LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY wyldraven)

New Christian broadcasting TV special featuring Ann Coulter blames Darwin for Hitler* - Raw Story

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An upcoming television special produced by a Christian broadcaster that features conservative pundit Ann Coulter blames Charles Darwin for Adolf Hitler, RAW STORY has learned.

"Author and Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy connects the dots between Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler in Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, a groundbreaking inquiry into Darwin’s chilling social impact," announces a press release issued by Florida's Coral Ridge Ministries. "The new television documentary airs nationwide on August 26 and 27 on The Coral Ridge Hour."

"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," says Dr. Kennedy. "Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."

Fourteen scholars, scientists, and authors featured on the show "outline the grim consequences of Darwin’s theory of evolution and show how his theory fueled Hitler’s ovens," according to the press release.

Other participants include From Darwin to Hitler author and California State University modern European history professor Richard Weikart; the director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins; and biochemist Michael Behe who wrote Darwin’s Black Box and is a prominently cited source against evolution in Coulter's latest book (in a recent study, Media Matters argued that Coulter's endnotes were "rife with distortions and falsehoods").

"This show basically is about the social effects of Darwinism, and shows this idea, which is scientifically bankrupt, has probably been responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the history of humanity," one of the show's producers, Jerry Newcomb, told World Net Daily.

A clip from the special can be seen at this link.

Coulter vs. Darwin

"We keep hearing about gaps in the theory of evolution," Coulter says in the special. "The whole theory is a gap."

Coulter carries on the theme from her best-selling book released in June -- on 6/6/06 -- which attacks liberalism as a Godless religion.

"I think Darwinism is popular as a story because it allows atheists not to have to explain why we're here," Coulter says in the special. "There's no such thing as morality. There's no such thing as our consciousness of our mortality."

"We're about one step above a porpoise," Coulter adds, "although many of them seem to believe we are below a porpoise because we have nukes and we pollute [chuckles] and have hate crimes and don't recycle."

Coulter has been widely criticized for her attacks on Darwin's theory of evolution, which she called "one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor" in her book.

"What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her 'alternative hypothesis," wrote Professor Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago's Department of Ecology and Evolution in a recent book review.

"That claim is that there is no evidence for evolution," wrote University of Minnesota associate professor PZ Meyers at the science blog, Pharyngula. "I know, to anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with biology, that sounds like a ridiculous statement, like declaring that people can live on nothing but air and sunlight, or that yeti are transdimensional UFO pilots."

Meyers counters Coulter's claims that there is no physical evidence for evolution by noting that there were 150,000 primary research articles alone in an online database of articles related to life sciences he searched called PubMed, which "indexes over 4800 journals and contains about 12 million articles going back to 1966."

Coral Ridge Ministries

According to the Ministries' Website, the Coral Ridge Hour "airs on more than 400 stations, four cable networks, and to 165 nations on the Armed Forces Network," and "is the third most-widely syndicated weekly Christian television program."

The show also runs on some Fox-owned television stations as a paid program.

"Coral Ridge Ministries three-fold mission is to evangelize, nurture Christian growth through biblical instruction, and reform American culture by applying the truth of Scripture to all of life, including civic affairs," reads the "About" page at the Ministries' Website.

Dr. Kennedy helped form the Alliance Defense Fund, a "socially conservative legal consortium" which "spends $20 million a year seeking to protect what it regards as the place of religion -- and especially Christianity -- in public life," and considers itself the "antithesis of the American Civil Liberties Union," according to a Washington Post article from July.

"What we are really trying to protect are the things this country was founded on," Kennedy told the Post's Peter Slevin.

(In June, Raw reported that Coulter apparently inserted a list that was originally compiled by an anti-abortion group almost word-for-word into her new book)

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Yes Hitler was trying to apply Social Darwinism in its most hideous form. However, "the ideology of Social Darwinism should be distinguished from the scientific theory of evolution developed in The Origins of Species (1859)." The one does not invalidate the other.

*Note: I have included the text of the Raw Story article. However, I have only copied a couple of the links in the article. Please click through to the actual article to see more documentary links.