1) There are several ways to learn how to use sources critically rather than gullibly.

For example, you can take a course or read a textbook in critical thinking. Indeed, my course in critical thinking is only $49 for thirty days of training, and includes the opportunity to ask me specifically how to critically evaluate any given Wikipedia page.

2) You can only learn from experience which pages on Wikipedia are more subject to fanatical editing and which are better policed by objective experts. But until you cultivate that experience, you should treat every page on Wikipedia as suspect, and thus vet it before trusting it (using the same critical thinking skills I just mentioned).

Eventually, you will start to realize what kinds of pages tend to be more reliable than others. For example math/science/trivia tend to outperform history/religion/politics; third-rail subjects, like anything Christians or Muslims or any kind of political conservatives argue with or about, will tend to be more suspect than second-rail subjects, like the history of Wisconsin, which will tend to be more suspect than first-rail subjects, like the history of peanut farming—and even those subjects may fall victim to lazy informatics, so if you intend to depend upon or cite them, you should check their sources first just to be sure.

For general tips on how to get better at not being gullible about sources and learning what level of trust to assign any given source, see my Vital Primer on Media Literacy for a start.

2) how do I determine which pages are those?

Lesson in reading comprehension:

(1) The phrase “that reliable” does not mean “reliable.” The question is not black and white (reliable or not). The question is treating it as so reliable you think you can end an entire argument by merely citing it, and not any of the evidence it is supposed to present for whatever claim you want to assert. The problem is not that Wikipedia should not be used. The problem is that Wikipedia has to be used critically. Not gullibly. You used it gullibly. I do not.

(2) The clause “especially on pages highly prone to hacking by fanatics with an agenda” was including in my statement for a reason. You ignored it. That’s three rationality fails on your part now. You failed to use Wikipedia credibly. You failed to read a qualifying phrase in my response. And you failed to read a qualifying clause in my response.

Three strikes and you’re out? Or maybe just stop acting like this and learn how to think critically rather than carelessly?

You’re call.

If you don’t think Wikipedia is reliable then why do you sometimes link it yourself?

People use Wikipedia all the time, can you please explain the problem with it?

If you think Wikipedia is that reliable, especially on pages highly prone to hacking by fanatics with an agenda, you have a larger problem than failing to read the article you are commenting on or not understanding the difference between evidence and assertion.

In some way. They just weren’t targeted with extermination, but domination, and thus religious bias against (Catholic) Poles definitely played a part, but so did mere political ideology. Here is a decent account.

Martin Luther (father of Protestant Christianity) wrote about the extinction of the Jewish race. His entire platform for that is identical to the Nazi Party platform for that (line by line, as shown by Avalos in The Christian Delusion). There is no mention of any such platform in Darwin. Darwin never calls for any organized extinguishing of any race. And does not mention Jews at all.

Likewise, the idea that black people are a race inferior to whites was invented by Christians and endorsed by theologians, particularly in the Catholic Church (I recently discussed this in Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America). In fact the very concept of “black” and “white” people was a Christian invention (to paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois, “Before the age of exploration,” i.e. the 15th century, “there were no white people,” and he’s right: no such concept existed until then; and then the concept was invented to establish a superiority-inferiority matrix to justify enslaving Africans, and dominating Native Americans).

Classifying the Jews as an inferior people condemned by God began in second century Christianity, and possibly earlier (it already appears in the NT). Classifying other races likewise (e.g. with “the curse of Ham”) began in earnest with the Age of Exploration (see The Christian Origins of Racism). Long before Darwin. And Nazi policy resembles these; it resembles nothing in Darwin.

By contrast, Darwin did not promote the idea of races being biologically inferior—he actually challenged this claim. Darwin is misquoted (often deliberately) by people like Weikart (who is actually a liar; a lot of what he claims about history in all his books is false; so I wouldn’t trust anything from him). They take passages where Darwin is talking about culture, and represent them as talking about biology; or passages about biology, and represent them as talking about policy. For example, when Darwin predicted the natural extermination of nonwhites, he gives as causes cultural choices, not biological properties.

This is well explained in Did Darwin Promote Genocide?

But as an example, here are Darwin’s actual words:

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks; though they owe much to the written works of this wonderful people.

In other words, Europeans are not biologically superior to (say) Africans—their superiority is a happenstance of cultural development. Hence, they did not have “superior biological stock” in the Greeks; they simply learned from their books—culture, not biology.

When it comes to biology (where Darwin did think there could be selectable differences in the races; though nothing that entailed any moral judgment or domination of them), he did not prescribe but lamented the loss of other races when he said “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,” by which he does not mean genocide, but simply natural extinction (which, ironically, Darwin attributed not to their being less intelligent, but to reproducing less—exactly the opposite of racist fearmongering about nonwhites—and he attributes this to cultural choices, e.g. how long mothers choose to nurse their young, and not biological differences).

When Darwin describes actual genocide, he describes it as “cruel,” a “train of evil,” that “originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.” So, unlike Hitler, Darwin condemned stances that would evolve into Hitler’s as cruel and evil and grounds for censure.

There was one particular point that Weikart made toward the end of the debate that you never actually got around to responding to. And unless I’m missing something I don’t see where in this blog article you responded to that directly.

Weikart stated the following (paraphrasing here) :

“On the issue of Darwinism and the competition between races. Read the “Descent of Man”, Darwin spent of good deal of time talking about competition between races.

And talks about lower races and higher races, and how the Australian races are being beat out in the struggle for existence by the superior European races.

Darwin has an entire section called “The extinction of races” dedicated to this topic. Whereas nowhere in Christianity do you anything about the extinction of entire races.”

So can you please respond to that argument specifically?

Thanks.