The shadow threat, 02. 2010

Ok, this post will be long. Be warned.

It was supposed to be a post dedicated to the Islamic world, but I changed my mind. It's not so much about Islamic world, as to the world of people who want to hurt science. Because if you read the second article, you'd know what is all about - how could possibly Islamic students in Toronto believe more in creationism than Islamic students in Islamic countries?! How could people in Turkey never have heard of creationism until 20 years ago and now it's all over Turkey? Where it comes from? It's clear enough, it comes from the West. And to be more precise, it comes from USA. And I can't but ask - why? What's wrong with evolution? What's wrong in the idea that we can become much more than we are with time? What's wrong to admit that species evolve even now, that our own genome is outrageously changing even now? Because it is what it does. See my other blog for more details, I often post articles about evolution there. It becomes clearer and clearer that life is universal and quite "easy" to get, it's clear that all kind of biological systems do evolve. It's clear that even robots with evolution-like codes evolve and develop new qualities unknown before. Isn't this enough?

Or we have to believe that the Earth is 5000 years old and all the fossils, all the cosmology is nonsense. No, thanks. And again, why? How wins from all this? Maybe they want to secure an easier to manipulate population? Maybe something not so obvious. In any case, that's the true evil. That is the shadow threat. The wiping out of reason, of science and utterly of the belief in ourselves. Because that is the essence of science - our belief that we can know the outside world, its laws and its secrets. I perfectly don't see a confrontation between science and religion as they are. But people forcefully confront them and make us believe science is almost in conspiracy against us, God or whoever. This is an absolute lie - most of the physicists I know are sincere believers and are truly awed by the wonders of our Universe, the creation of God. But that doesn't mean we have to stop studying the Universe, we have to stop trying to understand it.

And anyway, the other reason why I started writing this article - Turkey. They tell us it's modern. They tell us they are ready to join the EU. They flood us with idiotic sexist soap operas. But the reality is other and everyone watching carefully will know it. They are getting more and more Islamic with every year and that is dangerous. It's dangerous seeing veiled women, it's dangerous admitting the possibility that women may be excluded from the society and stuck in their homes, as useless household objects. It's dangerous letting the creationists enter Europe. I hope people will realise it. I hope Europe will realise it. Because I'm utterly scared from the idea that Turkey may join the EU. That our borders may be open. They already are trying to take over half of Bulgaria. They have the money, they have the desire. Who will stop them?

We hear about Iran and how bad and dangerous they are. What about Turkey. Their islamisation is clear. Aren't they dangerous? I won't comment more, I know most of the people won't understand or care. But I can't but ask, why creationism is taking over all the religion and why the countries who embrace it are encouraged in the EU and so on. What happens with the secularism and when it stopped being the ideal?

• In Iran, Protests Gaining a Radical Tinge
• Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World
• Broaching Birth Control With Afghan Mullahs

In Iran, Protests Gaining a Radical Tinge

By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the video, one of hundreds filmed during Iran’s nationwide demonstrations on Monday, an enraged woman’s voice can be heard as a paramilitary truck runs a motorbike off the road amid a crowd of fleeing protesters.

“This is the Islamic Republic!” she shouts, gesturing at the vehicle.

That message has grown increasingly common in recent protests, as demonstrators have made it clear that their target is not just President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the disputed election that returned him to power in June, but the entire foundation of Iran’s theocracy.

During Monday’s demonstrations, the civil tone of many earlier rallies was noticeably absent. There was no sign of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, a moderate figure who supports change within the system, and few were wearing the signature bright green of his campaign.

Instead, the protesters, most of them young people, took direct aim at Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, chanting, “Khamenei knows his time is up!” They held up flags from which the “Allah” symbol — added after Iran’s 1979 revolution — had been removed. Most shocking of all, some burned an image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution.

That creeping radicalization has underscored the rift within Iran’s opposition movement, analysts say, and poses a problem for its leaders, including Mr. Moussavi and the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi.

Some in Iran have even speculated that Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi were uncomfortable with the most recent round of protests, which were timed to coincide with a holiday commemorating the killing of three students by the shah’s forces in 1953. While they were involved with earlier protests, the opposition leaders did not organize the most recent ones. They do not appear to have attended any of them and have been silent since. It is not clear how much influence they have over the movement, which often seems to be built more around semi-spontaneous mobilizations over Facebook and Web networks than with the aid of any clear leadership source

Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World

By KENNETH CHANG

AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.

But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent.

One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”

By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the Bible a strict chronology that requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology and cosmology, which say the Earth and the universe are billions of years old.

