Immersed In Red

by Mike Shotwell

  During Stalin’s purges of the Great Terror, 1937–38, Church documents record that 168,000 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of that number, 100,000 were shot. Between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox churches in the Russian Republic fell (demolished and converted to such uses as bath houses, granaries, night clubs and museums of atheism) from 29,584 to fewer than 500 (98.5 percent).

  The most hauntingly tragic example was Stalin’s ordered destruction of the great mid-nineteenth-century Eastern Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior that stood a few blocks southwest of the Kremlin. The grand structure was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky. It was to be replaced with a grand building complex to be named the “Palace of the Soviets.” WWII thwarted this plan.

  In 1947, the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge was established. Its purpose was to run houses of scientific atheism in Soviet cities. By 1957, the school system enhanced atheistic materials in its curriculum, including a textbook that contained the declaration, “Religion has become the medium for the spiritual enslavement of the masses,” a theme often evoked by Orville.

  In 1960, the Central Committee brought back the practice of atheistic tutors visiting known religious believers to try and convince them to become atheists. If recalcitrant, it was brought to the attention of authorities and their transgressions were made public. In total, victims of Soviet state atheistic policies resulted in the murder of an estimated 12 to 20 million Christians.

  Darwin scholar, Dr. Jerry Bergman, wrote in The Dark Side of Charles Darwin, that Stalin’s brutal childhood started him on his way to his equally brutal worldview, convinced by Darwin that “mercy and forbearance were weak and stupid.” As a result, Stalin was able to kill with a “coldness that even Hitler might have envied and in even greater numbers.”

  Mao was also of the same stripe. What happened in China mirrored the atrocities of the Soviet Union at an even more militant and belligerent level. Researchers have stated that Mao regarded Darwin as the foundation of Chinese scientific socialism.

  The eventual horrors that emanated from this “scientific” worldview adopted by the Nazi’s, the communists, China’s “scientific socialists,” and other totalitarian regimes are almost indescribable. In the Soviet Union alone, the government created failed harvests, famine, social and political repression, religious persecution, mass murder, and placed neighboring countries under heel. A quote from Beate Wilder-Smith discusses the horrors of Hitler’s Germany in regard to their absorption of Darwinian law, “The Nazi’s were convinced, as are the communists today, that evolution had taken place, that all biology had evolved spontaneously upward, and that in-between links (or less evolved types) should be actively eradicated. They believed that natural selection could and should be actively aided, and therefore instituted political measures to eradicate the handicapped, the Jews, and the blacks, whom they considered as underdeveloped.”

  Adolph Hitler, reflecting Darwinian thinking, wrote the following racist sentiment in Mein Kampf,

  If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such cases all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.

  The justification for this godless world was that it was “scientific,” i.e., “proven,” and therefore immune from discussion. Not including Hitler’s atrocities, the communist leaders alone, using Kengor’s apt description, “left a wake of more than 100 million corpses from the streets of the Bolshevik Revolution to the base of the Berlin wall,” (some estimates are much higher) a number that far outpaced the fourteenth century, so well described by Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror, when over 50 percent of Europe’s population succumbed to wars and the black death.

  The line of human victims, not including those killed in WWI and WWII, resulting from totalitarian communist/socialist regimes of the twentieth century, if pressed tightly together and shoulder to shoulder, would stretch five to six thousand miles in length, approximately the distance from Los Angeles to London. In all of these regimes, there was no suggestion of pity toward the helpless and unfortunate, nor was there forward thinking of the horrors that would continue, seemingly forever. It was simply godless nature doing what it does best: kill or be killed in order to survive, and ultimately thrive.

  Darwin’s impact on science education and the scientific community: Darwin’s theory of evolution became so rooted in left academia that by the mid to latter part of the twentieth century the term theory became practically nonexistent; it was now seen as undeniable fact; it was in essence, “settled science.” Those with higher education who might question Darwin were viewed by Orville, my mother, and myself (as with most leftists), with their usual disdain and dismissal. The companion view of atheism as a stated fact was also part of their belief system. Those in the religious realm were already discounted by Orville, simply dismissed with the charming label of “Christers.”

  Neither my mother nor Orville had a single friend that was religious. In the area of science, practitioners who either held a belief in a creator or left the subject of creation to unknown processes that might have required intelligent design, were also derided as sub-intellects, which unwittingly included many of the greatest minds in human history (Einstein, Planck, Boyle, Tesla, Born, Pasteur, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and on and on). Unwittingly, this also may have periodically included Darwin himself who as a young man attended Cambridge to be a clergyman. But it also would depend on what period of his life we are talking about, what his frame of mind was at any moment, and to whom he was communicating. After about age 40, he wavered back and forth about his religious beliefs, but later in life consistently referred to himself as an agnostic.

