Quetzal

(sung to the tune of "Santa Clause is Coming to Town")

A correspondent - an anti-creationist Moslem scientist from Indonesia - posted this "warning" and plea for assistance to another message board I frequent. For those of you not familiar with Yahya, he is a well-known and quite famous Islamist (note: not "Islamic" - "Islamist", which is a political as well as religious movement linked to some of the nastier denizens of the Middle East) writer from Turkey. He is also a virulent koranic creationist. Try and imagine someone who combines the worst of Ham, Hovind, Baugh, etc, with a strong religio-political movement. Since he ALSO writes Islamist and Islamic nationalist pieces, he is widely read and quoted. He has a devoted following and significant influence on both governments and people - the likes of which our homegrown fundy creationists can only dream about.

If anyone happens to be in DC, it might be interesting to check him out.

Andya considers him one of the most dangerous men on Earth.

gravitybow

That's a pretty slick little site he has there. It's better looking than most of the creationist's sites in the U.S.

Harun Yahya has lifted "Jehovah" arguments whole cloth and rubber-stamped "Allah" over them. And the Quran's infallibility arguments are virtually identical to the Bible's. The wealth of articles published by Yahya appear to be nothing more than lazy stealing from Jehovah creationists. At least he has done evolutionists this favor: he aptly demonstrates that deities are interchangeable when credited with these nonsense evidences.

Can deities sue each other for plagiarism?

(edited for spelling)

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: gravitybow ]</p>

Peez

We had a lecture here last year sponsored by the local Muslim student's associations: "Darwinism: The Evolution Deceit". It was the usual pathetic assortment of creationist deceits. I was ammused right off with the poor student who introduced the lecture, as he made a big deal of it being a "scientific" lecture but felt the need to correct himself when he let slip the word "miracle" several times.

The speaker was not Harun Yahya, one of his flunkies was there instead. The presentation started with an animation meant to impress people with the complexity of a cell, followed with the usual "that could not have appeared by chance" argument. Leaving aside that evolution does not proceed simply by "chance", and the the formation of the first cell was not evolution, and that the first cells were prokaryotes (the film dealt with more complex eukaryotes), there were numerous errors and exaggerations in the film.

The speaker was not pollished, but spoke well despite his accent. The presentation was all on computer and obviously a lot of work went into it. The content was predicatable, and he was not shy about borrowing from and quoting Christian creationists. We heard about Michael Denton, the origin of life, tornadoes in junkyards, the Cambrian "explosion", Archaeopteryx being "pure bird", "Natural Selection has no effect on DNA", no useful mutations, Piltdown man, quote-mining from Gould, etc., etc. There was one particularly funny argument based on the bizarre premise that biologists supposedly expected that the Coelacanth had fully functional legs and were shocked when they did not. Another amusing moment was when the speaker tried to find fault with whale evolution, while showing a nice picture of a whale shark (a fish).

The only thing that I got out of the event was a free copy of the Koran (but it was a scientific event!). Harun Yahya has a <a href="http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/index.php" target="_blank">website</a>, which includes some references that suggest his wider political interests.
Peez

Camaban

Be it Jew, Christian, or Muslim, they each worship the same god (Jews have their Talmud, Christians renamed the Telmud the OT and tacked on the New Testament, Muslims took the New Testament and Old Testament and tacked on their book)

But, it's a pity Deities can't sue each other, yes (Mithras wouldn't be pleased to see just which son of god has stolen his life story)

Nat

"Jews have their Talmud, Christians renamed the Telmud the OT and tacked on the New Testament"

Just for clarification, the Talmud is very different from the OT which is just an extension of the Torah. The Talmud is the writings of famous rabbisabout Jewish life.

Aww - I knew that Bar Mitzvah training would prove useful one day!

lpetrich

Here is an untangling of the various sacred books:

The Christian ones are the Old Testament and the New Testament, of course. Though there were several Gospels and such that never made the official NT cut.

The Jewish ones are the Old Testament and the Talmud.

They prefer to call the OT the Tanakh or Tanach, from the initials of Torah-Nevi'im-Ketuvim ("Law, Prophets, Writings"). The first 5 books are the Law, the historical and "real" prophet books are the Prophets, and the rest are the Writings.

Some books never made the official Tanakh cut; these are the Apocrypha.

The Talmud is a big collection of commentaries by various eminent Rabbis, some of whom take different sides on various issues. It also contains various folklore, like Adam having a demon named Lilith as his first wife and Adam originally being a hermaphrodite (having organs of both sexes).

The Koran is, of course, Islam's great holy book; though traditionally attributed to Mohammed, its repetitious nature suggests a compilation of multiple documents.

Usually added to it are the Hadiths, which are big compilations of supposed sayings of Mohammed and comments about him. Many of them are almost certainly bogus; there are pro-Sunni and pro-Shiite ones about the Sunni-Shiite split, for example.

Dr.GH

Harun Yahya is also a Holocaust denier.

gravitybow

Too bad the followers don't act that way.
Let's just say that, if he's the same god, these fractured versions provide conflicting and mutually exclusive characteristics that, if they belong to a single deity, demonstrate his schizophrenia.

That said, all Yahya has done is peel off the "Jehovah" label and slap an "Allah" label on the creationism he presents. He's put less scientific thought into it than Baugh has, yet he (along with his other endeavors) has the ear of his government. That's scary. I hope he doesn't call himself a scientist.

Loren, thanks for the primer. That was helpful.

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: gravitybow ]</p>

lpetrich

According to a NCSE article about Islamic creationism, one very interesting reason for its successful copying of what might be called Crusader creationism is that the Crusader version is stripped of the doctrinal idiosyncrasies of many Xian-Fundie sects, thus enabling the operation s/Christian God/Allah with little difficulty.

This may be why Jonathan Wells gets along very well with other creationists and IDers; his "work" omits the details of Moonism, making it easily utilizable by non-Moonies.

Albion

Do you mean the NCSE article "Cloning creationism in Turkey"?

<a href="http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol19/9510_cloning_creationism_in_turkey_12_30_1899.asp" target="_blank">Cloning creationism in Turkey</a>

I saw an article in Science magazine (I think) a while back about how the Turkish creationists were borrowing from the American ones. I wonder if the supporters of ICR and AiG would approve of their ties with Islamic fundies.

{Edited to replace long URL with link - Pantera}

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Pantera ]</p>