The new Jews?

It has been suggested on Pharyngula that this actually wasnt a letter from a Jew,but if it was it sure does not bode well for the times ahead.
But then again why should cognitive dissonance and gullibility spare members of one particular death cult !

Whether or not the letter is written by a Jew, Stein is Jewish, and should be ashamed of himself.

I see no reason to assume that Jews are any less prone to human failings like ignorance and bigotry than the rest of us.

What seems particulary offensive to me is that, in this "mockumentary", Stein apparently visits the site of a Nazi concentration camp in what sounds like an outrageous parody of Bronowski's deeply moving appeal in The Ascent Of Man, the obvious irony being that Stein is defending exactly the kind of absolutist belief that Bronowski was warning against.

Ian,i couldnt agree more.What amazes me a bit is that the jewish community in the US(of which i dont know much about,admittedly) does not cry out in the face of such nonsense,because not even the Jews would serioulsy consider Darwin the moving force behind the Holocaust.

clinteas: It is always dangerous to generalise about "the Jewish community", because neither is it a single group with a single set of shared beliefs or values. That there are Jews who have values that would repudiate Stein's bullshit is enough for me.

And are you sure that no Jewish leaders have repudiated it already?

That's just a stupid letter, particularly considering that many, many Jews are atheists and "darwinists" (whatever that is).

Following a comment made in email, I have amended the final sentence to read "the individuals" rather than "the people", as that can be misread as a slander against all Jews.

Hitler dolls on sale in Ukraine

John, I agree with your assessment. I have been thinking this way for a long time. Ben Stein uses some of the same illogic as Nazis when he pins something he doesn't like on a group of people he doesn't like. He does it without proof and just declares one to cause the other.

Generically speaking, this is a common human thinking style. We all seek to make meaning of the world and in doing so, we try to understand what causes things to be as they are. We easily see things co-ocurring in time as being causally related. It is the foundation of superstition; something that has been a part of humanity for all of recorded history and probably before. Science is used to prevent this easily-perceived illusion. But it is no easy feat.

Ben Stein probably failed to make an attempt to critically examine evidence for a causal relationship between Darwin's ideas and Nazi behavior. I don't know that he is aware of the illusion or the need to protect himself from it.

The irony is painfully obvious to me. But knowing history doesn't seem to prevent it from repeating itself. Witness Ben Stein. Maybe scientific critical thinking is really the ingredient that is necessary for saving us from the doom of repeating history.

Ben Stein probably failed to make an attempt to critically examine evidence for a causal relationship between Darwin's ideas and Nazi behavior. I don't know that he is aware of the illusion or the need to protect himself from it.

Possible, but I'm inclined to think he is exhibiting another common human trait: selling yourself for a quick buck.

I dont think Stein personally believes for a second the tripe he is selling.

Atheists have long been viewed with fear and loathing. In Roman times (though the term meant something a little different back then) it was in fact illegal. Throughout the history of Christendom and up until the end of the 19th century, it wasn't always a healthy thing to declare yourself an atheist. During the Cold War, atheism was pretty much considered the same as being a Communist.

While some parts of the world, like Britain, seem to tolerate a laissez-faire kind of disbelief, just try to get elected to any public office in the US by openly declaring yourself an atheist. There's been at least one free thinker president, Abe Lincoln (though whether he was an atheist or more towards the agnostic or deist end is hard to tell), who still had to show up at church, and this was just seventy or eighty years after Jefferson had made no secret of his opinions of Christianity.

Stein didn't originate this particular scapegoat, it's been around for years. I think the real reason for so many insisting that Hitler was an atheist is that the thought that a Christian nation could start an unjust war and kill millions of its citizens because of their ethnicity is so horrible that it's preferable to find something else to blame. Since there's some proximity in time and space between the largely atheist Soviet Communists (though, let's be clear here, that things are not so clear cut on even this issue as the Nazi and later Cold War rhetoric would have us believe), it's easy to declare Hitler an atheist, because, after all, atheists like Stalin were doing bad things at the time.

The worst part about this seems to be the disconnect between Nazi anti-Semitism and all the anti-Semitic rhetoric and behavior that had gone on for centuries before it. Blaming atheists is not only wrong, but it serves to divert people from the true causes of the genocide, and opens the door for some other group to be demonized and seen fit to harass or slaughter.

I am Jewish and an atheist; there are some other like minded folks in my family. But believers and non, we all accept the evidence for evolution. I haven't talked to most of them about "Expelled" but feel certain that their views would not reflect the letter writer's, that they would consider him/her to be seriously deluded.

