Catching Up With The Hate Mail: Take Two On This Issue

I HAVE CRITICIZED the foolish movement in some liberal Christian churches to declare "Darwin Sunday" on a Sunday close to the birthday of Charles Darwin, February 12th.  Given that Abraham Lincoln was born on the exact same day as Charles Darwin, that they were two of the major figures of the time who had drastically divergent view points on life and reality, if those liberal Christians wanted a figure to hitch their perhaps sluggish wagons to who was closer to the Gospel of Jesus they would have been far better to hitch it to Lincoln. And if they did that, I'd encourage them to reconsider that, too. I think the liberal denominations could do with a lot less of an attachment to academia and its frequently twisted values and articles of faith.

You can certainly be a faithful Christian while accepting the evolution of species, including human beings, that evolution is what the physical evidence supports.  That is something which many Christians and many churches have long accepted and, unless you go for the fairly modern heresy of Fundamentalism, evolution is not at serious odds with the Gospel of Jesus, perhaps give or take things like a reference to Adam. In my re-reading of the Gospels, I've come to believe that Jesus often used the Scriptures that were Scripture to him, the "Old Testament" not necessarily because he believed in their literal truth in all places but as a means of talking to his audience in terms, images and ideas that they knew and already took seriously. I don't think he was above what has latterly become known as "proof texting" which seems to me is what he did when he used Exodus referring to God as "The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob," to refute the Sadducees' denial of life after death. But back to the theme of the post.

You cannot be a faithful Christian and believe in natural selection, certainly not as applying to the human species, because natural selection is an ideology which is directly contradictory of the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of Paul, James, etc. You can't serve two masters, you'll serve one and hate the other and in so many cases the one such true believers in natural selection (by that name or not) come to hate is the egalitarian Gospel of Jesus with its preferential option for the poor, the least among us.  That's as true of the fundamentalists and other advocates of, for example, America's style of fascism, white supremacy, who deny the reality of evolution and despise Darwin but who believe in the malignant aspects of his theory as applied to the human species as it is for the most extreme true-believer in Darwinism who hates Christianity with all their heart.

Darwinism began in the political-economic depravity of the nominal Anglican Parson Thomas Malthus and it began its evil work in such things as the New Poor Law more than a decade before Darwin built on it to come up with his theory of natural selection. Malthus wasn't the start of that, either, it started in the English class system and such things as the Elizabethan Poor Law which the yoked and beleaguered English People still haven't shaken off.  Though the Church of England has, in many cases, made far more progress, led as it is through the consideration of the New Testament as seriously worthy of consideration and respect.

You cannot believe that you are to do to others what you would have them do to you while believing in the Spencerian theory of survival of the fittest, as pointed out here the other day, it is the phrase which Darwin, himself, said was exactly what he meant when  he said "natural selection".  The distinction of "social Darwinism" blamed on Herbert Spencer (despite the fact that Darwin lauded him as "our great philosopher" in On The Origin of Species) that is allegedly not Darwinism is a later ass cover made for denying the truly depraved consequences of believing in natural selection as its depravity became apparent and gained an opposition.

You cannot believe you are obligated to give sufficient material support and help to the least among us while believing, as Darwin explicitly did, that giving them support and help would degenerate the human species.  No one should bet against the massive evidence that given their choice, most people will not choose to do good that they believe will be to their disadvantage, even if they don't believe in Darwin's warning of the dysgenic effects of charity.  Selfishness has been enabled by the theory of natural selection which elevates it to a progressive force in nature (though I doubt any such force as natural selection, actually exists.   Darwin explicitly advocated the benefits to the survivors of neglecting and harrying the poor and destitute to early graves so they would not have children, that is when he was not advocating the extermination of racial groups he deemed inferior.

You cannot believe that the meek will inherit the Earth and believe that the strongest in a struggle for life who win by destroying the weaker in violence, something which was stated about natural selection from the start, shows us how human beings are supposed to act.  