  It is evident that the left rigidly controls the scientific community at the university level, both nationally and internationally, with virtually no input from scientists holding views reflecting intelligent design (ID) or any hybrid theories that might include both Darwinian and ID concepts. This has come about over the long history of America’s colleges, which were at first 100 percent devoted to the specific religious groups that founded them.

  Over time, they transitioned into the European concept of universities with non-religious orientations, and offering graduate degrees. This shift from religious to secular education was greatly accelerated by the federal government and state aid that was far greater than what churches could contribute, thus, one by one, secular education took root. This transition is well detailed in The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, by historian, George M. Marsden, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. The universities have also maintained an iron grip on the lower levels of education with their power to influence the publication of textbooks that are in line with secular beliefs.

  The rage against ID is that it is a cover for “Creationism,” and is therefore “letting God in the door.” But any reasonable study of the varied world of ID paints a far more complex picture. As Ben Stein depicted in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a massive wall has been built around the scientific community that actively expels scientists who even mention the concept of ID from the universities. By doing so, many new scientists, whose careers have not been allowed to advance because of their perceived “backward and unscientific ideas,” have had their reputations destroyed and their research marginalized as irrelevant and kooky.

  But new theories regarding the origin of life on our planet are far different than what they were a scant few generations ago. Some are far removed from the settled science I saw in junior high, intended for general education, which portrayed lightning impacting the bubbling “primordial soup,” spontaneously generating life. With the modern understandings of microbiology, which is a vast world of which Darwin had no un
derstanding, and the massive intricacy of a single DNA molecule with its complex helix spiral and infinite complexity, few scientists are as positive as to how life began, as they were a few decades ago.

  In this arena, the notion of “Directed Panspermia” (seeded life from some unknown extraterrestrial source or civilization) has been thrown out for consideration by such leading people in the field as physicist, Stephen Hawking and biologist Richard Dawkins. All in all, it amounts to conjecture with no substantiation and or testability. At the same time, if panspermia can be contemplated by noted scientists, then the possibility of an incomprehensible super intelligence behind earth’s origins, also put forth by a few noted scientists, should logically be part of the discussion; to not do so is a gross abdication to leftist politics.

  The oft-quoted astronomer Fred Hoyle, noted for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, rejected the Big Bang theory, and though previously an atheist, came to the idea that a “super intellect” with a “guiding hand had monkeyed with physics.” He also stated that even the random appearance of the simplest cell had as much likelihood of spontaneously being created as a “tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials within.”

  But the tragedy of it is that the universities of the world, their presidents, department heads, and professors, are drawn from the secular agnostic/atheist ranks almost exclusively which largely prevents research and acceptance of colleagues with alternative views. Scientific publications also exhibit the same censorship. A well-known example relates to Dr. Richard Sternberg, editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, D.C, who came under intense scrutiny and persecution for publishing an article by Dr. Stephen Meyer concerning the inability of the materialistic theory of evolution to account for the information necessary to build novel animal forms.

  While a search on these topics readily produces myriad examples of this exclusionary environment surrounding the evolution issue, the fact remains that the general public and millions of students world-wide have not been aware of the conflict in the halls of science over Darwinian Theory. They have been taught that evolution is an established fact only opposed by the ignorant.

  Darwin, eugenics, and attitudes toward women: Darwin’s belief in eugenics cannot be left unmentioned, a direct precursor to Hitler’s policies of the twentieth century. His book, The Descent of Man, and Selection of Sex, is laced with noxious ideas, such as his dismay not only at the “weak” propagating, but also the idea of preservation of the weak and sick by vaccinations; they should naturally have died off. Among many illustrative Darwin quotes are the following:

  We must bear in mind without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.

  Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

  The advance of man from a former semi-human condition to the present state requires … natural selection eliminating the weak and inferior humans and leaving superior humans to continue populating the earth [emphasis added].

  At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. [emphasis added]

  To underscore the importance of eugenics in Darwin’s sphere, Bergman cites author Dennis Sewell who wrote The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics,

  In the years leading up to the First World War, the eugenics movement looked like a Darwin family business. Specifically, Darwin’s son Leonard replaced his cousin Galton (who was lauded by Darwin) as chairman of the national Eugenics Society in 1911. In the same year an offshoot of the society was formed in Cambridge. Among its leading members were three more of Charles Darwin’s sons, Horace, Francis and George. The group’s treasurer was a young economics lecturer at the university, John Maynard Keynes, whose younger brother Geoffrey would later marry Darwin’s granddaughter Margaret. Meanwhile Keynes’ mother, Florence, and Horace Darwin’s daughter Ruth, sat together on the committee of the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded … a front organization for eugenics.

