Creationism and the Holocaust

I like how athiests say that if you make an extraordinary claim (like that God exists) you have to have extraordinary claims to back it up. They say that books and writing isn't enough to prove this claim, because anybody could have just forged the Bible and just *claiming* to be an authority on the matter.

In 50 years from now, or a few hundred years from now, people believing that the holocaust happened, will face the same problem. They say that there's "mountains of evidence" to support this highly extraordinary claim, but with time, this mountain will be eroded into an amount of evidence no bigger than the Bible. Then people will point and laugh at the jews and their "fabled" extinction, going "Well, you're still *here*, aren't you? How do you explain *that*? I don't believe in your religious texts - I'm an atheist.".

>>17
My standpoint is actually similar: The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily the burden of proof lies on the one making the claim. If you claim the world is flat, then it's up to you to prove it.

Thing with the holocaust, is that the evidence if favor, tend to be to the effect that «believe as you're told, or else», which is hardly an improvement from the “glory” days of the 3rd Reich. And the “or else” part is invariably a Nazism framejob.

Not only does it sink us down to the level of the actual Nazis, but it hinges on the notion that the Nazis somehow need the holocaust to be evil. The inevitable consequence of this, would be that the holocaust was somehow “the only evil thing the Nazis ever did”, i.e. “remove the holocaust, and the Nazis were suddenly good guys after all”.

It shouldn't take a genius to grok the logical extreme of this fallacy; suddenly the Crystal Night was “not evil”, suddenly it's OK to burn books you don't like, suddenly it's OK to have KZ camps with “undesirables” in them (as long as they're not Death Camps), etc

And the true horror of this, is obviously that there are in reality a fuckton of reasons the Nazis were bad; but the over-focus on this one particular crime actually belittles the others. Makes them somehow harmless.

Which stands to open the floodgates for more of the same.