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Sep 17, 2008, 13:34 GMT
Turkey bans biologist Richard Dawkins' website
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Older Talkback
It is so typical of the AKP (governing islamist party in Turkey) to support their corrupt lowlife henchmen. What can you expect from the government of a PM who has the intelect of a primate? The EU should wake up and realise the true intensions of the AKP, which is to destroy Atatürk's secular republic and re-instate the califate, then move on to spread islam to Europe. What europeans also mistakenly assume that christianity is any better than islam; don't be mistaken, any religion allowed power under the guise of freedom of religion will bring the world back to the dark ages.
hi all guys I am from Turkey and I read the god delusion by Dawkins.. He isn't wrong completely.. He didn't erase not only ıslam's contradictions but also other religions'. I am so disappointed because of my country's attidute toward new ideas and different voices from all over the world.. we should listen and see different voices, views. In a matter like this one should act according to the dictates of one´s feelings, not one´s reason... ıf whole thinks through the same way it means no one will express difference...
If you have read any of Dawkins books you will realize his arguments are false , miss leading and full of contradictions. Evolution is not a theory but a hypothesis. There is little or no evidence to support it. Many have made false claims in the name of science, eg birds have evolved from dinosaurs when know from fossils that they existed at the same time.Any one who thinks life happened through pure chance is a fool.Evolution is bad science at best and Dawkins is an idiot who does more harm than good with his false claims and rhetoric.
As a Turkish citizen and a biology student in Turkey, I can tell you that it's not a surprising thing. In fact, even if there are some biology proffessors who think the evolution is a lie in a country, you can't expect ordinary people to thınk about evolution.
The statistical data tell us that Turkish people has the second highest rate of creationists throughout all over the world. That's even higher than Saudi Arabia or Iran. And that's the reason of only works of a man called Adnan Oktar. But is there anybody familiar with this name? Who is he?
Adnan Oktar is a mysterious person. Noone knows nothing about his life before he is so popular. The only known truths are he left the Psychology Department of Istanbul University as a 2nd class undergraduate student and he hadn't joined the army because he had the report shows he has schizophreniac paranoia. Turkey's first met him was in late 90's when the case of a religious cult. I can not recall the result of the case, but before that Turkish society had little opinion about evolution.
After that case, he started writing on evolution and creationism with the pen-name 'Harun Yahya'. At first, the books were for free and given out especially to the students and the society who comes from the church. The motto of all of the books were ' Evolution is a satanic cult and ideology that brings only disasters'. And people believed his words because theres noone telling the truth. So, the creationism spred out in this way.
Actually if you look in an objective way, you can find lots of dilemmas in these books, even if you don't know anythıng about evolution. For example in a paragraph it tells us Darwin was a racist philosopher while just after that it tells us he was a communist. But people were so illiterate that they believed them. Also the governments, especially the fundamentalist ones were with him. He usually misjudges the reality, bends the meanings, throws some words out from a sentence and makes books with these sentences.
And the most interesting act of him was sending his 'Atlas of Creation' to all European Schools and scientists with no charge. The book has lots of mistakes, almost every page of it. But it's still believed that the content is true.
Today, Turkish Government is the most fundamentalist government troughout the history of Turkish Republic, and they have full belief on Adnan Oktar. And Turkey is just democratic state of law in the constitutional law books, but it is just a fundamentalist Islamic regime in reality. So it is so normal to be banned an atheist biologist's homepage in a country like this
, like richarddawkins.net.
dont worry.. i m not that block detainment , we are accustomed bloks like this.this is not first block for us (youtube , bloqspot etc... )
i hate adnan oktar and our reactionary government.. i like richard dawkins ideas , books and i like different dns servers , free proxys and ktunnel.com
respect
I am from turkey, I can access the page but it is a little tricky you know.Not easy for many.
the problem with turkey is,; here, democracy is not established well.according to the official statistics about 99 percent of the population is islam, 1 percent should be the other religions I suppose.And we don't have any non-theists in here?!
there is a section of religion on id cards here and it is submitted by your parents to the officer whether you are a muslim, christian etc. when you are born.
turkey is a strange country, if you ask them, most people will tell you that he is a muslim but you can be sure that he doesn't obey the 'strict' rules of islamic god 'allah'.
you can't find almost anyone who knows evoulution theory and is older than 30.biology teachers are exception of course, but only 10 percent of them - optimistically !!
you can't imagine how difficult it can be if you live in turkey with all these pious maniacs.arabic countries are even worse.it can sometimes be really unbearable to live with people who even don't know what you are talking about.if you are a philosophy undergrad especially.
unfortunately we, atheists, free-thinkers are very weak in turkey right now.but I know that truth will be unveiled someday.It doesn't matter wherever it will be.
best wishes for all 'defenders of reason' from all around the world.science keeps us together, like brothers and sisters.
