Monday, April 14, 2008

Expelled and Antisemitism

In "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", as we've found out already, much is said about an alleged link between Darwin's theory of Evolution and Nazi Germany. Ben Stein goes all around to various death camps, with Nazi footage interspliced so that viewers can't mistake what the film is suggesting, and he cries crocodile tears.

But then Ben Stein interviews a Polish professor of dendrology, Maciej Giertych, who denies evolution.

What Ben Stein and the producers of "Expelled" either didn't know, or casually ignored, is that this professor harbors some very ignorant and rather antisemitic beliefs.

Professor Giertych had written and/or said the following:

"By their own will, [Jews] prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they govern themselves by their own rules and they take care to maintain also a spatial separateness. They form the ghettos themselves, as districts in which they live together, comparable to the Chinatowns in the USA. It was only Hitler’s Germany that created the concept of forced separation, of a closed ghetto from which Jews were not allowed to leave.



Jews are not pioneers. They do not go conquering the wild world or overpowering the hazards of nature. They settle among other civilisations, preferably among the rich. They tend to migrate from poorer to richer lands.They do so always as a group, immediately forming their own separate community. (source)



In our civilisation, a righteous person living honestly will not get in conflict with the law, even not knowing it. On the other hand, living in agreement with the letter of the law but dishonestly, derives from the pharisaic attachment to rules but not to ethics. The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. He cannot be compared to the Sabbath traveller sitting on a water bottle, who is also using a convenient interpretation of the Law, but he is doing this in order to fulfil the Law and therefore in full respect for it.


In our civilisation, a righteous person living honestly will not get in conflict with the law, even not knowing it. On the other hand, living in agreement with the letter of the law but dishonestly, derives from the pharisaic attachment to rules but not to ethics. The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. He cannot be compared to the Sabbath traveller sitting on a water bottle, who is also using a convenient interpretation of the Law, but he is doing this in order to fulfil the Law and therefore in full respect for it.


And all of this occurs because the Jews didn’t recognize "Jesus Christ as the awaited Messiah":


What we consider as the Jewish people today refers to a tragic community, a people that has not recognised the time of its visitation. It is those who did not recognise Jesus Christ as the awaited Messiah. Those Jews who followed Christ merged within the Christian universality. Those who rejected Him became wanderers throughout the world, among believers of other religions, jealously nurturing their chosenness, this messianic consciousness,which gives a defining mark to their civilisation.



I can tell you right now that many Evangelical Fundamentalists who absorb and believe the crap that "Expelled" promotes, will read the professor's comments and simply say "Yeah, so? What wrong with that?"

They will not recognize the blatant antisemitic tone of Giertych, because they probably think the same thing about Jews themselves. They probably consider the Professor's comments to be "commonly known facts". I'll be so bold as to affirm the theme behind some research I did on antisemitism and the Evangelical Christian movement; The Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian movement as a whole, harbors a lot of antisemitism. I document this in my "Fundamentalist Deceit" blog, which has a who's who of big-time Evangelism, with quotes of theirs.

There is a common idea among Fundamentalists that the Jews are a "flawed" people -- that their biggest mistake as a group was rejecting Christ. This leads many Fundamentalists to presume the following:

(1) The Jews (who never convert) will go to Hell.
(2) That Israel will be inherited only by "true Christians (c) (tm)"
(3) That Jews will be included among those who help Satan in the end times
(4) Most importantly, that a powerful conspiracy of Jews exist who wage war against Christianity.
(5) Jews "control all the banks and the media".

I've actually had prolonged discussions with various Chrsitians who took it upon themselves to tell me these things, and then write me all sorts of rationalizations and alleged proofs of it.

Jewish Conspiracy theories abound in Evangelical circles, and it's largely due to a combination of ignorance and blind trust for their leaders who often utter incredibly antisemitic statements.

The link between Christianity and antisemitism goes back to the founding of the Christian Church, and finds itself traced through Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Puritans, and southern Baptists in America. It's too bad that so many Evangelicals can turn a blind eye to this very obvious and well-documented fact, and continue pandering to "Expelled". Darwin's theory had zero influence on antisemitism in Nazi Germany. It was the much stronger and more obvious ties between Christianity and Antisemitism that is to blame.

What Irony that Ben Stein, a Jew, can help to promote the propaganda of a movement of people who share a much closer and more intimate set of links to Nazi Death Camps than Darwin!

12 comments:

GamingAsshole said...

I can't wait to see this stupid movie.

TiradeFaction said...

Maybe Ben is only a Jew in name only, and doesn't care if he uses anti-Semites to make him some extra cash? Assuming this movie is his pathetic attempt at a cash cow.

Three Ninjas said...

Have you seen how the Disco Tute is swearing up and down that the movie does NOT try to blame the Holocaust on Darwin?

