Monday, November 24, 2014

The First Person Who Says "Godwin's Law" Loses

Dan Arel, at the habitually hate filled Alternet, has up a bit of nonsense, that ties together several things I've written about.  Arel Said:

Earlier this month, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss postulated that it could only take a single generation of critical thinkers to wipe out religious belief. Speaking at an event in Australia, Krauss said:

“People say, ‘Well, religion has been around since the dawn of man. You’ll never change that.’ But I point out that… this issue of gay marriage, it is going to go away, because if you have a child, a 13-year-old, they can’t understand what the issue is. It’s gone. One generation is all it takes.”

This caused Ray Comfort, a creationist and host of the online Christian talk show "The Comfort Zone," to go off the rails and compare Krauss to Adolf Hitler.

Comfort’s co-host Emeal Zwayne pointed out that Krauss does not seem to be a big fan of Christianity.

“Just the glee that he got from the thought of eradicating religion — and it’s not religion, he hates Christianity,” Zwayne said. “He hates Christ...."

“Hitler said some similar things. Hitler’s Youth,” Comfort replied.

“And that’s exactly what I was going to say it was reminiscent of,” Zwayne said to viewers. “Very, very terrifying, friends.”

Playing the Hitler card or Godwin’s Law, as it is also called, is usually a sign of a foundering argument. When you are backed against a wall and see no logical way out, playing the Hitler card is an attempt to demonize your opponent. You have to wonder if these radical Christians have finally realized that their back is against a wall and they cannot reason their way back into reality.

I will note that Arel doesn't produce any documentation to refute what they said and he relies on the citation of "Godwin's Law" which is one of the stupidest in the recent fad of creating phony "laws" which are supposed to reign in the boundaries of what is allowed to be said.  "Godwin's" is a "law" invented by a rather right-wing libertarian whose main beneficiaries, so far as I can see, are neo-Nazis and ideas that can justifiably be compared to Nazism.  And also when there are direct parallels to the beliefs contained in Nazism.  That that "law" and some others like it are so frequently cited by those who believe themselves to be of the left,  leads to the conclusion that there is something wrong with that kind of "left".

Arel relies on calling "cooties" instead of refuting what they said.  Which is a heck of a way to conduct a life of the mind.  But such is the life of the mind so often displayed on the internet.  As to his whining that they are demonizing their opponent all I can say is Dan Arel?  At Alternet?   Complaining about people demonizing their opponent!  ROFLMAO.

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While I think Comfort and Zwayne may have better put it that the Nazi leadership said that to the Hitler Youth, the fact is that Nazism openly intended to replace Christianity with their own "scientific" alternative, and that has been known publicly ever since the Nazis published those views.  If they had endured longer than they did, the Nazis did, in fact, plan to replace Christianity with a Nazi system of belief, as I have pointed out the Nazi hierachy didn't hide those intentions.  As Martin Borman put it:

National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable.  The Christian churches build upon man's ignorance and endeavor to keep the greatest possible number of people in a state of ignorance.  For it is only in this fashion that the churches can maintain their power.  National Socialism, on the other hand, rests on scientific foundations....

The OSS report,  The Nazi Master Plan, in its annex, The Persecution of the Christian Churches notes:

National Socialism by its very nature was hostile to Christinity and the Christian churches.  The purpose of the National Socialist movement was to convert the German people into a homogeneous racial group united in all its energies fro prosecution of aggressive warfare.  Innumerable indications as to this fact are to be found in the speeches and writing of Hitler and other responsible Nazi leaders.

In regard to the Hitler Youth:

[Alfred] Rosenberg was editor in chief of the the chief party newspaper the Voelkischer Beobachter,  the Reich Leader of Ideological Training and the posessor of other prominent positions under the National Socialist regime,  his ideas were not without official significance.  Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934, Baldur von Schirach, German Youth Leader declared in Berlin;  "Roesnberg's way is the way of German youth."  So far as this sector of the National Socialist party is concerned, the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement. 

As it was mandatory German children over the age of 10 to be members of the Hitler Youth, its program of indoctrination was the embodiment of the future that Hitler and his cronies intended.

The OSS and other studies of what the Nazis did and planned noted that their plan was of gradually weakening Christianity and replacing it with a Nazism compatible substitute in the thinking of some "moderates" such as Hans Kerrl but that the ultimate goal as conceived by those who had the most influence in the Nazi hierarchy was its ultimate destruction just as certainly as they intended to destroy Judaism.

You can get an idea of how that plan was thought out from this:

Rosenberg's attitudes on religion were accepted as the only philosophy compatible with National Socialism. In 1940 Bormann, in writing to Rosenberg, made this statement:

"The churches cannot be conquered by a compromise between National Socialism and Christian teachings, but only through a new ideology whose coming you yourself have announced in your writings."

Rosenberg actively participated in the program for elimination of church influence. Bormann frequently wrote Rosenberg in this regard, furnishing him information as to proposed action to be instituted against the churches and, where necessary, requesting that action be taken by Rosenberg's department. See 070-PS dealing with the abolition of religious services in the schools; 072-PS dealing with the confiscation of religious property; 064-PS dealing with the inadequacy of anti-religious material circulated to the soldiers; 089-PS dealing with the curtailment of the publication of Protestant periodicals; and 122-PS dealing with the closing of theological faculties.

