QUOTE(Kato @ Mon 20th April 2009, 7:16pm)
QUOTE(Cla68 @ Tue 21st April 2009, 12:46am)
By the way, there is a
passing reference in the Darwin article about the influence of his eugenics ideas on the Nazis.
For the record, Darwin didn't have any eugenics ideas. That was Galton. Darwin, in fact, rejected them.
Also, Hitler's ideas were basically Cultist (or Occultist?) and had nothing to do with Natural Selection. Hitler believed heritage passed in the blood, for example, and had various other notions that were in stark contrast to Darwin's findings based on the scientific method. The link is extremely tenuous to say the least.
That's all true, of course. I'm not so sure the reference is especially
unfair, at least not to the same extent as the one in the Luther article, but I would absolutely say that it's unnecessary. It really depends on the interpretation -- IOW, how clear is it that the Nazis weren't using Darwin as their scientific justification? Definitely clearer, and further down in the article, which is good (relatively speaking). But again, unnecessary.
Either way, eugenics was a terrible, shameful aspect of early 20th-century history that has been, for all intents and purposes, covered up. There was really nothing good or moral about it at all... The Reformation clearly had some good aspects, even though a lot of people died because of it, and some of those people were, admittedly, Jews.
The one thing I would point out is that, to the best of my knowledge, Luther's reaction to what he saw as Jewish "betrayal" towards the end of his life was to exile them, not kill them. Whatever Jewish deaths occurred were tangential to that policy, and in any event, far more Catholics (and Protestants) were killed during the Reformation than Jews. More to the point, Wikipedia has a ridiculously lengthy article on Luther's
On the Jews and Their Lies, written as he was near death, a bitter, disillusioned old man. There is
no article whatsoever on his earlier
That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, which was probably about as
anti-anti-semitic a work as anything a German churchman could hope to publish at that time.
A much fairer treatment of the topic can be found at the bottom of
this page of Renaissance and Reformation, by James Patrick, on Google Books.
QUOTE(Cla68 @ Mon 20th April 2009, 7:30pm)
Reverted. It lasted about an hour. I've made a suggestion on the talk page. We'll see how that goes.
Oh well... I was hoping for at least three hours, but silly me.
Not the edit summary: "Restore an earlier version of this paragraph, which was better written and more precisely referenced," when in fact the "editor,"
Qp10qpÂ
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
, simply put the whole paragraph back in.
QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Mon 20th April 2009, 7:22pm)
Ah, what a disappointment! I thought you might be one. They're thick as thieves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota (where I lived until 6th grade), and I thought Iowa might be infested too!
I have a lot of good friends who are Lutherans, including one who's a minister. All of them are good people who would never dream of hating anyone because of their race, creed, color, or anything else (though they might hate someone for ripping them off in a real-estate transaction, say - I know I would!)...
But I myself am an agnostic-leaning-towards-atheist - my parents dragged me to a Presbyterian church for a few years, but it didn't really "take." If anyone asks me directly, I just tell them I'm "ignorant" - turns out it's a good way to avoid the subject!