It's the same trick AiG uses (read in Ken Ham's voice):

"Some people think we claim that the theory of evolution is responsible for the Holocaust. That's ridiculous. As thinking people, we acknowledge that hate and racism existed long before Darwin. What we are saying is that the theory of evolution is responsible for the Holocaust, which is something completely different."

TiradeFaction said...

Wait what? How can you say "We don't think it's responsible" but then say "we say it is responsible"?

Do people actually fall for that?

Ojalanpoika said...

Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for 'exaggerating' or 'going easy' on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the 'Politics-is-applied-biology' Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of 'agnostism' was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany. Haeckel was also the first one to propose a systematic answer to the Judenfrage: To EXPEL all the Jews from their chairs at the universities.

'Kampf' was a direct translation of 'struggle' from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.

Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary 'PUS', Haeckel's 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium. This despite the fact that Haeckel's crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). It was the second to most cross/scientific paradigm in the 20th century. Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS - and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it. Text book authors are making a mockery out of science.

More from conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf

pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm

GamingAsshole said...

Evolution and Charles Darwin had no bearing whatsoever on the Nazi Regime, which regularly burned Darwin's work.

Ernst Haeckel was also never promoted by the Nazis, and you can't find one of their works that says he is a basis of their ideas. As for being anti-semetic, can you prove that he was?

It's similar with the claim that the Nazis based their ideas on Nietzsche, when they never even bring him up.

Lysenkoism was not super evolution, what are you talking about?


Kampf means struggle in German, and is not from a British book published in the 1800's (The Origins of Species)

GamingAsshole said...

"Some creationists have claimed that Darwin relied on Haeckel's embryo drawings as proof of evolution[12] [13] [14] to support their argument that Darwin's theory is therefore illegitimate and possibly fraudulent. This claim ignores the fact that Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and The Descent of Man in 1871, whereas Haeckel's famous embryo drawings did not appear until 1874 (8 species). In The Descent of Man Darwin used only two embryo drawings, neither taken from Haeckel.[15][16]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel#.22Infamous.22_embryo_drawings

Wow, that only took a minute and a half of research.

Ojalanpoika said...

Ernst Haeckel casted his authority before he died to the secret organ Thule Geschellschaft starred by Rudolf Hess et al, which picked Adolf Hitler up later on. I have scanned this article on the topic by permission:

Before Hitler came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden (Reginald H. Phelps)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Thule.html

The Nazis did not want to confess anybody. They stole not only material treasures. Their doctrine did not emphasize intellectual scholarship. Joseph Goebbels himself started his career as a writer by plagiating anothers essay and getting nailed for it.

"There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition." (Blaise Pascal, Christian apologetic and defender of the Jews).

pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm

Ojalanpoika said...

Since Wikipedia lies in the subject and silences common sense to death, I will have to paste my argumentation and appropriate quotes in the blogs:

Prior to Haeckel's mystified doctrines, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) himself acknowledged in his letter to his intimate Asa Gray (1810-1888) and Joseph Hooker, that "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of" his theory was the similarity of vertebrate embryos in their earliest stages (Francis Darwin 1896 p. 131; Churchill 1991 pp. 1-29). Darwin complained that his reviewers and his friends had not paid attention to his embryological arguments despite of this. In the Origin, namey, Darwin had listed five set of facts in embryology, that could not be explained satisfactorily without the idea of descent with modification. "The leading facts in embryology" were "second in importance to none in natural history" (Origin, p. 450; Mayr 1982 p. 470).

Darwin referred mainly to the outlook, not to the recapitulation per se. In his autobiography, Darwin stated:
"Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class. No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the Origin" (Darwin 1987, p. 125).

Later on, this subject was siezed, indeed. In Darwin's Origin (p. 333-346), a phrase "second to none in importance" was used of the phenomenon - and in later editions the following phrase for its young investigator:
“[Haeckel]…brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters.”

Could the name of Darwin be one of the contributions why the misleading Haeckelian the embryo cavalcade had the authority to stay in the books despite the later criticism?

Darwin did not apply his revolutionary theory to the human beings until his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. Although this was after the young and ambitious Haeckel had firmly stepped in the print, the humility by which the old Darwin paid hommage in his introduction is tragicomical:

"The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species… is not in any degree new… maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers… and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work 'Generelle Morphologie' (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his 'Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,' in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine."

One has the intuition, that Charles Darwin admired Haeckel's early official positions and discipline. I have faced great difficulties to find a record of any academic degree of Darwin, but sometimes he is referred to as a Master of Arts. It is well known, however, that in his youth, Darwin was sent down for spending too much time hunting, shooting, fishing and socialising. A nasty way to put it: Darwin ate most of his specimens when he was young.

