The Holocaust
Offline To blame the Holocaust on atheism or especially "Darwinism" (a meaningless term) is preposterous. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of the Third Reich will understand that it is something quite the opposite that makes the Nazi regime so terrifying. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer pointed out that:
The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology – which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means
What may make the Third Reich remarkable is the astonishing degree to which the entire enterprise was built from a foundation of myth and delusion so astonishingly inane that, before 1933, most of Hitler's opponents dismissed him as a ranting idiot and a fringe lunatic. And who could blame them? But then, moving forward a few years, the Nazis had already codified their delusions in the form of law. In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Law and the Reich Citizenship Law to deny Jews in Germany citizenship. At the same time, the Nazis passed the "Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor", which used a ridiculous pseudoscientific basis for distinguishing between a Juden, a Mischling and a Deutscher.
What makes the Holocaust even more remarkable, apart from its total iniquity, is that it represents the most total pursuit of a path based on a total delusion. Stalin and Mao murdered many more people, but the Cultural Revolution and the gulag archipelago derived from the obsession with power that both dictators had. The Holocaust had no such pragmatic gains in it. It was costing money, depleting Germany of educated people, a drain on wartime resources. There was absolutely no reason for its pursuit other than the complete and utter delusion of the "world Jewish conspiracy" which the Nazi leadership obsessed itself with.
If the horrors of Nazi Germany should teach us anything, it should teach us of the terrible dangers of a preposterous ideology that sacrifices the rationality of the individual for the emotions of the crowd (which was precisely how Hitler came to power), and which is seeped in a fantasy world of preposterous myth. The Nazis came to power on the Dolchstoßlegende, the famous "Stab-in-the-back" myth which was propagated extensively by the Nazis (and in many cases, believed by them as well), which the German people were only too happy to accept. The premise of the myth was that the German post-WWI woes were due to a stab in the back by the German leadership which surrendered to the Entente powers (hence resulting in the hated Treaty of Versailles) while German forces were "50 miles from Paris"*. Eventually, the various arms of Nazi mythology became intertwined, and Hitler became obsessed with the notion that the stab actually resulted from a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy to control the world. What makes the Nazis so frightening is not that they were "atheists" or "Darwinists" but the fact that their entire enterprise, their beauracracy, their worldview, was based on myth and delusion of the most appalling sort, which sort of grew and grew into a massive web of mutually reinforcing delusions, which were so intertwined in the Germans during the Nazi rule that they became axioms, seeped into the consciousness of the nation.
*This itself was just another part of the ever-growing body of Nazi delusion. The German forces in late 1918 were near collapse as the Allies advanced on Flanders and rolled back the German offensive at Ypres.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Unfortunately we hear idiots say that a lot - including the idiots that made the "Expelled" movie. I wonder with the people that put that idea forth how much of it is idiocy and how much is dishonesty.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Yet, curiously, some of our (RRS's) loudest detractors chide us for reacting too strongly against the inanity of Christianity. It's quite a puzzle. Apparently history will teach us nothing. (Thanks, Sting!)
I wonder how much money has been spent in the effort to "preach the gospel to all men."
I also wonder... is there really a conspiracy of left wing liberals to subvert family values and the American way of life? Did things really go so far south because we took prayer out of schools? Do hurricanes really hit cities because we tolerate the gay lifestyle?
But it'll be ok in America. If we can just get rid of the homosexual agenda, protect all the babies for Jesus, institute a government based on Christian values, and stamp out the secret communist agenda, we'll have a perfect society based on the teachings of the one true lord and savior, Jesus Christ. No delusion here.
I have yet to meet a scientist who studies Darwin. It seems like they're all much more interested in evolution. There are, I suppose, some historians who have committed their lives to studying Darwin's life. Maybe they'd be considered Darwinists?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
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Curiously, the Nazis were absolutely obsessed with the idea of the utopian society. Of course, the Nazi idea of "utopian society" involved the liquidation of nearly 50 million people. Documents from the Fuhrerbefehl directives in the Waffen-SS archives indicate that the SS wanted to starve 30 million Slavs in order to feed the advancing Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa, and turn the rest of the Russian population into a giant forced labour camp. The Nazi vision also included some frightening domestic policies. By subsidising women to have Aryan children, the Nazis hoped to have a population of blonde haired, blue eyed babies (if the Nazi vision ever came to fruition, it would probably have collapsed within a few generations due to overwhelming preponderance of genetic disorders brought on by a high concentration of nearly identical alleles within the population). Their vision is...chillingly familiar: Women work at home like good Christian German women while the men go off to war against the evil Communist-Jewish enemies. Everyone can have a car on the new autobahn. Intellectual activity is strongly discouraged. Every home of every good German must have Mein Kampf. Boys go to school to learn about the evil Jewish conspiracy and to recieve a form of military training (at the peak of the Nazi obsession with obliteration of education, drills took up 40% of the school day), while girls go to school to learn to sew, bake and make Aryan children. Amusingly, the last scheme failed completely as the Nazi leadership realized they were producing a generation of obedient drones incapable of running a technical society. It is quite clear to any rational human being that the Nazi vision is the height of dystopia.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
This is actually why 9/11 Troofers and people like team Zeitgeist: The Movie scare me so much. People lap that shit right up, and it really resonates with the Nazi propaganda.
Here. Watch this video, and take into consideration what DG has said above about Hitler's crazed ideas of global conspiracy and occultism:
If you haven't already seen it, go watch Zeitgeist: The Movie.
These people hate Bush so much (just like the majority of Germans hated Heinrich Bruning, and just as rightly so) that they will follow dishonest anarchists and whackos like Alex Jones to the ends of the Earth. More chilling is how directly anti-semitic most of the rhetoric is (...constantly mentioning Larry Silverstein and what 'huge profits' he made from the destruction of the building - a blatant lie if ever there was one).