What can one say about Turkey and Islam in general. One must remember that we are dealing with primitive people who had an uneducated filth as their leader.
I am a Turkish citizen living abroad for my studies, but all my family is actually living in Turkey.
I want to point out something really important about this issue, the fact that Mr.Dawkins' site is banned in Turkey (this is something that I would like to criticize about this web-site):
The reason why Mr.Dawkins' site is banned in Turkey must not be misunderstood, Turkey is not an Islamic state governed by religion (although some people in our government would probably like that to happen). Not at all. The real problem is just that the Republic of Turkey's laws regarding internet is not developed enough to the modern situation! That's all!
So actually in Turkey you can, for pretty much anything, shut down a web site or prevent the entire country to have access to this site.
Another example would be some entire blogging networks that have been banned in Turkey because there were actually some blogs giving Turkish Premier League goals and highlights away freely and that it was against the rights of Lig Tv, the broadcaster for football games in Turkey.
So pretty much anyone can do the same thing for reasons like this in Turkey and I agree that this is a problem, but not the problem some people might think of.
Let's say it's some kind of breach, or weak point, in the law system in Turkey.
This is why I would also kindly ask the webmaster of this website to be a little clearer about the ''Banned in Turkey'' banner on the home page, because it is giving a wrong image about our ''beautiful but lonely country''.
Actually there are possibilities that the laws are reviewed accordingly because of many critics in the media and some student riots for internet freedom. Recently even our prime minister said that he was actually accessing banned sites like Youtube through proxy programs like ninjacloak, so this shows that we can hope that things change soon in Turkey.
I can easily access this website... no ban even for kids here. And i never respect YOUR Richard Dawkins some english talk like they are %100 sure of everything they talk about and they are the ones who are on the right way in the universe. It's something ironic. You just make me smile here. I take YOUR Richard Dawkins as charlatan as Atheists think the same about Harun Yahya. Hello ?? hello ?? there is a centre of the world ? or we are wrong? ... I don't care about U.K. neither EU like many ppl do in Turkey. We are neither Eastern nor Western. We are the grandchildren of Ottoman with a new modern face. We don't any Union except for probable Turkish Union in the future.
Born and raised as a muslim. I cannot tell that I am an atheist now, because I believe this term includes activism . But I can tell that I don't believe in God. I try to read and discuss as much as I can. Banning the site in Turkey will just make people more and more curious . Noone takes this guy seriously in Turkey , He was just famous to 'convince' rich people's sons with hot girls he also 'convinced' and he was gaining power and money day by day . He was arrested then . After that he raised back from his ashes , unfortunately .
He could ban this site so easyly because according to new law , local court could do this.But don't worry. Due to long youtube banning stories , almost everyone here knows how to reach banned web sites.
I am most ashamed that that kind of a person could do this . But I am just curious , if atheists of west world can attack their own 'creationists' ( as far as I know , there are these kind of people also in the western community. For example Mormons, scientologists ) with same attidute and sarcasm ? They should ...
First of all, all internet users in Turkey are able to visit your site since even YouTube is banned in Turkey, and now everyone knows how to use a proxy - fascism CAN be educative, wow!
I would like to clear up some misinformation about Turkey. The majority in Turkey, which is less educated than the rest, are moved by religious motives instead of scientific ones, as is the case in every single country on earth which is not rich enough to provide the best of education to the poor. But these decisions and fundamentally irrational decisions take place in Turkey because of the current 'lukewarm Islamist' party called AKP is in control of the parliament with a majority. Under the guise of 'democracy', which is more like 'mob rule', they are undermining the already damaged pillar of secularism and pursuit of science with the support of the Western countries.