I hold that elevation of killing, actively murdering or through neglect, was the  second most attractive feature of Darwinism for those who adopted it, especially those in the ruling class and those who despised religion.  The elevation of the powerful, the rich and those of inherited wealth as the crown of creation was the first such attraction.  Darwinism believes the strong, the aggressive and the violent rightly inherit the Earth, the term "struggle for life" is ubiquitous in Darwin.  The latter day attempt to introduce "mutual aid" into Darwinism was logically incoherent and an obvious job to "Christianize" it, though the first who did that probably despised Christianity as much as Huxley, Haeckel, Glaton and most of those who were less apt to suppress that idea than Darwin was. It's denial of the literal reading of Genesis and, so, it's utility to promoting atheism among people of overly naive faith was, possibly, the only greater attraction of it for Darwinism's largely little informed lay faithful.   I have noted that, not by that name, Darwinism, natural selection, in its promotion of inequality and racism and, lest it be forgotten, gender inequality, is rampant among American Fundamentalists and the like who support Trumpism, even as they deny the possibility of evolution of species.

Literally everything about natural selection advocates the opposite of the morality of Jesus and, by the way, The Law of Moses and the entire Prophetic tradition.  "Darwin Sunday" is as much as fundamentalism and the prosperity gospel a symptom of Christianity gone seriously wrong.  Or, more likely, the largely college-credentialed folk in charge at such churches buying the ubiquitous post-WWII con job that denied that natural selection was exactly what Darwin and his earliest to his latest disciples said it was.  The BBC PBS plaster saint Darwin is a lie which anyone who does what almost none but his critics does, read Darwin, and those he cites as reliable, Haeckel, Galton, Thomas Huxley and the latter day Darwin orthodoxy,  Karl Pearson.  Read him and his citations and admit that what they claim about reality is, in fact, exactly what I've said it was and at odds with the popular presentation of Darwin  distancing him from the eugenics he explicitly supported and the later development of that into Nazism. Both and their like in some form is a logical conclusion of the theory of natural selection, as I've pointed out a number of times, that was not lost on the scientist neo-Nazi who wrote the American Mein Kampf, the Turner Diaries who was an ardent Darwinst.

I am in the seemingly odd position of being an enemy of the ideology of natural selection who advocates that people read Darwin seriously but only if they take him at his word that he means what he says as a scientist which cuts through the several often cited self-protective smokescreens that Darwin set up while supporting the depraved claims of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg as the highest of scientific reliability, including the earliest documents in eugenics.  The claim of Haeckel that Darwinism was also a contradiction of democracy, supporting an aristocratic rule in the Prussian style (never forgetting he also advocated genocide) in a book that Darwin said he agreed with completely, as I also pointed out yesterday.  

And that is what even a secularist should realize is true that natural selection is as anti-democratic as it is anti-Christian and for the same reasons.  It is an elitist system, unavoidably so, in which those who are best off are to be considered as biologically and intellectually superior to those who happen to be lower in the social scale.  Darwin, his followers and his sons who carried the torch for him opposed things such as universal vaccination because they suspected it would keep too many of the underclass alive so they could have children.*  They were all in on what in the Trump era would be called "herd immunity" which means people who survive pandemic diseases are believed to have a natural immunity which those who die obviously don't have.  Only with Covid, as with the common cold, the virus seems to be able to change rapidly and thwart any kind of lifetime immunity. Primitive and inadequate conceptions of "primitive organisms" and such things as immunology among those with the power to put their ignorance into governmental practice isn't something only mobster As Seen On TV politicians and their gangster thugs practice, scientists are as capable of that as anyone.

It is obvious that is of political and legal importance, it was the basis of huge swaths of American and other legal policy, eugenics, forced sterilization, ranking children for the purpose of discriminating in favor of the favored and the disfavoring of the un-favored, the denial of opportunities for education, the exclusion of many racial and national groups from immigration into the United States, the discrimination against, especially, Black People, Native Americans, Eastern European Jews, Latin Americans, Asians, Africans, etc.  While those evils certainly have other motives, Darwinism, natural selection, provides them with a pseudo-scientific basis.  That is not surprising because Darwin based his theory on an economic theory of utter depravity, that of Thomas Malthus.  

