Abraham Lincoln and
Charles Darwin were born on the exact same day, Feb. 12, 1809, but their lives had opposite effects.
Lincoln is best known for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and freeing millions of slaves, claiming all men are created equal, as he stated in his Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Darwin’s theory of evolution claims men were not created, instead they evolved, and men are not equal, as some are more evolved than others. Just four years after Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published, James Hunt used it to justify slavery, writing a paper in 1863 titled “On the Negro’s Place in Nature,” stating: “Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants, perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transported some of them to America.”
Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was read and reread by Karl Marx, who saw “survival of the fittest” as validating his “dialectical conflict,” where labor and community organizers would create domestic chaos to enable communist dictators to usurp power.
Karl Marx wrote to Lassalle, Jan. 16, 1861: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history.”
Karl Marx dedicated a personal copy his book, “Das Kapital,” to Charles Darwin, inscribing that he was a “sincere admirer” of Darwin.
Darwin also influenced Engels, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and others whose totalitarian regimes killed and enslaved millions.
In 1876, Darwin’s views were used by the Melbourne Review to justify the eradication of indigenous Australians, arguing “the inexorable law of natural selection exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races … the world is better for it … (thus preventing) promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal.”
Of this, Darwin reflected “I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage race.”
Darwin had a cousin, Francis Galton, who advanced racial eugenics. Darwinian evolutionist Winwood Reade’s book, “The Martyrdom of Man,” gave Cecil B. Rhodes justification for European expansion across Africa, saying “That book has made me what I am.”
In 1877, Rhodes wrote: “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. … It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses.”
In contrast to Darwin, Abraham Lincoln’s last act in office was to put on all national coins the motto, “In God We Trust.”
Darwin’s theory has been used to deny a Creator God.
A year and a half into the Civil War, Lincoln told his Cabinet, Sept. 22, 1862, as reported by Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase: “The time for the annunciation of the emancipation policy can no longer be delayed. Public sentiment will sustain it, many of my warmest friends and supporters demand it, and I have promised God that I will do it.”
When asked by Secretary Chase to explain, Lincoln replied: “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee were driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.”
Lincoln, the first Republican president, addressed the Indiana Regiment, March 17, 1865: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
Abraham Lincoln stated Aug. 14, 1862: “It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”
Lincoln wrote to H.L. Pierce, April 6, 1859: “This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God, cannot long retain it.”
Lincoln stated in his second inaugural, March 4, 1865, just 41 days before his assassination: “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God … He now wills to remove, and that He gives … this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? … ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
Lincoln stated in his second annual message, Dec. 1, 1862: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free … We shall nobly save – or meanly lose – the last, best hope of earth. … The way is plain …which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”
In contrast, Darwin published his “Origin of Species,” 1859, and “Descent of Man,” 1871, in which he wrote: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. … We civilized men, on the other hand … build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. … Thus the weak members propagate their kind. No one who had 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. …”
Darwin continued: “Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. … The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Social Darwinism was used to justify racism, such as the Supreme Court opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1856, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who was appointed by Democrat President Jackson. The Dred Scott decision stated: “Slaves had … been regarded as beings of an inferior order … so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Darwin’s theory influenced Margaret Sanger, who promoted “eugenics” and “forced sterilization” to eliminate inferior races. Sanger founded a 501(c)3 called Planned Parenthood. Margaret Sanger wrote in her autobiography of addressing a Klu Klux Klan rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1938. She wrote in her book “Pivot of Civilization,” 1922, calling for the: “Elimination of ‘human weeds’ … overrunning the human garden; for the cessation of ‘charity’ because it prolonged the lives of the unfit; for the segregation of ‘morons, misfits, and the maladjusted’; and for the sterilization of genetically inferior races.”
Margaret Sangers’ magazine the Birth Control Review published in April 1933 an article by Nazi Party member Ernst Rüdin, one of the “fathers of racial hygiene.” Ernst Rüdin, advocated eliminating those with hereditary defects – “untermensch” – from the human gene pool, which led to millions dying in the holocaust.
Darwin influenced Joseph Stalin, as recounted in the book “Landmarks in the Life of Stalin”: “At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist.”
Joseph Stalin stated of the Soviet state-controlled “common core” type indoctrination: “There are three things that we do to disabuse the minds of our seminary students. We had to teach them the age of the earth, the geologic origin, and Darwin’s teachings.”
Stalin used intentional famines, forced labor and executions to eliminate over 7 million Ukrainians. Stalin’s notorious 1937 order No. 00447 called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people.” Estimates of deaths during the Stalinist period range from 8 to 61 million.
Darwin influenced Mao Zedong who stated: “Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”
Mao Zedong’s atheistic Communist Party policies resulted in an estimated 80 million deaths.
Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge killed 2 million Cambodians in his “killing fields” between 1975 and 1979. With Darwinist-utilitarian logic, Pol Pot stated: “Keeping you is no gain. Losing you is no loss.”
In the article “Nationalism in the Slave States of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and now, China” (Dec. 23, 2010), Lev Navrozov, an immigrant from the U.S.S.R. who worked with the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, stated: “Once upon a time it was assumed that a slave should fulfill the slave-owners’ order as efficiently as a machine. But after Stalin, Hitler, and Mao … slaves must relive the order, and hence scream in their delight to kill and be killed.”
These genocides resulted from ascribing an unequal value to human life.
The statement in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “a new nation … dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” was echoed by other presidents.
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his United Flag Day broadcast, June 14, 1942: “The belief in man, created free, in the image of God – is the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face.”
Harry S. Truman stated in his inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1949: “We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. From this faith we will not be moved.”
Ronald Reagan stated to the citizens of Hambach, Germany, May 6, 1985: “Each of us … is made … in the image of God, the image of God the Creator.”
Woodrow Wilson stated in Denver, Colorado, on the 300th anniversary of King James Bible, May 7, 1911: “The finger of God that moves upon the face of the nations is against every man that plots the nation’s downfall or the people’s deceit. … These men are … groping and staggering in their ignorance to a fearful day of judgment; and … the glad day … will come in which men will sing by the host of the coming of the Lord in His glory, and all of those will be forgotten – those little, scheming, contemptible creatures that forgot the image of God and tried to frame men according to the image of the evil one.”