Tag Archives: Eugenics

News

Was Nazi torturer Josef Mengele influenced by Christianity or Darwinism?

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Story here from Evolution News.

Here is some of the evidence collected in the article.

In Mengele: The Complete Story, Gerald L. Posner and John Ware write:

Precisely what corrupted Mengele’s eager young mind is hard to pin down. Probably it was a combination of the political climate and that his real interest in genetics and evolution happened to coincide with the developing concept that some human beings afflicted by disorders were unfit to reproduce, even to live. Perhaps the real catalyst in this lethal brew was that Mengele, first at Munich and later at Frankfurt, studied under the leading exponents of this “unworthy life” theory. His consummate ambition was to succeed in this fashionable new field of evolutionary research.

[…]Medicine at German universities was in any case more complementary to Mengele’s real interest in evolution, since it was taught in accordance with the guidelines of the social Darwinist theory that Hitler and a growing number of German academics found so attractive.

[…]One of the earliest influence on the student doctor was Dr. Ernst Rudin, whose lectures Mengele regularly attended….Rudin was a leading proponent of the theory that doctors should destroy “life devoid of value.” Rudin himself was one of the architects of Hitler’s compulsory sterilization laws, which were enacted in July 1933.

Compulsory sterilization? That sounds like Obama’s science czar!

In Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel write:

The messianic quality of social Darwinism seems to have appealed to the young Mengele. His writings suggest that he was especially struck by their use of the phrase “the fate of mankind.” From his youthful encounter with their distorted ideals, to his old age, a weary and broken exile, Mengele would continue to feel a personal allegiance to the social Darwinists. At the university, the question of the “biological quality of mankind” may have been esoteric to most of Mengele’s classmates. But for him, it was apparently a clarion call.

Is it any wonder that the secular left is so interested in embryonic stem cell research, and cloning? They like scientific progress, and their worldview has no foundation for the right to life, or any objective human rights. They are thus rational in sacrificing the weak to make their own lives better.

Are all worldviews equal when it comes to morality?

Notice the difference between people influenced by Christianity, like William Wilberforce, and people influenced by Darwinism, like Josef Mengele. On the one worldview, you have man made in the image of God, for the purpose of having a relationship with God. And our job is to help them to have that relationship while respecting their free will (part of being made in the image of God means you have free will). And on the other worldview, you have survival of the fittest, the strong exterminating the weak to keep them from reproducing and wasting precious resources, so that the strong can pursue pleasure without being encumbered by the needs of others.

Here’s my previous post contrasting Wilberforce and Hitler, and another where I examine who is more responsible for the mass murders of the 20th century, and the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. My series of posts explaining why morality is not rational on atheism is here. Atheists may act better than their worldview allows, but that’s only because we are still living on the fumes of a dying Christian culture. If you want real atheist morality, unencumbered by Christianity, then just look at North Korea.

I’m going to be strict with comments again – please post your evidence along with your assertions. I cited evidence for my assertions.

Commentary

MUST-READ: The link between Darwinism, nihilism and public school shootings

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Check out this amazing UK Times article. (H/T ECM)

First, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold:

“Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

[…]As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes? It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

And Pekka-Eric Auvinen:

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

The article continues:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

Darwin himself thought that his theory warranted racism and genocide:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Convinced that the various races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary highway, and that two races could be fairly described as more or less evolved even when both had a track record of cultural achievement, Darwin insisted that natural selection explained why the Europeans had been able to see off serial invasions by the Ottoman Turks. Some of today’s Turks understandably resent being designated as genetically second-rate, which perhaps explains why the editor of Turkey’s most popular science magazine was instructed by his proprietor to cancel a special edition celebrating Darwin’s anniversary.

[…]Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man could “only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him”. Darwinian ideas, eugenics and its ugly sister, eugenic euthanasia, were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions. Indeed, so convinced were the staff of the clinic at Kaufbeuren-Irsee in Bavaria that they were acting rationally that, even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, they carried on killing handicapped people under the American occupation, until a US officer led a squad of GIs to the hospital and ordered them to desist.

The modern pro-abortion movement is rooted in the thought of Darwinian eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, who was quite explicit about weeding out the poor, the “unfit” and “inferior” races. Many people on the secular left believe that some people are not fit to live, and that these people should be weeded out by force. For example, Obama’s science czar advocates controlling the reproduction of undesirable people and that born babies are not human beings.

