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Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
I have some severe doubts about the claim that Hitler was a "creationist" (or, as creationists claim, a "Darwinist". He was pig shit ignorant on biology - he left school at 16 without a single qualification and I strongly suspect he was never taught anything about evolution at school - he left school in1906 and evolution was pretty well not in fasion then.
Hitler's views were a hodge-podge of half understood (or not at all understood) opinions of an uneducated man and were full of inconsistencies, contradictions, incoherence and huge gaps.
I am an ignoramus on the history of creationism in Austria and Germany but, if the UK is anything to go by, acceptance of creationism there would have been near zero in the first half of the 20th century. What we normally understand in Europe as creationism today was imported from the USA around 1970 and didn't begin to have any impact until the 1990s.
Where on earth would he have got creationism from? Eugenics is nothing more than selective breeding, something which was practised long before 1859. He wouldn't have got it from the Catholic Church - remember that the second most famous name in the history of evolutionary biology was a Catholic priest in the region. From German Protestantism? I doubt it. German Protestantism is basically Lutheran, not fundamentalist.
Permalink Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:29:47 UTC | #570874