Some ideas have fatal consequences. The Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter was allegedly enamored with the book Might Is Right published under the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard. The book was published in 1890, and includes “principles related to social Darwinism that have been used to justify racism, slavery, and colonialism, said Brian Levin, director of Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.”
“The notion that people of color are biologically inferior is a key tenet of this book, and that biological determinism, the Darwinian view of the world, justifies aggression against diverse people and vulnerable people,” Levin said.
Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest, is a book by pseudonymous author Ragnar Redbeard. First published in 1896, it heavily advocates egoist anarchism, amorality, consequentialism and psychological hedonism. In Might Is Right, Redbeard rejects conventional ideas such as advocacy of human and natural rights and he also argues that only strength or physical might can establish moral right (à la Callicles or Thrasymachus).
The book also attacks Christianity and Democracy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of master – slave morality and herd mentality served as clear inspirations for Redbeard’s book which was written contemporaneously.
Noted individualist anarchist, revisionist historian James J. Martin called it “surely one of the most incendiary works ever to be published anywhere.” This refers to the book’s controversial content such as its viewpoint that weakness should be regarded with hatred and the strong and forceful presence of Social Darwinism in its text. There are also controversial parts of the book which deal with the topics of race and male-female relations, such as its claim that the woman and the family as a whole are the property of the man and its proclamation that the Anglo-Saxon race is innately superior to all other races.The book also contains many extremely anti-Semitic statements.
The odd thing is, the shooter did not target “people of color.”
The Monist Journal of 1899 stated:
This book is a reasoned negation of the Ten Commandments – the Golden Rule – the Sermon on the Mount – Republican Principles – Christian Principles – and “Principles” in general. It proclaims upon scientific evolutionary grounds, the unlimited absolutism of Might, and asserts that cut-and-dried moral codes are crude and immoral inventions, promotive of vice and vassalage.
Atheists have tried to make the case that religion is the cause of all the evil in the world. Get rid of religion and we’ll all live happily ever after. For a brief time, there were a few news articles that reported on a school student in Finland who shot and killed eight people (six students, a nurse, and a principal).
Here’s how Reuters reported the story:
Eight people were killed when a teenaged gunman opened fire at a school in southern Finland on November 7, 2007 hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there. The gunman was a pupil at Jokela High School, a teacher who witnessed the attack told Reuters, and had walked through the school firing into classroom after classroom. . . . The YouTube video, entitled ‘Jokela High School Massacre—11/7/2007,’ was posted by a user called ‘Sturmgeist89.’ ‘I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,’ read a posting by a user of the same name. ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’ Sturmgeist means storm spirit in German. ((Eight killed at Finland school after YouTube post,” Reuters (November 7, 2007).))
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The shooter described himself as “a social Darwinist.” ((David Williams, “Eight shot dead including principal in school massacre predicted in YouTube video,” Daily Mail online (November 7, 2007).)) An almost identical article appeared in Sky News but with no reference to the Darwinism association.
I haven’t heard any of the New Atheists explain this evolutionary “logic” and how it might be morally wrong for an atheist to kill the unfit. I’m most interested in what super-atheist Richard Dawkins has to say since he blames religion for all types of ills:
Religious beliefs are irrational. Religious beliefs are dumb and dumber: super dumb. Religion drives otherwise sensible people into celibate monasteries, or crashing into New York skyscrapers. Religion motivates people to whip their own backs, to set fire to themselves or their daughters, to denounce their own grandmothers as witches, or, in less extreme cases, simply to stand or kneel, week after week, through ceremonies of stupefying boredom.
Dawkins doesn’t like to talk about the irrational, dumb, dumber, and super dumb belief system called Communism and the 100 million deaths at the hands of its atheist practitioners.
Dawkins has a real problem on his hands since he believes that “human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection. . . . From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb."
Evolutionists need the Christian worldview of altruism (super niceness) to maintain sanity in the world. If atheists were truly consistent with the tenets of their materialist faith, they would praise the Finnish Darwinian killer for following “a rational point of view” that led him to argue that it was proper for him to “eliminate all who he believed were unfit.” Instead of killing himself, he should have demanded to be tried by a jury of his atheist peers. He could have called Dawkins as a witness and called into evidence the following statement made by him: “In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice.”((Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.))