Fox News guest: Scientific ‘enlightenment and reason’ led to the Holocaust

[DonViejo]

A Fox News guest on Thursday slammed President Barack Obama’s transportation secretary nominee, connecting him to an 18th century scientific movement that embraced reason, which she said was partially to blame for the Holocaust.

Fox News host Steve Doocy asked Penny Nance, CEO of the Christian activist group Concerned Women for America, if she could make any sense out of why Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx would proclaim May 2 as both a “Day of Prayer” and a “Day of Reason.”

“He comes from North Carolina, which has the 7th highest church attendance, clearly he’s not running for re-election since he’s up for transportation secretary,” she opined. “You know, G. K. Chesterton said that the Doctrine of Original Sin is the only one which we have 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up. Clearly, we need faith as a component and it’s just silly for us to say otherwise.”

“You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.”

Full article + vid
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/02/fox-news-guest-scientific-enlightenment-and-reason-led-to-the-holocaust/

[truebrit71]

1. Fucking idiot...

...but that's a given...

[CJCRANE]

2. Well, the "Age of Reason" didn't lead to Fox News

that's for sure.

[joeybee12]

3. FUX Noise exists solely to make the ignorant feel good about themselves...nt

[HangOnKids]

7. Best Explanation Of FUX Noise EVER!

Thank you.

[joeybee12]

8. You're welcome

[HangOnKids]

10. You Are Brilliant As Usual

back at ya!

[joeybee12]

11. I think you have me confused with someone else!

[HangOnKids]

12. Nah, I know who you are! Beautiful.

Good egg and all that.

[ananda]

4. Geez!

The Age of Reason certainly had its flaws, but promoting irrational dark thinking
like that of the Nazis and Fox News hosts wasn't one of them.

[SidDithers]

5. Dumbass...

inb4 our local "scientific materialism" crank.

Sid

[MattBaggins]

14. Calcified scientific materialism

Don't forget calcified.

[hootinholler]

6. I thought he was gonna play the eugenics card

Which I think contributed to the Holocaust.

[Enrique]

9. there is some truth in it

the claim in the headline, that the Enlightenment had a dark side, has some truth, though I don't see how it relates to the mayor's "Day of Reason", and I think the CWA is ridiculous and fraudulent.

And of course conservatives who are against the Enlightenment should be reminded that one of the upsides to it was the United States.

[sofa king]

16. Her ignorance of history did not help her.

There is a simple way to drag Darwin into this, too, by mentioning that the Nazis were trying to apply the pseudoscience of eugenics.

The idea of eugenics was conceived by Francis Galton, after Galton read Darwin's works on evolution. Galton and Charles Darwin were also half-cousins; they shared the same grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

I'm going to guess that is where this particular argument started, from some firebrand trying to tag the Holocaust on Darwin, but that since the minds at work here are not real good about details, the facts were tossed overboard in favor of a more impressionistic hand-wave.

Moral relativism may be the target of the day, but factual relativism is the practice here. The target audience only hears a Larsonesque, "blah blah blah NAZI blah blah." The rest of us hear bullshit.

[MattBaggins]

13. 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up original sin?

That is in the top ten of the fucking stupidest things I have ever heard.

[Ligyron]

19. Yeah, I can't puzzle out any kind of meaning to that statement whatsoever. n/t

[Jim Lane]

24. I took it to mean that people have been committing sins for 3,000 years.

That's certainly true and probably noncontroversial.

In some cases there would be disagreement about which act was the sin and which wasn't (e.g. helping a fugitive slave escape on the Underground Railroad -- a crime under the law as it then stood, and a sin in many people's eyes, but today considered heroic). There'd be quite a large core of sins, though (your garden-variety murders and the like), that just about everyone would condemn.

[longship]

15. Atheists are always hearing that moral relativism claim.

(Or variations thereof.)

Given what happens in the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, to say nothing of their own personal peccadilloes (some not too small), I would just request that these idiots first put their own house in order.

[ljm2002]

17. So what led us down the dark path of the Inquisition?

Why, that would be moral absolutism, as preached by the Church, which most emphatically did not leave God out of the equation. Well, their version of God, anyway.

[redgreenandblue]

18. Ahistorical nonsense. The nazis rejected "reason and enlightenment" on ideological grounds.

The nazis where tied to conservative "Romanticism", not "Enlightenment".

[sibelian]

20. Moral relativism came from the constant fracturing of the Christian Church.

It's older than they realise.

[sibelian]

21. Also, the Holocaust is the absolute OPPOSITE of moral relativism.

These people are VERY confused.

[mountain grammy]

22. The genius of Fox. Keep trotting these nuts out of the dark fringes where they belong

until, suddenly, they appear to be mainstream ideas and beliefs. They spout stupid as facts, and those who either don't know better or actually have the same ideas become regular viewers.

[Warren DeMontague]

23. Fox News Guest Completely Full Of Shit: Film at 11

More of the same.

[Rex]

25. CNN BREAKING - Foxnews to become real news station

with real guests and real journalism.

[truebluegreen]

26. ...whereas religion is only responsible for good stuff.

[Recursion]

27. The intellectual provenance of eugenics are complex

And don't really fit any current political position's wishlist of what they were.