Those who claim to support democracy as they claim natural selection is the controlling force for evolution - and that inevitably will be read as progress based on inherited biological superiority and inferiority, Darwin and virtually every one of his pre-WWII supporters did so - are as foolish as those liberal Christians who uncritically accept the PBS-BBC post-WWII plaster saint Darwin and the ideology of natural selection.  I would suggest that as well as doing what they've never really done, read Darwin (especially The Descent of Man and the last, the 5 and 6th editions Darwin issued of On The Origin of Species, reading, as well, those he cited as supporting him) and also read the critics of natural selection.  The moral atrocity it was was early realized to be by Frances Cobbe in her admirable essay on the subject is also worth reading.  Her observation are some of those from the time that certainly were supported by the subsequent history of the idea in practice.  I think that the only place that natural selection ever has existed was in the conscious attempts to apply it to the human population, there has never been anything natural about it.

*  As also mentioned yesterday, it is one of the great ironies of the post-WWII Darwin mythology that so many of those, inside of science and in the popularization of its understanding were held by him, whether by the economic class, the nationality, racial grouping, exactly of the generations that Darwin hoped would not be born because he explicitly held they would be inevitably inferior through immutable, irredeemable biological inheritance.

I always think of that when someone who is of color, or through their surname (especially the Irish, or, if you extend it two generations, Eastern European Jews) or whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents were of the white underclass of Darwin's time presents themselves as the biggest, fattest champions of St. Charles Darwin who ever were. They are absolutely clueless as to what Darwin actually claimed on the basis of his theory, what those he cited with his authority of a famous scientist said.

They should read The Descent of Man, the works of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg he endorsed as reliable science in that book and compare those designated as inrredeemably infrior by them to their family tree.  There's a good chance most of the people who are true believers in natural selection, today, would have been cut off from the present if Darwin and his followers had had their way in the past. As cut off as those unborn to those who were involuntarily sterilized on the basis of natural selection through eugenics, as cut off as those selected by the Nazis murdered on the basis of their applied science. They're just lucky they didn't get around to sterlizing their great-great or great-grandparents as Dr. Perkins in Vermont did to so many Abenaki People in his eugenic campaign in 1930s Vermont, something the Nazis studied as they were getting ready to set up their own solution to the imaginary dangers asserted by Pearson and Moul. Or that they didn't die in things like the British death camps, the work houses that Darwin bemoaned as a dangerous excess of charity as he did medical care and innoculations for the underclass.  I know probably everyone in my family tree on both sides were probably in the cross-hairs of Darwin and his disciples.  Probably in most of yours at least enough were so you'd have been cut off from the present.

It is as great an irony as those who claim to believe in egalitarian democracy who are also great big Darwin fanboys and gals.  There are real alternatives that can't both be true and human equality and natural selection are two of those.  Life proves the truth of equality and the benefit of making that assumption in law and society through the consequences of inequality.  Natural selection cannot be demonstrated to anything like the same extent as the horrors of Darwin's Neo-Malthusian vision.  As a claim of the origin of species, natural selection can't be demonstrated at all it has never been observed to produce a new species, it can't be observed at all.  The denied belief that it is asserted to be a progressive force that produces superior life forms through the deaths of those whose deaths, through the question begging assertion, that their deaths proved their inferiority. The advocacy of human beings "correcting" the charitable aspects of civilization by making sure they died was present in Darwinism almost as soon as On The Origin of Species was published.  It was that aspect of Darwinism which Nazism was based in has coexisted with the claim that that is exactly what it is from the absolute beginning of the theory.  Darwin, himself, did that two step in the Descent of Man, in On The Origin of Species, though in many of his letters his true beliefs expressed to other members of his inner circle and class are more direct in their advocacy of European imperialism and the destruction of other races around the world so they could be replaced, another aspect of Nazi though that was anticipated in Darwin's correspondence.