Yes, John, Stein should be ashamed of himself; I am not proud to call him a member of my tribe and would take the opportunity to tell him that to his face if I had the chance.

I was at an event about a thousand years ago where Harvey Milk spoke. He made what I considered to be an anti-Jewish remark and after his speech I confronted him about it. His defense was that since he himself was Jewish it was okay. I told him that was garbage (I probably said bullshit, but this is a family blog, right?).

There are a few Jewish creationists; they are rare, and tend to be Ultra-Orthodox. I've blogged about them before I think.

I agree that Milk should not have done that (this is not a family blog. We swear when it is reasonable to do so), and it is indeed bullshit, but it's like the way American blacks use the term "nigger" to deprecate the standing of those who would use the term as a racist epithet. Other terms started that way, as insults: Christian, humanist, cladist...

That said, Harvey Milk was a man to be proud of.

I didnt realize one could be a member of the jewish "tribe"( I liked that one,Susan) with all its celebrations,fests and rituals and be an atheist,but I guess its like me being a roman catholic "by birth".

@ Aaron,Number 11:
""because, after all, atheists like Stalin were doing bad things at the time.""
I hear this a lot these days when people talk about Hitler and THAT mockumentary,but its just not true that Stalin was an atheist,he was a nihilist with some vague mystical sprinkles here and there.

I am still trying to understand the rational behind his claims about evolution and the holocaust, it is all twaddle as far as I can see. What next, assassination of PZ and Richard.

These comments on various sites are just plain stupid, supporting the claims of Stein and others.

"That said, Harvey Milk was a man to be proud of." Yes. He was a good man, trying to make the world a better place, and for this he was murdered by a bad man.

The remark was said during a speech made without notes (AFAIK), I don't believe it was indicative of a general mindset, and I do not judge a person based on one sentence.

John W @ #5: Thanks for the link to that Jewish blogger giving Ben Stein the what-for: exactly what I've been waiting for since the Expelled mess began.

That said, Samurai "Darwinism was just another attempt to write God out of the picture" Mohel seems to be neither scientifically informed nor a leader in the Jewish community. The Anti-Defamation League still has nothing to say about Ben Stein, for example: why not?

Oh, gosh, we do have a mountain to climb. I have yet to see Expelled (where can I find it, folks?) so it's hard to comment. The prima-facie link between Darwin and the Holocaust is patently ridiculous. However, there is a link, if one is sufficiently warped, and it goes like this. Darwin's biggest fan in Germany was Ernst Haeckel, who bolted natural selection on to the earlier German tradition of Naturphilosophie, turning evolution into a kind of progressive force, which it plainly was not. (Darwin's earliest notes had evolution as progressive, but this aspect was soon winnowed out as the theory developed). It is thanks to Haeckel that people have the misperceptions of Darwin that they do. And I think it's fairly well established that the Nazis used Haeckel's version of evolution to justify their racial policies. John, you really ought to be aware of these historical currents - to counter Ben Stein's illogic by saying that it simply ain't so compunds the error.

Second, Dawkins has a very uneasy relationship with Jews, especially in the UK. He has been prominent in the academic anti-Israel movement (and for those who say that antisemitism is not the same thing as deligitimization of Israel, see http://www.engageonline.org.uk/home/ a left-leaning site that shows how the two frequently overlap.). And Dawkins has made some extraordinary remarks about 'The Jewish Lobby' which have a slight whiff of the old Jews-really-control-the-world conspiracy theories.

Peirce, that was merely the first site I found of a Jew objecting to Stein's idiocy regarding the Shoah. And Shaotra Sarkar's recent blast was published in Jewcy, a Jewish journal, although Sarkar himself is Indian.

Henry, I think, but do not have time to document now as I'm about to celebrate Anzac Day with a picnic (old Australian tradition, and as I'm an old Australian, I must), that Haeckel is a lot more nuanced than the Monism gave rise to Nazism trope. For a start nobody used Haeckel's evolutionism to justify racism and nationalism; they used Haeckel's racism and nationalism. Second, he wasn't, for his time, so much of a racist. It would be absurdly easy to find quoted from such fin de siecle individuals as the young Churchill making similar claims. So Haeckel's nationalism, which is likely to be the end product of the making of the German nation under the Iron Duke, is the (a very small) mediate source of Nazism. Naturphilosophie is often blamed, but there is rarely any decent argument given by the historians.

