But you never provide evidence for this hypothesis that Hitler was a fake Christian. If he, indeed, pretended himself as a Christian, then on what evidential material does it stand on? If Hitler acted as a pretend Christian, then where does he disown his belief in Christ? Does he write in his private notes that he used religion only for political purposes? Did any of his close associates or friends think so? Where?

Of course Hitler did try to use political force to control Christianity and he tried to establish a unified Reich Christian Church, but this only supports his stand on his view of "positive Christianity" as described in the Nazi party platform (their version of a constitution). And yes, he criticized the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy, but so what? So do Popes and Protestant leaders. Martin Luther himself strongly condemned the Catholic religion and thought of it as the work of the Devil.

You will need to do better then that, Eljay.

Where are your references from John Jay, John Witherspoon, Roger Sherman, James Wilson, Benjamin Rush, Gouverneur Morris - to name but a few. Like I said. Examine the facts - all of them - and see where they lead.

I NEVER said there were no Christians involved in the Continental Congress. I have however told you that there were these 6 that were high profile Deists. There were probably more based on the actual outcome of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, however, its beating a dead horse.

If Hitler was a christian - wouldn't you think he should pass the biblical test for it? Read the first two chapters of Second Peter and hold Hitler to the test. An examiniation of the book of James and Jude should further lay claim to where Hitler is on the "christain" spectrum.

Use those three books to show Hitler was a christain, and you'll convince me.

If Hitler wasn’t a Catholic, shouldn’t the Christians citizenry have known this? What about the Catholic and Protestant church? How did he fool everyone? That’s a fair question.

Also, what does it matter in the wake of 11 million dead when Christianity was used to accomplish this mission?

What you said is that this country was founded by Deists. Then you listed what you presumed to be 6 men who were supposed Deists. In that list you sited Washington and Adams. I've asked you numerous times where you got this list from, because it's just not supported by the historical accounts of these men. I've never doubted that Jefferson and Franklin were Deists - though even the semantics of that term is inconsistant with what we know of Deist's today. There were 55 framers of the constitution - 53 of which were members of orthadox christain denominations.

So I ask - don't you see a glaring contradiction in your claim? What are you supporting it with? Some article you read? All I'm asking is that you come clean on this - since you insist to make this claim that the Founding fathers were Deists in every thread that brings it up. Where's your support for this claim?

If Hitler should be "given" a test, to prove he was a christian, then Every Christian should have to take a test to prove it.

Personally, if Hitler was christian, like the quotes from Krimsa point to, who are you to say he is any less of a christian then you?
Now, I'm sure that you will cook up some "logic" with how I am wrong, but isn't judging and condemning other a sin?

If someone claims to be a christian - then it should be evidenced by their actions and their words. How difficult is that acknowledge?

If you believe that Hitlers actions and instructions to his subordinates demonstrated his deep christian conviction, than I'll ask you what I asked Krimsa - what do you think a christain is, and what are you basing your understanding of this on?

I have said that these 6 Founding Fathers were Deist. I would need to look to find the names of more. I know these 6 were Deists because I have read their biographies. I read these books several years ago but still have them here now.



That’s not true at all and I have repeatedly shown you the evidence to support this based on their own words taken from historical documents.



Oh now you will concede that Jefferson and Franklin were both Deists. That was like pulling teeth out of your head. I had to bash you over the head with the evidence. Ben Franklin was a scientist!






What are you talking about? You just pull these wild claims out of your hat. Look here!

http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm



No.



The same evidence I have used to support that Franklin and Jefferson were both Deists.

That is a NO TRUE SCOTSMAN fallacy. Cant you see it!

Eljay say I posted an article taken from the early 1990s in which Catholics were accused of murdering people in Africa? Would you say the same thing? They aren’t true believers in god? Where does it end? Just curious? What accountability will Christians ever take for anything?

It's not difficult to acknowledge, what is difficult to acknowledge is someone else saying that person can't be a "true" christian because of things they did.




To me, a christian is a person who accepts the bible as the word of "god". I base my understanding of this having grown up as a child of christian parents.

That seems like a reasonable assessment to me. Most Christians I have known over the years openly admit to accepting Jesus as their lord and savior and then they sometimes will go about reading the bible. They may or may not attend church. If they do read the bible, it usually confuses them or they go through and pick out all of the good stuff.

Aside from that, it seems very subjective. Other Christians would appear to be the most critical of other Christians.

I will say this, I don't believe Darwinism leads one to be Nazi, but I do now believe there is a definite link btw. Nazi ideology and Darwin. I also believe Darwinism was not the only factor motivating the Nazi's to commit the atrocities that happened. I am going to get this book to investigate this further.



"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society," says Dr. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of "The Coming of the Third Reich." "This provided Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power."

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.

"From Darwin to Hitler" is a challenging yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.

Richard Weikart earned his Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Iowa and is an Assoc. Professor at California State University, Stanislaus focusing on German and European intellectual history. He was a Fullbright Fellowship participant in 1992-93, doing research at the University of Bonn, Germany. His articles have appeared in numerous journals and publications including: German Studies Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Books and Culture, The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion.

