FirmhandKY
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
No one can ask you to kill in the name of "science"?!
Hitler killed 6 million Jews, Gypsies and "others' in his scientific eugenics program.
No this was racial and religious prejudice because all the science into genetics of the time was pointing to the opposite of what he was attempting; if he was trying to create some superior race. He fell for his own version of science which stood up to no real external scrutiny.
The murder and genocide practiced by der Reich was directly attributable to their "scientific" view of humanity.
FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY
In this compelling and painstakingly researched work of intellectual history, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially those pertaining to the sacredness of human life. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary "fitness" (especially in terms of intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis. He convincingly makes the disturbing argument that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles rather than nihilistic ones. From Darwin to Hitler is a provocative yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.
Nazi eugenics
Nazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns. Those humans were targeted that they identified as "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), including but not limited to the criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane and the weak, for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while 70,000 were killed in the Action T4.
Adolf Hitler read racial hygiene tracts during his imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. He thought that Germany could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the principles of racial hygiene and eugenics.
Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. These had to be removed quickly. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, and the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The racial policy of Nazi Germany were a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race", and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy. It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by using compulsory sterilizations and extermination of the Untermensch (or "sub-humans"), and which eventually culminated in the Holocaust. These policies targeted peoples, in particular Jews, who were labeled as "inferior" in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk (or "master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft (or "national community") at the top and included Romani, persons of color and Jews at the bottom.
Plenty more, if you want to look.
Just because it was proven to be bad science, doesn't mean it wasn't science.
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
Stalin killed 20-50 millions of his own citizens in his quest to impose the "scientific" vision of mankind.
I don't know what particular incident you are referring to or whether you are trying to cast everyone that gives themselves the title of scientist as actually being one. It is clear from what we know of Stalin that he actually hindered scientific advancement and sent many scientists to labour camps if they came up with answers that were inconvenient to him or his vision. I don't try to pretend that everyone that calls himself a Christian actually is one. What is dangerous about Christianity however is there is no clear way to distinguish who holds the correct version of it and what that version says they can do in its name.
I'm referring to his entire rule, and his vision of how to order society was based on the Marxist "scientific method and discoveries".
Darwinism & Communism, Part II
To understand why this is so, we need to go back to the origins of Communist philosophy. Communists from the very beginning were attracted to Darwinism because, as Engels remarked in a letter to Marx, it eliminated “teleology” from the story of life’s history. That is, it obviated the need for understanding life’s development as having been directed by a transcendent personal being outside nature, and it opened the way to understanding history as being directed by impersonal forces of the kind envisioned by Marx. In 1861, upon reading the Origin of Species, Marx exulted: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course.”
Scientific Communism
Scientific Communism was one of the three major ingredients of Marxism-Leninism as taught in the Soviet Union in all institutions of higher education and pursued in the corresponding research institutions, and departments. The discipline consisted in investigation of laws, patterns, ways, and forms of class struggle, Socialist revolution, development of Socialism and construction of Communism.
Passing exams in Scientific Communism was an obligatory prerequisite in obtaining any postgraduate scientific degree in the Soviet Union, see "Kandidat" article for details.
Typical courses of study included the following topics, among others.
* Origins and development of the communist theory
* Theory of socialist revolution
* International Communist movement
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Transformation of Socialism into Communism
* Socialist democracy
* Communist interpersonal relations and upbringing
* Criticisms of anti-Communism
Anarchy and Scientific Communism
Nikolai Bukharin
Scientific communism sees the state as the organization of the ruling class, an instrument of oppression and violence, and it is on these grounds that it does not countenance a "state of the future". In the future there will be no classes, there will be no class oppression, and thus no instrument of that oppression, no state of violence. The "classless state" - a notion that turns the heads of social democrats - is a contradiction in terms, a nonsense, an abuse of language, and if this notion is the spiritual nourishment of the social democracy it is really no fault of the great revolutionaries Marx and Engels.
Marxism and Science – Introduction
While Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were developing their communistic worldview, Charles Darwin was presenting his theory of evolution and creating quite a stir among the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Many people perceived that Darwin’s theory could provide the foundation for an entirely materialistic perspective on life. Marx and Engels were among those who recognized the usefulness of Darwin’s theory as just such a foundation for their theory of dialectical materialism.
In a letter to Engels, Marx writes, “During . . . the past four weeks I have read all sorts of things. Among others Darwin’s work on Natural Selection. And though it is written in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural science for our view.”
When viewing Marxism and Science, Marx believed that Darwin’s evolutionary theory could be extended naturally to answer questions about human society. Marx felt that society, like life itself, had gone through an evolutionary process and must continue to undergo such a process until a classless society evolved. Marx integrated this notion of evolution into his worldview, writing, “Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention?”
Engels more straightforwardly states the link between Darwin’s and Marx’s theories: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.”
This claim has been reaffirmed throughout Marxism’s development. V.I. Lenin echoes Marx and Engels, stressing the scientific nature of their theory: “Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, ‘created by God’ and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis . . . so Marx . . . was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis . . .”
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
And I'm not including the purely political wars of the 20th Century which easily resulted in the deaths of millions more (15 million in WWI, and 50 million in WWII for example).
Why not include them??? Better critical thinking from the electorate could have prevented them. No war would have occurred if the politicians didn't have the room to identify and represent themselves as religious leaders. This has never occurred with science, no atheist has ever gathered a crowd and used the cornerstones of atheism to legitimise a war.
I mentioned them just to show the numbers, and at worst case, if you don't accept that WWII was caused by an adherence to "Marxist science", at least you can't lay them on the door of "religion".
And, as I've proven, your statement that "no atheist has ever gathered a crowd and used the cornerstones of atheism to legitimise a war" to be completely false.
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
If there are massive deaths to account for, religious wars are a pimple of the ass of science, and pure old politics.
Makes me wonder why you would spend so much effort to try to portray it the other way around?
I can't take this statement of yours seriously, it amounts to a denial that religion isn't intrinsically easy to manipulate for your own ends. I can't justify a war on the basis of Newtonian laws of motion, the same way that a politician can claim god will protect the righteous (and then quote a vague bible passage).
Your claim was that "science" could never start a war.
Now proven completely inaccurate.
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
PS. And I forgot Mao's attempt at a "scientific political revolution" where more than 20 million died.
20 million died in one of the items on my original list if it's just a numbers game you are after.
You are the one who started throwing around "all them thar wars caused by religion".
Deal with it.
Firm
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Some people are just idiots.
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RE: Hawking: Religion will be defeated by science - 
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