And if I had more time this morning for unpaid fact checking and writing I could find tons of material to support the contention that was the ultimate goal of the Nazis, including those who ran the Hitler Youth.   I recall reading some of the Hitler Youth anti-Christian chants but don't know where I can find them translated into English on such short notice.

But, as they say, change a few words and it doesn't sound much different from what you will read from atheists online just about any hour of the year.  What strikes me is that a so called leftist such as Arel can't take the opportunity to point out the evils of Nazism because noting why Christianity was incompatible with Nazism, you know, things like doing to the least of those what you'd have done to yourself, forgiving your enemy and praying for them, doing unto others that which you'd have done unto you, treating the stranger among you as one of you... wouldn't serve Arel's and Alternet's more basic anti-religious program.

That Comfort and Zwayne (who I've never heard of before this) may be creationists and wrong about science doesn't change that what Arel quoted isn't outside of the bounds of scholarship on the goals of Nazism, among which was to destroy Christianity, the real target of Arel's and Alternet's invective and, I dare say, Larry Krauss's real target in his pipe dream.   That even two creationists could get something right isn't out of the realm of the possible, nor is it for hit men in a hate campaign to distort history.

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One of the foundations of the pseudo-left, the same one which is hostile to religion, is that it is intellectually superior to its opponents who are irredeemably stupid, perhaps even on a fixed, biological basis.   The near ubiquity of that conceit among those who turn out to be 1. far less liberal than they like to believe they are, 2. class snobs, 3. ballot box poison, guaranteeing the political failure of the left.  They share a good part of the responsibility for the political failure of the left due to their addiction to insulting people who they would rather feel superior to than to convince of the rightness of their own political views.  I didn't come to realize this was the situation until going online and reading the unedited, stream of consciousness that flows from such "leftists".  It explains a lot about how the corporate liars have been able to defeat even that part of the left which has a more practical program of benefit to the very people the pseudo-left loves to diss.

Another thing which I learned from the blogs and their commenting community is that their pretenses of intellectual superiority generally consists of them repeating items in some kind of common received wisdom of "the left", which, despite their scientific pretensions, is not to be fact checked or questioned.   And, in a crucial number of those beliefs, when you do fact check them, they turn out to be as credulously wrong as much of the common received wisdom of the less febrile right, as opposed to the right which is an expression of mental illness.

The left also has its limb on which those who are mentally ill reside.  Only, when you examine what they really think and intend, that "left" is not that much different from the deranged right. Many of those "leftists" are Marxists, anarchists or utilitarians.  I have come to include that last one after reading through some of the literature from the Peter Singer style "ethicists" who advocate murdering children and other such things.   To note other areas in which Godwin's Law would try to silence those who notice more than a passing similarity between ideas of supposed ideological opponents.

A common strain in that frequently deranged and always misidentified "left" is that they are obsessively hostile to religion, Christianity most often, that overrides much if not all of their other alleged goals and beliefs.

Update:  See also

No human being would know anything of Christianity if it had not been drilled into him in his childhood by pastors.  The so-called dear God in no wise gives  knowledge of his existence to young people in advance, but in an astonishing manner in spite of his omnipotence leaves this to the efforts of pastors.  If therefore in the future our youth learns nothing more of this Christianity, whose doctrines are far below ours, Christinaity will disappear by itself."

D-75, copy of letter dated 12 December 1941from Security Police and Security Service (Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst) Inspector Bierkamp to Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) enclosing copy of the Bormann decree.

Compare that with what Krauss is reported to have said on the occasion mentioned above, from the religion hostile website, Raw Story.

4 comments:

  1. I always took "Godwin's Law" as one of those snarky observations, rather like Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will.") Not so much an observation for the ages as a bit of pseudo-wisdom, akin to the 'definition" of insanity (which sounds clever but has become so trite its very mention is now unbearable).

    Like most sarcastic observations, however, it soon became accepted as real wisdom. It isn't. "Of the making of books there is no end, and much study is a vexation." Now there's a bit of wisdom you can wrestle with.

    Godwin's Law was supposed to be an observation on what brings a discussion to a halt. Now it's become the thing that halts a conversation in itself. The irony, as ever, is so sharp you can cut your own throat with it. Which is what Kierkegaard was getting at, 150 years ago, in his dissertation on irony.

    Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

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  2. If my depression ever lifts, I'll have to go read more Kirkegaard. "Godwin's" along with such things as "Poes Law" and a number of others serves me mostly as a sign that the person using them isn't too bright and has nothing to say. And most of those I encounter are atheists.

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  3. The irony of the atheist's favorite argument, "You can't prove it!", is that they so seldom demand proof themselves.

    I've seen the genetic chart of my daughter (taken in utero). They tell me those marks on paper represent genes. I accept it. I "believe" it. But it isn't proof. If I denied it, no proof would be possible.

    And yet the bog-standard on-line atheist insists "proof" is the gold standard of all discussions; while they have absolutely no clue what they mean by the word, or the concept. Most of them have a tiny set of ideas which they cling to tenaciously, and defend with cliches. Their arguments would embarrass a freshman philosophy major.

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  4. just noted in passing, but the comments at Raw Story on the Krause story are far more intelligent and open-minded than the usual run at Salon.

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