And so Darwin elaborated in his Descent of Man (1871, p. 203):
"In attempting to trace the genealogy of the Mammalia, and therefore of man, lower down in the series, we become involved in greater and greater obscurity. He who wishes to see what ingenuity and knowledge can effect, may consult Prof. Haeckel's works." [Footnote: "Elaborate tables are given in his 'Generelle Morphologie' (B. ii. s. cliii. and s. 425); and with more especial reference to man in his 'Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,' 1868. Prof. Huxley, in reviewing this latter work ('The Academy,' 1869, p. 42) says, that he considers the phylum or lines of descent of the Vertebrata to be admirably discussed by Haeckel, although he differs on some points. He expresses, also, his high estimate of the general tenor and spirit of the whole work."]

Referring to both Huxley and Haeckel, Darwin wrote in the first chapter of the Descent of Man:

“The [human] embryo itself at a very early period can hardly be distinguished from that of other members of the vertebrate kingdom… It may, however, be added that the human embryo likewise resembles in various points of structure certain low forms when adult… os coccyx projects like a true -- we ought frankly to admit their community of descent.” (p. 14-17.)

The academic myth of recapitulation rests on a set of 24 Haeckelian figures first published in 1866 in Generalle Morphologie der Organismen, recycled first and foremost by Haeckel himself. There was only one illustration in the Origin, but many of them in the Descent of Man. In the case of the first drawing in Darwin's Descent, an appropriate albeit absolutely absurd confession was honestly added by the more sincere Darwin to the footnote of the embryo drawings:

"… This drawing is five times magnified, the embryo being 25 days old. The internal viscera have been omitted, and the uterine appendages in both drawings removed. I was directed to these figures by Prof. Huxley, from whose work, 'Man's place in Nature', the idea of giving them was taken. Häckel has also given analogous drawings in his 'Schöpfungsgeschichte.'" (p. 16.)

Haeckel reinforced the human genealogy, where Darwin had referred in his most exposing work, by Anthropogeny. This is the book usually recalled by the title The Evolution of Man, and it reached almost a thousand pages in later editions. This is also the book whose drawings are recycled (or further modified) by Alberts et al (1994) and the countless others. (The same embryonic cavalcade, indeed, were found already in the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1868a.) Yet already at face of the 3rd edition to the Anthropogenie, however, something had come up: The long history of fierce accusation against Haeckelian manipulation of observations had begun.
In one of the recent correspondences, Richardson writes:
"…Haeckel's drawings of 1874 are substantially fabricated. In support of this view, I note that this oldest 'fish' image is made up of bits and pieces from different animals - some of them mythical. It is not unreasonable to characterize this as 'faking'. Later editions of Haeckel's drawings were somewhat more accurate, and showed significant variations among embryos of different species.
Sadly, it is the discredited 1874 drawings that are used in so many British and American biology textbooks today." (Science 281, 1998, p. 1289.)

GamingAsshole said...

You had me going there. I thought you were just some dumbass you didn't know what he was talking about. But I realize you are a troll. Now most people have fun with trolls for awhile, but I normally don't. Here's all you are going to get:

>>> Ernst Haeckel casted his authority before he died to the secret organ Thule Geschellschaft starred by Rudolf Hess et al, which picked Adolf Hitler up later on. I have scanned this article on the topic by permission:<<<

Yawn, conspiracy theories.

>>>Since Wikipedia lies in the subject and silences common sense to death, I will have to paste my argumentation and appropriate quotes in the blogs:<<<

Haha, troll, troll, troll. Try to troll some other comments.

Try atheism vs christianity (google groups) they may give you more time.

GamingAsshole said...

For those of you who don't exactly know why everything this guy says is bullshit, just read up on the subjects he's talking about with these easy to find articles (it's obvious he's a troll, because even a drop-out could find this information):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gobbels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled_No_intelligence_allowed

http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/darwin_nazism.htm

http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/understanding_evolution.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=jnTUvf_qEs4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+descent+of+man&ei=yMIcSJzEA4KGswPj1tXyBg

GamingAsshole said...

http://books.google.com/books?id=eIQYwBjfJ5AC&pg=PA312&lpg=PA312&dq=Hardly+any+point+gave+me+so+much+satisfaction+when+I+was+at+work+on+the+Origin,+as+the+explanation+of+the+wide+difference+in+many+classes+between+the+embryo+and+the+adult+animal,+and+of+the+close+resemblance+of+the+embryos+within+the+same+class.+No+notice+of+this+point+was+taken,+as+far+as+I+remember,+in+the+early+reviews+of+the+Origin%22&source=web&ots=YXrr5f-v3O&sig=gIlasoeJWcXzxghXkbCpAbfwya0&hl=en