Sarah Palin scares me, but in a different way than these folks. If they ever found a representative to leap into politics and start winning them poll points, I'd just start digging myself a bomb shelter.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
The thing about conspiracy theorists that irritate me is that they come in clumps. Thus, if a person believes that the moon landings never really happened, the probability increases that they will believe 9/11 was government orchestrated and that the scientific community is hiding water cars from everyone. People seem to gravitate towards conspiracy theories. As for me? I note the following trend:
As a person knows more about failure analysis and mechanical engineering, the probability that they will believe in 9/11 conspiracies decreases
As a person knows more about biology, the probability that they will believe in creationism or variants decreases
As a person knows more about medicine and chemistry, the probability that they will believe that the evil medical community is suppressing the miracles of Homepoathy and electromagnetic healing and so forth decreases
As a person knows more about quantum physics, the probability that they will believe that quantum mechanics is essentially magic which allows the insertion of any arbitrary and meaningless New Age doctrine decreases
As a person knows more about theoretical physics, the probability that they will believe that the LHC will destroy the universe decreases
As a person knows more about climatology and thermal physics, the probability that they will believe global warming is a scam decreases
As a person knows more about astrophysics, the probability that they will believe the moon landings never happened decreases
Anyone picking up on the trend just yet? See that big list of topics on the left? Yeah. They're kinda, sorta, maybe rather complicated. You get people coming in prattling on about thermodynamics and evolution, and they've never troubled themselves to solve a simple problem of chemical equilibrium or a rate equation. You get people insisting that planes can't bring down skyscrapers who've never solved a simple line integral problem let alone confronted a failure analysis. You get people insisting that global warming isn't happening, who've never solved a zeroth law of thermodynamics problem or employed Stefan-Boltzmann models for black-body radiation. You get people who've never solved a Lagrange point problem insisting that we couldn't have gone to the moon. You get people who've never troubled themselves with an eigenvalue solution or employed a delta-dirac function over a vector field going starry-eyed about quantum mechanics and New Age nonsense. You get people who've never even tried to do a simple molarity or combined gas law computation insisting in Homeopathy. Learn your bloody epistemic rights, people.
You can tell this is a pet peeve of mine, but...Jesus bloody Christ, what the hell can make a person think they've noticed some massive flaw in the notion that HIV causes AIDS that's been missed by the entire biology community when they themselves don't even know how an RRE works or how to construct a lysogenic life cycle?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
To be honest, I don't see much of a threat from conspiracy theorists. Yes, they see conspiracies in almost anything, but sometimes they manage to hit the mark. Watergate comes to mind. I think they would only concern me if they held a majority in the population. Quality education, fortunately, mitigates the possibility of widespread belief in such things.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
When I was working 3rd shift, I used to listen to Coast to Coast am for shits and giggles. I sometimes wondered if they went into mental hospitals to find their guests.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Any ideology taken to an extreme (especially the ones that are the most delusional) will in certain circumstances appeal to mass psychology. Whether it is Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Hutu, Serbism, etc.. the end result is a mass extermination of a group who are considered outsiders and a threat to the order. In the absence of democracy and rule of law, a brutal ideology will prey upon our innate xenophobic tendencies.
For example, the hateful epithets hurled at Obama at the McCain/Palin rallies. Imagine there was nothing to counter this ie. no competing ideologies. That hate would spread like wildfire among the masses particularly at this point in time with the economic downturn. It would not be unlike the conditions in Nazi Germany in the 1930s if McCain/Palin ran unopposed. I honestly don't think John McCain is racist and Palin probably is too much of airhead like Paris Hilton to even understand what racism is. Yet their ideological messages are being morphed into hate speech which left unrestrained is very much akin to the rise of fascism. The rational libertarians on this site who believe in limited government, self-determination and personal freedom honestly do not want this to happen.
We should all point out to pinheads like Dinesh D'Souza who blame atheism for the 20th century mass murders that the behavior of die hard, evangelical Christians who support McCain completely destroys his stupid argument. The majority of Darwinists and atheists support Obama. And who are the ones spewing hate speech? Those fucking Christian fundies on the far right. So for all those who blame the holocaust on atheists, my message to you is fuck off!!! If they have their way, they'll have all of us shot!!!!
(my thanks to Pink Floyd for that last bit)
Enjoy!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_leY_LgOuQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvPoCWElOc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bDY0DfEjmo
Precisely my point. As I have demonstrated above, such historical examples serve only to strengthen our primary thesis: Irrational, emotion-based ideologies seeped in mythology are extremely dangerous and must be countered to the greatest extent possible.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
When DG gets rant-in , I get brightened ....
bestest rant ever
Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.
Thanks
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Oh, Zeitgeist.
I actually enjoyed the first part of the movie, where it discussed the astrological origins of Christianity.
Although, this is partly because I'm already an agnostic atheist, and I haven't researched the topics discussed, Egyptian Mythology, constellations, etc. The few pieces of information that I did know seemed accurate.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Unfortunately, not as accurate as they seem. You should read some of Rook's critiques of this line of "scholarship."
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I also dug the first part one of Zeitgeist as is slapped Xainity in the face, as it offered it's alternative ideas of connecting myths, like astrology. My xian friends went red faced when I showed it to them.
The new one is pretty good too, regarding our money system .... as it gets people thinking ....
NEW movie - Zeitgeist: "Addendum" - 2 hrs - Oct 3, 2008
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912
Cartoon - Duck Tales Inflation Lesson - 4 mins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LWQQrpSc4
Yeah , wake up the neighbors, get debate on, wake up the apathetic. I bring a Sword ....
Atheism Books.