I haven't yet read Bob Richards biography of Haeckel, which may go into more detail.

Dawkins says that religious Jews run American foreign policy. That makes him deluded, an idiot, merely uninformed, or an anti-Semite because that is a classic anti-Semitic remark. I don't buy the "I like the Jews, I just hate Zionism" line.

I stand corrected, John. But as for the second point I agree with Susan Silberstein. And she agrees with me, so we're both happy.

Some thoughts on Haeckel, evolution, eugenics, the Nazis and Germanic philosophy of science in the 19th Century.

To start a quote:

Up to the present Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) counts as one of the most disputed biologist of the more recent history of biology. We are concerned here not only with the problem in how far Haeckel with his Monistic World View was a co-founder of Social Darwinism and so made possible the stream of thought leading to the National Socialist extermination of "undesirable life forms".

Quoted from Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Christine Hertler and Michael Weingarten in Darwin & Co. Eine Geschichte der Biologie in Portraits Vol. I Ed. Ilse Jahn and Michael Schmitt, Munich 2001, p. 434 (my very rough translation).

Naturphilosophie is the philosophy of science of the Romantic philosophers in Germany in the first half of the 19th Century, most notably Schelling. The philosophy found very little resonance amongst scientists with the Danish physicist Oersted being its only prominent supporter on the continent. In Britain it was propagated by Coleridge, he of the Ancient Mariner, the only British scientists that I know of who supported it were Percy Bysshe Shelly, who as well as being a poet and the husband of Mary "Frankenstein" Shelly was also a chemist, and the Irish mathematician and astronomer Sir William Rowan Hamilton, he of the quaternions and the Hamiltonian (not to be confused with the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton whose argument over the quantification of the predicate with Augustus de Morgan inspired George Boole to invent his logical algebra or with Sir William Archibald Hamilton Scottish antiquarian, archaeologist and diplomat most famous for being the husband of Emma! But I digress).

Haeckel was not a proponent of this philosophy but was a disciple of its main opponents the Vulgar Materialists an early primitive form of scientism with many supporters in Germany most notably Helmholz. Haeckel later developed this materialism into his Monism.

Although Haeckel own philosophical world view was used to justify eugenics he himself did not preach eugenic as he believed that evolution was not random but directed towards perfections and that with time natural selection would dispose of the "inferior races".

If one is going to blame Haeckel and by implication Darwin and his theory of evolution for eugenics and racial hygiene then one also should stop using telephones as Alexander Graham Bell was an outspoken proponent of eugenics.

"I don't buy the "I like the Jews, I just hate Zionism" line."

It should be a legitimate differentiation, but yes, it is too often uttered by those who don't really believe that there is a separation. It's only recently occurred to me that this almost seems to be an article of faith in many liberal circles in the UK. I have had engaging conversations about human rights, freedom of religion, and all sorts of progressive ideas with fellow liberals, and then the subject of Israel will come up and... poof!... some incongruous, cynical comment will come out of nowhere about "those Jews". No hint of irony, either. Not so much as the faintest acknowledgment of how absurd such a position is, especially in the midst of a long discussion about tolerance and the importance of reason. I honestly thought all that wailing about antisemitism was just Israelis trying to dodge criticism for their crap foreign policy, but although I still hold that their foreign policy is utterly disastrous, I learned that there is a strong grain of truth underlying their accusations of bigotry, particularly toards the Europeans. It really is quite widespread in Europe, and it's utterly bizarre. I never even knew it existed until my early 20's, so I can't for the life of me imagine how it I wonder if I perhaps missed school the day that they gathered all the children in assembly to tell them, "Children, what the Nazis did was utterly wrong, and you should always remember that... but you should know that the Jews really are up to something all the same..."?

Thoroughly peculiar, and on the occasions I've been exposed to it, thoroughly surreal.

Identifying evolutionists with the Nazis is a morally dubious move since it amounts to slander and libel. It is also analytically stupid since very little else has ever been quite like the Nazi regime. As I used to like to say, Hitler was so bad he gave fascism a bad name. Even in comparison to the other ghastly movements that arose after civilization attempted suicide in WWI, the Nazi system was an extreme outlier. Likening ordinary events and people to such an exceptional phenomenon, even for rhetorical purposes, routinely produces mischief and nonsense. Endlessly bringing up the holocaust is similarly problematic, especially when it is used as a permanent justification for bad behavior