With only two slight differences. We weren't responsible for the murder of 100 million people over the past century and we don't don't believe in evolution.
Oh, but we did excommunicate a few people from the church 500 years ago. Oh, the horror, the inhumanity of it all. Will you ever forgive us? Please?
Creationists are like MarxistsWith only two slight differences. We weren't responsible for the murder of 100 million people over the past century and we don't don't believe in evolution.
Oh, but we did excommunicate a few people from the church 500 years ago. Oh, the horror, the inhumanity of it all. Will you ever forgive us? Please?
For me, I'll give the Protestant Reformation credit: By breaking the monopoly of the Catholic Church and teaching that we all have the ability to find out the true meaning of the Bible on our own, they paved they way for the understanding that we each have the ability to reason our way to the Truth about anything. Thus paving the way for the Enlightenment, and for America itself.
What scares me about creationism in the middle east is, since there doesn't seem to have been any major reason-friendly reformation movement in Islam, the creationists' attempts to smuggle creationism into Turkey puts our one secular ally in the region at risk. It can only help the cause of Islamic fundamentalism, & help snuff out the one bright light in the Islamic world.
A snippet from this extended article on creationists in Turkey:
Cloning Creationism in TurkeyCan you just imagine the harm that ICR-style creationism could do to the world if it ever took hold in rational, responsible Turkey?
by Taner Edis... While this is a reasonably accurate picture of "creation science" in the Western world, the emergence of an Islamic creationism, which is practically a clone of ICR´s "scientific" vision, means we have to reassess our picture of creationism. Though Turkish creationists hail from a very different religious culture and history, their wholesale adoption of ICR-style arguments means that we cannot explain creationism by narrowly sectarian factors alone. Creationism mobilizes traditional Abrahamic convictions about the moral significance of the natural world against the threat of social modernity. Hence successful variants of creationism have a potential to spread beyond the environments in which they originally evolved.
A New Wave of Turkish Creationism
Turkey has been the most Western-oriented among Muslim countries, a legacy of modernization efforts going back more than 150 years. Most significantly, the early years of the new Turkish Republic, spanning the 1920s and 1930s, saw aggressive state-sponsored efforts to bring the European Enlightenment to a country with a traditional Islamic culture. While this revolution created some enduring modern institutions and an urban secular elite, a religiously-tinged conservative populism came to dominate politics in the 1950s. However, until the 1980s, explicitly Islamist political movements remained mostly submerged. Evolution was not a flashpoint, flashpoint, partly because it was a religiously unpalatable element in secular public education, and so did not receive major curricular emphasis.The aftermath of a military coup in 1980 presented new opportunities for Islamist politics and for creationism. Concerned that secular government allowed too much space for left-wing dissent, risking national fragmentation and social unrest, the military junta and subsequent governments promoted a more religious ideology. This naturally affected education policy. While compulsory religion courses and the teaching of a conservative view of history were its most visible results, natural science did not escape untouched. The 1980s saw the state-sponsored translation and distribution of ICR material, explicitly creationist high-school textbooks, and a general anti-evolutionary climate in secondary education (Edis 1994). In 1992, ICR´s Duane Gish and John D Morris appeared at a creationist conference held in Istanbul.
Recent years have brought important political changes that affect the creation-evolution conflict in Turkey. Islamists have grown stronger, even tasting power on their own instead of through factions within more moderate conservative parties. Although the Islamist Party lost some support to a more nationalist ultra-right party in the elections of April 1999, there is still a powerful constituency that objects to "polluting young minds" with Darwinian biology. However, the Turkish military has emerged as a counterbalancing force. Freed from the need to promote religious conservatism for anticommunist purposes, in the past few years the military has once again acted in defense of the secularist ideals of the early republic. This has extended to applying pressure to remove an Islamist-led government from power in 1997 and insisting upon educational reforms aimed at undercutting the base of Islamist politics.
In this highly charged environment, 1998 brought a new wave of creationism to Turkey. Unlike previous efforts directly aimed at public education, this wave is much more an exercise in popular propaganda through the media. By producing a series of scientific-appearing meetings and books, creationists organized in the Bilim Arastirma Vakfi (BAV; the Science Research Foundation) caught the public eye — not only through the extensive Islamist media which cheered them on and secularist newspapers which expressed concern, but also through the wider commercial media with a nose for controversy. As John Morris observes, BAV has considerable media clout: "As a group, they have access to more than adequate financial resources, as well as to the media, and are able to blanket the country with creation information. They choose to invite international creationists for their publicity value, but especially welcome Christian creationists in the ICR mold rather than those who hold merely an anti-Darwinian stance" (Morris 1998).