Thursday, March 11, 2010

Evolution & the Occult


David Klinghoffer, a conservative writer who is connected with the Discovery Institute, “the organization that is the driving force behind the intelligent design movement,” has a piece on Beliefnet, March 4, 2010, titled “Darwin at the Mountains of Madness: Evolution & the Occult,” implicating HPB’s ideas in The Secret Doctrine about the races as an influence on Nazi development of the Aryan ideal.

By decapitating—so he thought—any rational case for belief in a divine or any other designer, Darwin created a gaping wound at the center of the Western soul. Something had to come along and fill that hole and it had to be, so to speak, Darwin-shaped. It had to speak in evolutionary terms, about races and competition. Madame Blavatsky happened to be the person who came up with an influential modern Darwinian myth that filled that role, disastrously.

“Disastrously” for evolutionism because it offered a successful alternative view. It was the esotericist reply to Darwin and those who would speak in his name. The rest can be read here.

The Darwinist blog The Sensuous Curmudgeon is appalled at the idea of any connection of HPB with Darwin and responds: If you’re sane and familiar with Darwin’s work, you’ll see nothing that even remotely connects his thinking with her ravings. But Klinghoffer somehow sees Madame Blavatsky as Darwin’s intellectual love-child.

“Ravings,” so no need to point out any error in her model, just dismiss it. The writer’s “ravings” continue here.

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