Oh, what's that supposed to be? Western support for an Islamist party? How can that happen, you probably ask yourselves. Well, wake up. The prosperity of the West is mostly caused by its controlled exploitation of the third world countries. And these people, whoever they might be, have backed AKP to come into the power. When AKP's antisecular moves had carried the party to the constitutional court, all the western newspapers were crying out 'the grandest project of the west is about to fail!'. Now the West got what it wanted - a fundamentalist proto-fascist country right in the Middle East, instead of the old secular Turkey. But the West, or at least Germany and other European countries with sizable Turkish immigrants will regret their decision, since the immigrants there are even more fundamentalist religious zealots, and they are now posing a serious problem in the countries they live. Rejoice, good and developed people of the West, because your governments' actions are what caused this absurdity to happen.
That said, Turkey was never a shit-hole originally; it was made into one. Congratulations.
Hi guys, he is another pathetic action by Turkish government:
Science and Technology (S&T) is a monthly magazine published by Turkish Science Institute (TUBITAK). The S&T decided to dedicate its cover page to the 200th Anniversary of Darwin's Birth in March, 2009. While in press, the directorate of the magazine, who had been appointed by the Turkish Islamic government (the party in power is AKP), reacted this and changed the cover page to 'Global Warming', while firing the lady in charge of the publishing of the magazine.
S&T and TUBITAK used to be the stronghold of the left behind science in Turkey, and now totally in the hands of radical Islam.
I am really desperate as a person believing in Science, pure science. HELP US!
Hi from beautiful Anatolia,
Our land will be free. Idiotic and unscientific thoughts and beliefs won’t last. The worst thing in our country is to leave the secular educational system. Every unpleasant event is based on religious and unscientific educational system.
Youtube is also banned due to videos against religion. Although they say the censor is due to videos against Ataturk, everybody knows that the real reason is videos against some religious groups and videos.
Social evolution will lead a society with religionfree and scientific commonsense.
The only thing I have is hope for now. A campaign should be started all over the world against censorship.
Best regards.
I am a doctorate student and a scientist in a Turkish university and my department is biology. While i was studying, our teachers taught us about Darwin's teory and evolution. So we are enlightened about this issue. But there are many people who are ignorant like the president of Türkiye now. I am blaming to the government for banning website. But i know that is a temporary duration. Darwin has been blamed for his thoughts as Kepler and Galileo so that their ideas were against Catholic Church on time. Science and religion must be seperated from eachother. But as a turkish scientist,i and many people know that cause of political reasons in Turkiye,that all is happened. This is not only a case is happened here. Nowadays, a magazine broadcasted by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Turkish council of Turkey) was changed the heading of the last volume. It is related with Darwin and 200. anniversary of him. Until now, any volumes of the magazine hasnt been cencored. This means primitivity of minds. As i am believing evolution with scientific clues, sometimes i am in a doubt whether this type of people, who are self seeking and religious fundamentalist, evolve or not.
I think, this is not related with EU or politics. There can be many people like that in every country. But science have existed before religions, and it will endure forever.
So if you support us in this issue instead of slander, we are really glad.
richarddawkins dot net is not banned anymore in Turkey.
i am feeling so good.
Dawkins is pursuing a career as a writer, and has merely identified a big opportunity to preach to a big group of already converted believers; believers in the non-existence of something that cannot be proved to exist/not-exist. What a brilliant idea! he must be laughing all the way to the bank.
I think he probably knows he's full of shit, but likes the money and ego stroking of his success in his chosen career, so makes like a believer himself, purely for the purpose of self-promotion.
It wouldn't surprise me if that once his current audience have had enough of his circular logic, that he then uses it to counter his own argument for the other half of the eager to spend believers.
I assume that Iftikhar Ahmad would also like to see the same religious freedoms granted in Turkey to the Alevis, Orthodox Christians, and Armenians.
Seems to me that Iftikhar Ahmad has described very accurately an alien culture living within another one with no intentions of any attempt at integration, rather isolation and ghetto-isation.
I felt shame for the band. But i must correct that. The ban practically doesn't work.
I am sure any turkish citizen could get into the sites. Even the president Erdoğan confess that he could reach Youtube.com. Ironic.
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