Special to WorldTribune.com

By Bill Federer, February 12, 2018

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.

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, January 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 Margaret Sanger, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and others whose eugenic policies and totalitarian regimes aborted, killed and enslaved millions.

Lincoln’s last act in office was to put on all National Coin 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, September 22, 1862, as reported 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 August 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, December 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.

Sanger began a “Negro Project” in 1939 to reduce the African-American population. Her racist views are seen in statements, such as: “The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development.”

Margaret Sanger wrote in her autobiography that she addressed 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 Sanger’s Planned Parenthood began receiving Federal funding when Richard Nixon signed the Title X-Family Planning Services and Population Research Act in 1970.

In 2017, the U.S. House and Senate continued to fund Planned Parenthood with $543.7 million. 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.”

Most genocides result from systems which deny each person is made in the image of God — that deny all are of equal value in His sight.

Darwinists believe some humans are “more evolved” that others and fundamental Islamists believes Allah has no image and that kafir-infidels are not equal to believing Muslims.

Lincoln countered this attitude in his Gettysburg Address, stating that America is “a new nation … dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” — a belief which has been repeated by American leaders, both Democrat and Republican:

President Calvin Coolidge stated on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 5, 1926: “The principles … which went into the Declaration of Independence … are found in … the sermons … of the early colonial clergy … They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the Divine image.”

Woodrow Wilson stated 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.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union, Jan. 6, 1942: “Our enemies are guided by … unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: “God created man in His own image.”

“We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image – a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.”

FDR 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.”

FDR stated in a radio address on United Flag Day, June 14, 1942: “We know that man, born to freedom in the image of God, will not forever suffer the oppressors’ sword.”

In his State of the Union, January 7, 1948, Harry S. Truman stated: “We believe in the dignity of man. We believe that he was created in the image of the Father of us all. We do not believe that men exist merely to strengthen the state or to be cogs in the economic machines.”

Harry S Truman stated in his Inaugural Address, January 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.”

President Eisenhower stated upon his return from the Geneva Conference, July 25, 1955: “The wide gulf that separates so far East and West … lies between the concept of man made in the image of his God and the concept of man as a mere instrument of the state.”

President Eisenhower addressed the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, December 5, 1955,: “Man is created in the Divine Image and has spiritual aspirations that transcend the material.”

Eisenhower told the Spiritual Foundation of American Democracy Conference, Nov. 9, 1954: “Milton asserted that all men are born equal,because each is born in the image of his God. Our whole theory of government finally expressed in our Declaration … said “Man is endowed by his Creator. When you come back to it, there is just one thing … a man is worthwhile because he was born in the image of his God.”

Eisenhower addressed the U.S. Information Agency, November 10, 1953:

“The things for which the Americans stand are those things which enrich human life, which ennoble man because he is an individual created in the image of his God and trying to do his best on this earth.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur addressed the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, May 12, 1962:

“The soldier … is required to practice the greatest act of religious training-sacrifice … In the face of danger and death, he discloses those Divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image.”

Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan stated in his speech “The Prince of Peace,” which was printed in the New York Times, September 7, 1913:

“I find proof that man was made in the image of his Creator in the fact that, throughout the centuries, man has been willing to die, if necessary, that blessings denied to him might be enjoyed by his children, his children’s children and the world.”

President William Henry Harrison stated in his Inaugural, March 4, 1841: “The American citizen … claims them because he is himself a man, fashioned by the same Almighty hand as the rest of his species and entitled to a full share of the blessings with which He has endowed them.”

Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis, December 23, 1776: “The Almighty implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of His image in our heart. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals.”

George W. Carver wrote to Rev. Kunzman of Seattle, March 24, 1925: “My life time study of nature in it’s many phases leads me to believe more strongly than ever in the Biblical account of man’s creation as found in Gen. 1:27 “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created he them.”

George Washington Carver wrote to Mr. and Mrs.Woods, who had given him some dahlias, on Sept. 7, 1940: “The great Creator … made man in the likeness of His image to be co-partner with him in creating some of the most beautiful and useful things in the world.”

Ronald Reagan stated at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, January 31, 1985: “We are all God’s children. The clerk and the king and the communist were made in His image. We all have souls … I’m convinced, more than ever, that man finds liberation only when he binds himself to God and commits himself to his fellow man.”

Ronald Reagan told the citizens of Hambach, Germany, May 6, 1985: “Each of us, each of you, is made in the most enduring, powerful image of Western civilization. We’re made in the image of God, the image of God the Creator.”

Reagan stated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, England, June 3, 1988: “Like the Founding Fathers … we hold that humanity was meant not to be dishonored by the all-powerful state, but to live in the image and likeness of Him who made us.”

President Trump stated at the National Prayer Breakfast, February 8, 2018: “We are all united by our faith, in our Creator and our firm knowledge that we are all equal in His eyes.”

Reagan quoted Lincoln in his article “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” (The Human Life Review, 1983): “The great champion of the sanctity of all human life in that day, Abraham Lincoln, gave us his assessment of the Declaration’s purpose. Speaking of the framers of that noble document, he said: ‘This was their … noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on … They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.’ He warned also of the danger we would face in we ever closed our eyes to the value of life in any category of human beings …”

He continued: “We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others, a value of which Malcolm Muggeridge says: ‘… however low it flickers or fiercely burns, it is still a Divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives ever so humane and enlightened.'”

Reagan concluded: “Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide … There is no cause more important … than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.”

  Abraham Lincoln, Born on the same day, Charles Darwin, Darwin and Lincoln had opposite views of man, LIFE, WorldTribune.com