But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.

The debate over evolution is only now gaining prominence in many Islamic countries as education improves and more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology.

The degree of acceptance of evolution varies among Islamic countries.

Research led by the Evolution Education Research Center at McGill University, in Montreal, found that high school biology textbooks in Pakistan covered the theory of evolution. Quotations from the Koran at the beginning of the chapters are chosen to suggest that the religion and the theory coexist harmoniously.

In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani high school students conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators, 28 percent of the students agreed with the creationist sentiment, “Evolution is not a well-accepted scientific fact.” More than 60 percent disagreed, and the rest were not sure.

Eighty-six percent agreed with this statement: “Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time.”

The situation in Turkey is different and changed only in the past couple of decades. One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encountered creationist undertones when he was growing up in Turkey in the 1970s. “I first noticed creationism when I came to America for graduate school,” said Dr. Edis, now a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri. He thought it an American oddity.

Some years later, while browsing a bookstore on a visit to Turkey, Dr. Edis found books about creationism filed in the science section. “It actually caught me by surprise,” he said.

In Turkey, officially a secular government but now ruled by an Islamic party, the teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least below the university level, and the science curriculum in public schools is written in deference to religious beliefs, Dr. Edis said.

In the McGill research, fewer students in Indonesia than in Pakistan thought evolution a well-accepted scientific fact, yet 85 percent agreed that fossils showed that life had existed for billions of years and changed over time.

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said.

Biology education, even in places like Pakistan that otherwise teach evolution, largely omits the question of where humans came from.

There is some indication that in the West, where non-Islamic influences are strongest, Islamic creationism may be stronger in reaction to the outside pressure. For example, high school students at Islamic schools in and near Toronto were far more doubting of evolution than students in Indonesia or Pakistan, the McGill researchers found.

source

Broaching Birth Control With Afghan Mullahs

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The mullahs stared silently at the screen. They shifted in their chairs and fiddled with pencils. Koranic verses flashed above them, but the topic was something that made everybody a little uncomfortable.

“A baby should be breast-fed for at least 21 months,” said the instructor. “Milk is safe inside the breast. Dust and germs can’t get inside.”

It was a seminar on birth control, a likely subject for a nation whose fertility rate of 6 children per woman is the highest in Asia. But the audience was unusual: 10 Islamic religious leaders from this city and its suburbs, wearing turbans and sipping tea.

The message was simple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before having another to give your wife’s body a chance to recover. Nothing in Islam expressly forbids birth control. But it does emphasize procreation, and mullahs, like leaders of other faiths, consider children to be blessings from God, and are usually the most determined opponents of having fewer of them.

It is an attitude that Afghanistan can no longer afford, in the view of the employees of the nonprofit group that runs the seminars, Marie Stopes International. The high birthrate places a heavy weight on a society where average per capita earnings are about $700 a year. It is also a risk to mothers. Afghanistan is second only to Sierra Leone in maternal mortality rates, which run as high as 8 percent in some areas.

“This was a useful and friendly discussion,” said Mullah Amruddin, a tall man in a dramatic turban. “If you have too many children and you can’t control them, that’s bad for Islam.”

Maybe they were so receptive because a mullah led the class, using their own language — scripture from the Koran. Or maybe it was because some attitudes are starting to change.

Syed Wasem Massoom, 29, a mullah and one of the trainers, said urban Afghans were looking for ways to have fewer children. Afghanistan was changing, he said, especially its cities, and mullahs had better be thinking about these issues.

“People kept asking us how to have less children,” he said.

Afghan women who work for Marie Stopes, distributing birth control door to door in the country’s capital, have also noticed an interest.

“Sometimes they are kind of surprised that this kind of thing exists,” said one of the workers, a woman named Aziza.

One woman was so happy to have birth control pills that she hugged and kissed Aziza, ripped open a package and swallowed a pill with a gulp of water.

“She said she didn’t want to wait until evening,” Aziza said, laughing at the memory. The total number of the woman’s children: 17. Three dead, 14 living.

The most difficult families are ones headed by mullahs. Aziza and her colleagues tread carefully in those households. Mahmouda, another worker, recalled walking into one such house and finding the mullah’s wife washing clothes and trying to calm a baby. She signaled silently that Mahmouda should talk in a low voice.

“ ‘If my husband finds out, he’ll punish me,’ ” Mahmouda recalled the woman saying. “ ‘I’m pregnant now. I really need those pills.’ ”

Taking birth control in secret is not unusual, the women said. Even Aziza’s own husband opposes her using it. source