After you finish reading the UK Times article, check out this post over at Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When we teach our children that their existence is an ultimately meaningless accident and that morals are arbitrary byproducts of random genetic fluctuations and mechanical necessity, should we be surprised that they place a lower value on human life than someone who is taught that all humans have inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God?

[…]There are three and only three options.

1.  We can continue to fill our children’s heads with standard Darwinian theory (which Dennett rightly calls “universal acid”), understanding that at least some of them are going to put two and two together and realize that the acid has eaten through all ethical principles – and act accordingly.

2.  We can try to come up with a secular noble lie.  “OK kids.  You might have noticed that one of the implications of what I just taught you is that your lives are ultimately meaningless and all morals are arbitrary, but you must never act as if that is true because [fill in the noble lie of your choice, such as “morality is firmly grounded on societal norms or our ability to empathize with others”].

3.  We can teach our children the truth – that the universe reveals a wondrous ordered complexity that can only be accounted for by the existence of a super-intelligence acting purposefully.  And one of the implications of that conclusion is that God exists, and, reasoning further, He has established an objective system of morality that binds us all, and therefore the moral imperatives you feel so strongly are not just an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical states of your brain.

This reminds me of the essay “Men Without Chests” in C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis writes that moral relativists undermine objective morality, which cannot be grounded rationally by atheism, and yet they are surprised when people actually act as though moral relativism is true.

The good news is that Darwinism is false. The bad news is taxpayer money from working parents is funneled into politicized government-run schools that teach children that Darwinism is true. High taxes ensure that parents are kept away from their children, since they must both work to pay for the government-run schools. The left’s opposition to stay-at-home mothers and fathers, (e.g., sex education, abortion, unilateral divorce, same-sex marriage, subsidies for single motherhood, etc.),  ensures that the government-run schools have more influence on children than the parents do.

Commentary

MUST-READ: A medical doctor explains how Obamacare fails patients

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This American Thinker essay is awesome, and was sent to me by ECM.

The author gives the physician’s perspective on Obama’s government-run health care plan.

First, Pollard explains that Medicare is not providing good service now because it is rationing care.

Excerpt:

I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.

Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.

Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point — rationing of care.

Over the past 35 years I have cared for over 1000 children born with congenital cataracts. In older children and in adults the vision is rehabilitated with an intraocular lens. In newborns we use contact lenses which are very expensive. It takes Medicaid over one year to approve a contact lens post cataract surgery. By that time a successful anatomical operation is wasted as the child will be close to blind from a lack of focusing for so long a period of time.

Again, extreme rationing. Solution: I have a foundation here in Atlanta supported 100% by private funds which supplies all of these contact lenses for my Medicaid and illegal immigrants children for free. Again, waiting for the government would be disastrous.

That is what happens when the government is the single-payer for treatment. Long delays, waiting lists, rationing. The solutions are all with the private free market, not with the government.

The rest of the article contains other examples of problems with government-run health care:

  • how Sweden’s government-run health care system puts people on waiting lists
  • how Medicare is slow to reimburse doctors for services performed
  • how government-run care in the military is rationed
  • how the British government-run system denies care to the elderly
  • the consequences of billing the government for care instead of paying your doctor what they ask for
  • the real story about whether the uninsured receive care

But there is one point you may never have heard before, and I want to cite this last point in full.

In the free market, doctors compete with other doctors to provide the best care for the patient at the lowest price. But the government is run by politically correct social engineers who make rules based on what seems fair to them. And often, what seems fair to them is racial discrimination and gender-discrimination in the form of affirmative action programs. And that has consequences for you.

Excerpt:

One last thing: with this new healthcare plan there will be a tremendous shortage of physicians. It has been estimated that approximately 5% of the current physician work force will quit under this new system. Also it is estimated that another 5% shortage will occur because of the decreased number of men and women wanting to go into medicine. At the present time the US government has mandated gender equity in admissions to medical schools .That means that for the past 15 years that somewhere between 49 and 51% of each entering class are females. This is true of private schools also, because all private schools receive federal funding.

The average career of a woman in medicine now is only 8-10 years and the average work week for a female in medicine is only 3-4 days. I have now trained 35 fellows in pediatric ophthalmology. Hands down the best was a female that I trained 4 years ago — she was head and heels above all others I have trained. She now practices only 3 days a week.

Don’t let the government run your health care plan, do it yourself. There are other ways to reduce costs that do not involve rationing of care.