  Darwin also had a belief in the bizarre and false concept of “pangenesis.” This theory put forth the idea that human bodies produced “gemules” which grew in the organs that could be passed on to offspring which would, in turn, alter life from generation to generation.

  He also had a strong belief about “underdeveloped humans” (e.g. blacks and women) that permeated his writing. His “scientific” analysis regarding women was that they had smaller brains; they were “eternally primitive,” and childlike; biologically and intellectually inferior to men; less spiritual; more materialistic; and “a real danger to contemporary civilization.” These ideas, according to Prof. Evelleen Richards, Historian of Science at the University of NSW Australia, contributed to the “nourishing of several generations of scientific sexism.”

  Darwin’s health and state of mind: Since Darwin’s utterances and writings have been elevated to God-like status by most of the scientific world, it does not seem unreasonable to also examine his health and state of mind, which Darwin himself spent much time describing and dealing with. Returning to Bergman’s The Dark Side of Charles Darwin, he notes Darwin’s self-documented psychological ills,

  His (Darwin’s) mental problems were so severe that he became an invalid at … around age 30. They included various combinations of psychological symptoms including, severe depression; insomnia; incapacitating anxiety; fits of hysterical crying; depersonalization; visual alterations (seeing spots); malaise; vertigo; shaking; tachycardia; fainting spells; shortness of breath; trembling; nausea, vomiting; dizziness; muscle twitches; spasms and tremors; cramps and colics; bloating and nocturnal flatulence; headaches; nervous exhaustion; dyspnea; skin problems; tinnitus; and sensations of loss of consciousness and death.

  All of these Darwin wrote about incessantly, battling his demons on a daily basis. Only with great anxiety was he able to leave his house. He was childlike in his relationship to his wife who became in essence his mother.

  While suffering these unimaginable infirmities, he became painfully aware that his theories were upsetting the society he lived in. After all, what Darwin concluded in his theory of natural selection was the purposelessness of life, an ideology that conflicts with every religion on the face of the earth. Evolution stresses that no meaning exists in life other “than doing what is needed to survive and pass on life.”

  Bergman also stated, “Darwin was keenly aware that admitting any purpose whatsoever to the question of the origin of species would put his theory on a very slippery slope.”

  This might well have brought on some of Darwin’s internal consternation, given the dismal projection of that theory on mankind’s existence. His concern was validated during the next century.

  Darwin also expressed fears that his theories were not accurate, admitted he had no proof, and that they were dangerous. In a letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote, “I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.”

  Definitions of science in the mid-nineteenth century varied somewhat from modern understanding; nevertheless, this is a powerful statement.

  Another aspect of Darwin’s personality was unpleasant at best. Dr. Bergman discusses the well-documented sadistic tendencies Darwin displayed toward people and animals. The commonly held image is that of a placid and kindly man who patiently applied scientific principles and pondered the vast epoch of man, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. However, the image doesn’t fit well with the reality.

  Bergman quotes Darwin’s own words, “As a little boy, I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.” Darwin also admitted to stealing solely for fun. Bergman also stated, “A clearer example of his sadistic impulse was when a young boy, Darwin ‘beat a puppy … simply from enjoying the sense of power.’” Through his universit
y years and later, he was abnormally fixated with killing birds and other animals.

  Guns and shooting became an obsession far and above the norm of the average nineteenth-century gentleman’s recreational pursuit. He also kept voluminous yearly records of the animals he killed. He became an expert shot, as well as becoming adept at killing birds and rabbits by throwing rocks, all for the pure pleasure of it. He described his laboratory as a “chamber of horrors,” where he practiced dissection on live animals including birds and rabbits, before anesthesia “when ripping out the innards of animals caused them to suffer greatly.” At one point, he murdered a 10-week-old “angelic little fantail, and a pouter,” and described in detail their slow deaths as a result of his experimentation with various poisons. In later life he apparently felt some remorse, but it had been a long time coming.

  On his five-year Beagle voyage, he waded onto the Brazilian coast, and his fellow crewmember described Darwin excitedly beating birds to death with his geological hammer, fascinated by their stupidity. He had also purchased a rifle and two pistols before the journey and looked forward to some battles with natives and the possibility of shooting the “king of the cannibal islands.” This was years before he began to write about his theories of evolution.