I agree with Ruse that Hitler’s ideology was not built solely on Darwinism. Nonetheless, Ruse does not seem to realize that Darwinism was a central, guiding principle of Nazi ideology, especially of Hitler’s own world view. Richard Evans, historian at Cambridge University, has explained, "The real core of Nazi beliefs lay in the faith Hitler proclaimed in his speech of September 1938 in science—a Nazi view of science—as the basis for action. Science demanded the furtherance of the interests not of God but of the human race, and above all the German race and its future in a world ruled by ineluctable laws of Darwinian competition between races and between individuals." This is not a controversial claim by anti-evolutionists, but it is commonly recognized by scholars who study Nazism.


Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a "rebel" willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID). But Expelled has some problems of its own with honest, open presentations of the facts about evolution, ID—and with its own agenda. Here are a few examples—add your own with a comment, and we may add it to another draft of this story. For our complete coverage, see "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—Scientific American's Take.

1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.
When the film is building its case that Darwin and the theory of evolution bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, Ben Stein's narration quotes from Darwin's The Descent of Man thusly:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections emphasized in italics):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The producers of the film did not mention the very next sentences in the book (emphasis added in italics):

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.

Darwin explicitly rejected the idea of eliminating the "weak" as dehumanizing and evil. Those words falsify Expelled's argument. The filmmakers had to be aware of the full Darwin passage, but they chose to quote only the sections that suited their purposes.

2) Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup.
"Viewers of Expelled might think that Ben Stein has been giving speeches on college campuses and at other public venues in support of ID and against "big science." But if he has, the producers did not include one. The speech shown at the beginning and end was staged solely for the sake of the movie. Michael Shermer learned as much by speaking to officials at Pepperdine University, where those scenes were filmed. Only a few of the audience members were students; most were extras brought in by the producers. Judge the ovation Ben Stein receives accordingly.

3) Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.
As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.

When exactly did Crossroads become Expelled? The producers have said that the shift in the film's title and message occurred after the interviews with the scientists, as the accumulating evidence gradually persuaded them that ID believers were oppressed. Yet as blogger Wesley Elsberry discovered when he searched domain registrations, the producers registered the URL "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007—more than a month (and in some cases, several months) before the scientists were interviewed. The producers never registered the URL "crossroadsthemovie.com". Those facts raise doubt that Crossroads was still the working title for the movie when the scientists were interviewed.

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.
One section of Expelled relates the case of Richard Sternberg, who was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to the film, after Sternberg approved the publication of a pro-ID paper by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, he lost his editorship, was demoted at the Smithsonian, was moved to a more remote office, and suffered other professional setbacks. The film mentions a 2006 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report prepared for Rep. Mark Souder (R–Ind.), "Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian," that denounced Sternberg's mistreatment.

This selective retelling of the Sternberg affair omits details that are awkward for the movie's case, however. Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator. As editor, Sternberg's decision to "peer-review" and approve Meyer's paper by himself was highly questionable on several grounds, which was why the scientific society that published the journal later repudiated it. Sternberg had always been planning to step down as the journal's editor—the issue in which he published the paper was already scheduled to be his last.

The report prepared by Rep. Souder, who had previously expressed pro-ID views, was never officially accepted into the Congressional Record. Notwithstanding the report's conclusions, its appendix contains copies of e-mails and other documents in which Sternberg's superiors and others specifically argued against penalizing him for his ID views. (More detailed descriptions of the Sternberg case can be found on Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars and on Wikipedia.)

Peter Singer, the bioethicist at Princeton University who supports infanticide and euthanasia for the disabled, for instance, admits that Darwinism underpins his dismissal of the sanctity of human life. Richard Dawkins likewise claims Darwinian support for euthanasia.

Ben stein does make them look pretty silly. Some of them do say some fantastic stuff though. I want to make clear that Ben Stein is no Christian. I believe he is agnostic.

5) Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.
Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are "forbidden" by "big science." It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of "big science" are just described as having an atheistic preference.

Actually, science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism). That requirement prevents scientific theories from becoming untestable and overcomplicated.

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: "This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed."

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID "theories" are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.
Expelled includes many clips of scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, William Provine and PZ Myers who are also well known as atheists. They talk about how their knowledge of science confirms their convictions and how in some cases science led them to atheism. And indeed, surveys do indicate that atheism is more common among scientists than in the general population.

Nevertheless, the film is wrong to imply that understanding of evolution inevitably or necessarily leads to a rejection of religious belief. Francisco Ayala of the University of California, Irvine, a leading neuroscientist who used to be a Dominican priest, continues to be a devout Catholic, as does the evolutionary biologist Ken Miller of Brown University. Thousands of other biologists across the U.S. who all know evolution to be true are also still religious. Moreover, billions of other people around the world simultaneously accept evolution and keep faith with their religion. The late Pope John Paul II said that evolution was compatible with Roman Catholicism as an explanation for mankind's physical origins.

During Scientific American's post-screening conversation with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis, we asked him why Ken Miller was not included in the film. Mathis explained that his presence would have "confused" viewers. But the reality is that showing Miller would have invalidated the film's major premise that evolutionary biologists all reject God.

Inside and outside the scientific community, people will no doubt continue to debate rationalism and religion and disagree about who has the better part of that argument. Evidence from evolution will probably remain at most a small part of that conflict, however.