So the thing that pisses me off the most about this whole hullabaloo over ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,’ Ben Stein’s creationist propaganda movie, isn’t PZ Myers getting kicked out, it isn’t how how Richard Dawkins, Myers, and other were lied to about the purpose of the film when they were interviewed for it, and it isn’t the fact that it supports this ridiculous farce in which creationism continues to masquerade around in this pseudoscientific “theory” of intelligent design. These are all perfectly contemptible, but the thing that I really can’t stand are the claims that belief in evolution somehow leads to naziism or the crimes of the holocaust. I don’t even know where to begin with this. I suppose I could start out with the obligatory statement that Hitler was in fact a Christian, did not believe in evolution, and seems, in all likelihood to have been a creationist. It’s actually really, really to find the evidence too, he made statements himself in Mein Kampf, in other publications, and in speeches he made early in his career that supported this conclusion.
Examples:
The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger will retain the character of a tiger. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. ii, ch. xi
For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. ii, ch. x
From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump , as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today. - Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Tabletalk (Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier)
Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol ii, ch. i
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. - Adolf Hitler, speech, April 12 1922, published in My New Order (emphasis mine)
[source]
(tip to Phil Plait for that source)
Case closed? If anyone still has any doubts can take a look at this much more thorough analysis of Mein Kampf and Hitler’s religious beliefs.
Having established now that Hitler without question had religious motives to his genocidal tendencies, I think it is likely the creationists who need defending from a comparison to Hitler. While I think it is fair to say that Hitler’s concept of creation led him at least in part to his heinous actions, I think it would be wildly unfair to claim that anyone else who believed in a creator god somehow must also hold similar a philosophy. Just because Hitler was a creationist and he committed the most horrible act of mass murder of the last century doesn’t mean that creationism inherently leads to such actions, just like the fact that he had a mustache, that he was a vegetarian, or a teetotaler had nothing to do with it…oh, wait, it was me that was being accused of being Hitleresque wasn’t it? Eh, I think I’ve dealt with that sufficiently.
