil from good in the first place. Again, their worldview simply denies that good and evil even exists.
The moral argument for God is summed up at the 4:36 minute mark of the following video and can be stated as such:
Premise 1: If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.
Thus, for Dawkins and Seversky to try to claim that God is evil is for them to try to claim that an objective moral standard exists to judge God by. Yet that claim in and of itself defeats their atheistic worldview since their worldview denies the existence of good and evil in the first place. i.e. Without God, there simply is no good and evil, only a variety of subjective opinions with, morally speaking, no way to tell up from down.
Seversky, and Dawkins, have cut off their nose to spite their face and have made a blatantly self-refuting argument in regards to morality and God.
Of supplemental note: As to the Atheist’s oft repeated, and blatantly false, claim that Hitler was a Christian:
The claim that Hitler was a Christian is simply ludicrous. As I once asked an atheist on UD who once tried to claim that Hitler was a Christian, ‘So do you think that the concentration camps that Hitler built to exterminate the Jews were really just his Christian attempt to help the poor and needy?”
Verse:
>”… irrevocably tainted by…”
If we agree things are tainted, then we should at least proportion the taint to the chronological and cultural closeness of the tainting. Crusades? Martin Luther’s prejudices? OK. But weight atheism/Communism/totalitarianism/etc. by their relative closeness in time and culture. Threats come from things that are still close at hand.
Furthermore, with Christianity, you have the ideal, and then you have human beings screwing it up. The taint can adhere to the human beings all you want, but that doesn’t necessarily taint the ideal. That’s what you see others here trying to explain: We readily repudiate Luther’s anti-semitism for instance. But you didn’t go around repudiating old Brother Stalin; that would get you killed.
Sev, you have already been corrected that Luther is 1500 years too late to be a founder of the Christian faith. He was a reformer and as we all are he was deeply flawed. We must learn from his good and his errors, the latter to avoid. Beyond that, we smell the whiff of irretrievably self-refuting deconstructionism, and dismiss it. If we cannot learn from errors, find reconciliation, forgiveness and reform, we are doomed. Likewise if we are led to imagine that one error or perceived error irretrievably taints so the whole can be swept away, that too is folly. History is there to be learned from and errors and wrongs do not refute truths and rights. KF
Judaeo-Christian and Christian, with or without the root, accept that all are flawed. Darwinists believe if enough people are killed off, a perfect person can arise. One cannot have a utopian society built for imperfect people. They demand perfection from those who have influenced society in a positive way, but ignore or minimize the imperfections of those who have brought about their own worldview.
In the same way that Darwin made it possible for Dawkins to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist,” Darwin also made it possible for Hitler et al to be self-satisfied mass murderers.