{"id":2250,"date":"2011-10-12T21:39:17","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T04:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/?p=2250"},"modified":"2011-10-12T21:40:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T04:40:15","slug":"how-moral-was-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/2011\/how-moral-was-hitler\/","title":{"rendered":"How Moral Was Hitler?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The obvious answer seems, &#8220;Not very.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Surely the terms <i>moral<\/i> and <i>Hitler<\/i> have to be mutually antagonistic.<\/p>\n<p>And yet&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Author Richard Weikart offers the proposition that Hitler was a moral man.<\/p>\n<p>See what you make of this: <!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div style=\"float:right; margin-left:25px\"><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;nou=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=anabaptistbookst&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as4&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;ref=ss_til&#038;asins=0230112730\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>In his most recent book, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0230112730\/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=anabaptistbookst&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=0230112730\" title=\"Hitler's Ethic\">Hitler&#8217;s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress<\/a><\/em>, Discovery Institute fellow Richard Weikart lays out a historian&#8217;s case for the proposition that Adolf Hitler&#8217;s murderous policies arose from a scientific racism inspired by Charles Darwin&#8217;s most famous ideas.<\/p>\n<p>According to Weikart, Hitler wasn&#8217;t an amoral monster, but a frighteningly &#8220;moral&#8221; one &#8212; &#8220;moral&#8221; in the sense of principled, of course. Principles can be directed to evil or to good. Hitler was an autocrat who aimed to bring about what seemed to him to be a praiseworthy end, a biological utopia forged in the fiery struggle for life. In Hitler&#8217;s mind, this world-to-come would be the inevitable result of Natural Selection, a blind and unforgiving process he would merely speed along by expansionist warfare, eugenics, and institutional racism. In Hitler&#8217;s view, evolutionary progress was so great an end that any means used to achieve it would be moral, even programmatic genocide.<\/p>\n<p>The most ghoulish evils of Nazi foreign and domestic policy were made possible in the first place because Hitler sought to <em>apply<\/em> Darwinian concepts to the world outside the biology lecture hall. Mere ideas are not to blame for mortal suffering, true, but in light of <em>Hitler&#8217;s Ethic<\/em>, the exportation of Darwinian ideas outside the confines of biological study merits close watch.<\/p>\n<p><i>Source:<\/i> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebereancall.org\/node\/9444\">On Darwinism and Hitlerism<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Did Hitler get carried away with his applications of Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution?<\/p>\n<p>If so, why would evolution be OK as a theory of origins but not as a set of principles by which to live?<\/p>\n<p>Interesting.<\/p>\n<p>And perhaps you will find these two articles of interest as well:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.reachingoutmag.com\/issue-57\/evolution-and-the-disconnected-society\/\">Evolution and the Disconnected Society | Reaching Out Magazine<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/reachingoutmag.com\/issue-48\/the-cry-of-the-innocents\/\">The Cry of the Innocents | Reaching Out Magazine<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The obvious answer seems, &#8220;Not very.&#8221; Surely the terms moral and Hitler have to be mutually antagonistic. And yet&#8230; Author Richard Weikart offers the proposition that Hitler was a moral man. See what you make of this:<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,10,20],"tags":[992,871,416],"class_list":["post-2250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lessons-for-living","category-religion","category-youve-been-warned","tag-books","tag-evolution","tag-morality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-Ai","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}