Expelled's Quote Mining

Ray Comfort posted a singing praise about the Expelled movie. The review itself really exposes how frail Ray's mind is if he can succumb so greatly to a propaganda fluff piece. This post isn't a review about Expelled, as many (many, many, many) have already done so and pointed out its flaws. There's two things I wanted to note about it, though. Firstly, Ray fell right through the trap door of it linking "Dawinism" (whatever that is) to the Holocaust. That he can believe that the cause of the Holocaust and the cause of Action T4 was the scientific theory of evolution speaks monuments about his intellectual dignity. It shows he is blithely ignorant of history and the fact that eugenics actually had support of Christians in America.

Nevertheless, I had always thought something special of Ray for using the correct term instead of "Darwinism" until this review. It showed that he could be taken in by simple propaganda slogans. Why do they call it Darwinism? So that they can do the following spiel: "Darwinism leads to Social Darwinism which leads to Nazism which leads to the Holocaust." Nevermind the fact that actual Darwinism or even the theory of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with Social Darwinism.

Just as the Nazis had their 100 scientists dissenting from Einstein, the Discovery Institute (the thinktank for the Darwinism leads to Social Darwinism propaganda) had their 100 scientists dissenting from Darwin. Too bad modern dissenters from Einstein (notably the Christian geocentrists who think the Sun orbits the Earth) don't have the strategists from the Discovery Institute or they could have made a fluff piece like Expelled by calling the theory of relativity "Relativism." Then, they could come up with the slogan "relativism leads to moral relativism leads to Nazism leads to the Holocaust."

But I digress. The second point of this post goes to the issue covered in the last two posts: quote mining. The Expelled creators, just like anti-science Christians like Ray, like to mine quote. Just as Ray takes quotes completely out of context and mangles them, as did the propaganda piece Expelled. To show that Darwin was racist and a proponent of forced euthanasia, they mine the following from his masterful Origin of Species:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

It's easy to see why an uneducated mind, such as Ray's, which has never been exposed to a reading of Origin of Species could fall for such a mined quote. The actual quote, in full context, with the omitted parts in bold, is:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.

Yeah, that Darwin! He was an evil man indeed.

You can effectively measure how much a person's mind has been compromised by the anti-science propaganda against the scientific theory of evolution with the following five questions:

1. Do they refer to evolutionary theory as Darwinism?
2. Do they refer to defenders of evolutionary theory as evolutionists?
3. Do they state that evolutionary theory teaches that humans evolved from monkeys?
4. Do they state that evolutionary theory teaches that life just happened or came about from "lightning striking a mud puddle"?
5. Do they link evolutionary theory with atheism?

If, on the above five accounts, you have answers of "Yes," then you are dealing with an uneducated person who has been taken in by propaganda. Ray Comfort, like Ben Stein, fail on all five accounts. It's difficult to judge from his blog, but I wonder if Ray shares Ben's sentiments that "science leads you to killing people"?