Author: Ophelia Benson

Best of luck, Haluk Ertan.

“Turkey is now the headquarters of creationism in the Islamic World. This is no longer only Turkey’s problem, it is now the problem of the whole civilized world,” says Haluk Ertan, a professor of molecular biology at Istanbul University. He’s one of a handful of Turkish scientists who have been working to counter creationism’s spread in the country.

But if you package pseudoscience nicely enough, it will win.

In the past year, BAV has blanketed several European countries and the US with its glossy “Atlas of Creation,” a lavish 768-page tome weighing more than 13 pounds, sending it to scientists, professors, journalists, and schoolteachers…”Every Islamic bookshop I know of stocks Harun Yahya’s material. It is so glossily produced. It is very attractive and very colorful and outclasses everything else,” says Inayat Bunglawala…”It is having an effect. Even among Muslim medical students there are a number now who are speaking out against Darwin.”

Oh well, doctors don’t need to understand biology.

The series includes titles such as “The Dark Spell of Darwinism” and “Why Darwinism is Incompatible with the Koran.” Oktar’s brand of creationism is not only religious, but also political and even messianic, seeing most of the world’s ills – terrorism and fascism among them – as stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution…”Folks, there is no such thing as what you call evolution. If there was, it would be in the Holy Bible or the Koran,” added Oktar…”Scientifically speaking, the whole Harun Yahya corpus is a bunch of nonsense, but it is unfortunately very popular,” says Taner Edis, a Turkish physicist who teaches at Truman State University in Missouri. Professor Edis says the success of the Harun Yahya books, at least in the Islamic world, can be attributed to a need for harmonizing modern life with traditional Islamic beliefs.

Sure. The success of a lot of bullshit and nonsense can be attributed to a need for harmonizing fundamentally incompatible things. That’s why people go in for bullshit and nonsense: because they want to harmonize things they want to believe with some obtrusive bit of reality. The reality won’t give way to prayers or persuasion or gentle little dances and passes in the air, so the only thing left to do is harmonize. Then once people get their teeth into harmonizing, they want to pass the harmonization on to schools and universities and the mass media, and pretty soon the entire population has learned that there’s no such thing as evolution because it’s not in the Koran. Maybe if we all work really hard, in a few generations the whole population of the earth will be as ignorant as it was ten thousand years ago. Yee-ha.

Sorry I’m a little quiet. You can thank the spambot, for one thing – it deposits comments (porn ads) on an old N&C, and I have to remove them. The number of comments has been steadily rising; it doubled between yesterday and today. Yesterday I had 8 pages to delete, today it’s 18. It’s a slow process – click ‘check all,’ click ‘delete,’ then wait, then click yes, then wait; repeat. 17 times. It’s slow, because I don’t have broadband. I can do other things at the same time, but it’s jerky and interrupted. Deleting 18 pages takes a very long time.

Anyway, it’s just as well for me to be quieter. I’ve learned that JS has to pay more the more I talk. It had been my understanding that B&W didn’t increase costs, but that was wrong. I have to find some skeptical organization or other that would like to affiliate with B&W and bankroll it in the process. (I tried to insist that I was the one who should pay, but I got nowhere.)

202 spam comments left to delete. 7 pages. More than half finished. That’s only an hour wasted.

Ah well that is reassuring. The Grand Mufti of Egypt explains about apostasy and stuff.

[F]rom a religious perspective, the act of abandoning one’s religion is a sin punishable by God on the Day of Judgment. If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment. If, however, the crime of undermining the foundations of the society is added to the sin of apostasy, then the case must be referred to a judicial system whose role is to protect the integrity of the society.

Excellent. From a religious perspective, no earthly bastards will punish you for apostasy, it’s only God who will. Of course, God will presumably do a pretty thorough job of it, being a jealous and tyrannical kind of shit, but no matter, that’s a few years off probably, unless you get run over by a bus tomorrow. The important thing is that the mullahs and the cops aren’t going to push your door down and take you out for execution right this second. Unless, of course, they are – on account of you done added the crime of undermining the foundations of the society to the sin of apostasy, and that we don’t allow, so up against the wall mothafucka. Because the thing is the sin is God’s business and God will deal with it as and when necessary, but the crime is a whole nother story. The thing is, the integrity of the society has to be protected from the likes of thinking doubting questioning mind-changing you; understand? The integrity of the society is the important thing, not selfish little you and your selfish individualistic atomistic consumerist idea about wanting to think for yourself and make up your own mind and not be compelled to ‘believe’ what you don’t believe. Got that? You don’t matter, the integrity of the society does. No yous matter; all the yous added up don’t matter; what matters is the society and its integrity – in other words its uniformity of thought. Integrity of the individual, poison; integrity of the group, divine Utopia. See? It makes perfect sense if you look at it in the right way.

There’s also of course the familiar irritating boilerplate about women – equal but not the same blah blah blah so actually they have higher status than men which is why they’re not allowed to leave the house or the country without permission from a man.

Islam adopts the perspective of gender equality, but it does not endorse the idea of gender equivalency. Islam affirms the difference between the natural dispositions and constitutions of men and women. Women have the ability to bear and nurse children, whereas men do not, so there is a lack of equivalency in regards to the physical and psychological make-up of men and women…

Therefore…you know the rest.