User:Darth Tiktaalik/notes on racism and evolution

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This page is meant to gather resources to refute creationist arguments that racism has it's roots in and is caused by the acceptance of evolution or that religion is a cure for bigotry.


Confederacy[edit]

In this great struggle we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolitionist spirit is undeniably atheistic[1][2]

- Benjamin Palmer, civil war era minister

Anti-slavery is essentially infidel. It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men[3].

- Southern Presbyterian of S.C


people have formed themselves into a great sectional party [...] proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.

–A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union.

We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. [4]

Charles Darwin in his own words[edit]

One thing I have always thought that the destruction of Slavery would be well worth a dozen years war.

19 April 1865, letter to Asa Gray

Khristianity[edit]

The Klan requires that initiates state a belief in "the Christian religion" during initiation[5]

Thomas Robb, national director of the knights of the klu klux klan took offense that Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed accused white supremacists of accepting evolution[6]

An interviewed Grand dragon calls jewish people "Christ killing jews", referencing the concept of jewish deicide as justification for his anti-Semitism.[5]

The church of former day racists[edit]

Mormonism founder Joseph Smith cites multiple bible passages in his defense of black people being enslaved in a letter sent to Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate editor Olivier Cowdery and published on April of 1836[7] Note that Darwin published origins in November 1859, a full 23 years and 7 months after this letter.

2 nephi 5 originally had "white and delightsome" people getting cursed with a skin of blackness: "wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.". Black men would be denied the mormon priesthood until 1978 on religious grounds.[8]

2nd president of the LDS church Brigham Young preached death for interracial couples:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot.[9]

Nazis[edit]

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a proponent of scientific racism whose work would inform the nazi policies on race. He was also a critic of Darwinian evolution who mocked both evolution and Darwin himself in his writings. Of universal common descent be wrote:

What may the meaning be of a living being unfitted for its end or purpose, of a formless form, — how that so-called primeval mother of all living forms was able to live even for a quarter of a second, let alone nourish itself, grow and multiply itself, if it was not from the very first perfectly organised for life — that we are not told; the brain is treated in this school as the 108th rudimentary organ of man.[10]

Anti evolution attitudes specifically made it's way into nazi propaganda and censorship guidelines. The nazis promoted the notorious antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion which contains the claim that "Darwinism" was a Jewish plot to poison the minds of non-jews.

In a nazi list of banned books you find "6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism"[11].

Similarly banned are "All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God"

We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out.[12]

unsorted[edit]

A correlation between bigoted attitudes and rejection of evolution[13]


In Johnson v M'intosh the supreme court states that "The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity"[14], justifying colonization by the spread of Christianity. Further, the court held that European Christians could "discover" and lay claim to already inhabited land.


Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon went so far as to claim that the human races were seperately created by god in contrast to even other christian creationists who hold Adam and Eve as common ancestors.


Some creationists justify racism/slavery using the curse of ham. The Joseph Smith letter noted in the LDS section incorporates this as part of his argument


Godless engineer takes on the claims of one RichieFromBoston, an anti evolution conspiracy nutter who pines for the days when people "stayed within their own race" and "italians married italians"

general creationist antisemitism[edit]

Lara Logan of fox nation thinks that Darwin was paid to come up with evolution by the Rothschilds.[15], a dogwhistle version of the protocols of Zion claim mentioned above in the nazi section

Kent Hovind has pushed antisemitic books in the past[16]. Reportedly Michael Marcavage tried to defend Hovind from accusations of antisemitism in a moment that itself was a mask off moment of accusing the ACLU of being a Jewish conspiracy against Christians though the primary source for this doesn't seem to exist anymore[17]


Israel Shamir expresses a low opinion of "Darwinists" in his review of the world turned upside down[18]

References[edit]

  1. Weldon, Nick (22 November 2019). "On Thanksgiving 1860, a New Orleans pastor's sermon defending slavery rallied the secessionist movement"
  2. Palmer, Benjamin M. (29 November 1860). "Thanksgiving sermon"
  3. Rhea, Gordon (25 January 2011). "why non slaveholding states fought"
  4. Hammond, James H. (4 March 1858). "cotton is king" speech
  5. 5.0 5.1 CBS reports (21 September 1965) "Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire"
  6. Robb, Thomas (24 April 2008). "the trap is set"
  7. Smith, Joseph (circa 9 April 1836). Letter to Oliver Cowdery
  8. https://time.com/vault/issue/1978-06-19/page/67/
  9. Young, Brigham (8 March 1863). journal of discourses volume 10, page 110
  10. Chamberlain, Houston Stewart "Immanuel Kant volume II"
  11. https://web.archive.org/web/20060901174220/http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm
  12. Hitler, Adolf. (24 October 1933). Speech at the Berlin Sportpalast
  13. Syropoulos, Stylianos; Lifshin, Uri; Greenberg, Jeff; Horner, Dylan E.; Leidner, Bernhard (2022). "Bigotry and the human-animal divide: (Dis)belief in human evolution and bigoted attitudes across different cultures"
  14. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3104237999990733260
  15. Bort, Ryan (28 March 2022) "Fox Nation’s Lara Logan Suggests Theory of Evolution Is a Hoax Funded by Jews"
  16. The intelligence report (08 May 2001) "Creationism Gets a Dash of Anti-Semitism"
  17. Neiwert, David A. (20 March 2006). "Good Christian hate"
  18. Shamir, Israel. "A poison cake"

Notes[edit]