Red State Rabble

What do you do when the courts reject your arguments, the public votes your supporters out of office, and school boards that once fell for your subterfuge wake up, put their shoulders to the wheel and roll your Trojan horse out of their schools?

Well, if you're a creationist or an intelligent design activist you avoid introspection at all costs. Certainly, you never allow yourself to ask why scientists, teachers, judges, and voters -- reasonable people all -- find your arguments unconvincing. No, for the creation scientist/ID theorist the only possible answer is to escalate your arguments beyond all reason.

We're seeing the first signs of that now:

"The Coral Ridge Hour" plans to broadcast "Darwin’s Deadly Legacy," a program that falsely asserts "Charles Darwin should share with Hitler the blame for the 11 million or more lives lost in the Holocaust" on Aug. 26-27 according to WorldNetDaily.

"This show basically is about the social effects of Darwinism, and shows this idea, which is scientifically bankrupt, has probably been responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the history of humanity," says Jerry Newcomb, one of two co-producers.

Ann Coulter, Discovery Institute fellow Richard Weikart, Lee Strobel, author of "The Case for a Creator," Jonathan Wells, author of "Icons of Evolution," will appear on the program.

WorldNetDaily reports that Francis Collins, Project Director of the Human Genome, is also scheduled to appear. However, PZ Myers reports that he's received an e-mail from Collins "stating that he was interviewed about his book, and that was then inserted into the video without his knowledge."

That little bit of dishonesty alone is enough to show that this program is propaganda at its crudest.

For our part, Red State Rabble wonders if Coulter, Weikart, and the others will grapple with this:

"... Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas." Fritz Stern, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and scholar of European history.

No mention of Darwin there. Perhaps, in the interests of objective inquiry, "The Coral Ridge Hour" will examine this statement by Mary E. Teats, the National Purity Evangelist for the Women's Christian Temperence Union, a lecturer for the National Purity Association, and a lecturer for the Correspondence School of Gospel and Scientific Eugenics:

The great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind, deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards and moral perverts are very poor material with which to "subdue the world," and usher in the glad day when "all shall know the Lord, whom to know aright is life everlasting." There are hundreds and thousands of men and women today to whom in the interests of future generations, some rigid law should say, "Write this one childless." Men and women whose habits of life are such as to curse their offspring, should be prohibited from marrying.

We can count on the assembled Coral Ridge experts to come to grips with the role of Southern churches -- still in the forefront in their opposition to evolution -- in defending slavery and Jim Crow, can't we?

The baseless charge by creationist and ID activists that Darwin -- long dead when these movements came on the stage of history -- is somehow responsible for the Holocaust, eugenics, and abortion -- sounds suspiciously to RSR like saying that Wilbur and Orville Wright are responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

If Coulter, Weikart and the other so-called experts truly want to inquire into the causes of the Holocaust, and if they don't care if the culprit was already in his grave when those events unfolded in all their horror, they might want to look into this statement by the founder of their religion, Martin Luther:

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.