Adnan Oktar

 

It was pointed out to me earlier today, that WordPress had been blocked in Turkey.

Why?

This post from someone in Turkey explains it well.

I’m writing from Turkey and thought that some info on this person may be helpful.

Adnan Oktar is a religious zealot who launched a campaign against the Darwinian theory of evolution, maybe a decade ago. He has written a number of books, which, despite being worthless and even funny by scientific standarts, attracted the attention of religious people. In those fundamentalist circles, he is revered as the “destroyer” of evolutionary theory as the majority of islamists consider Darwinian evolution as a refuted theory thanks to his books.

As expected, his books and the ideas in them are worthless, mistaken, false, consisting of arguments refuted even by Darwin himself 140 years ago. Alas, he is a wealthy and powerful person, thus capable of reaching many people, by sending free copies of his huge books to every school, teacher, and university. Sadly, as the public he tries to reach is mostly uneducated, his words are taken to be the truth.

As a result of this, turkish intellectuals and those of us lucky enough to get a secular education, with an understanding of what science is, and what an argument is, are giving his ideas what they deserve. He is respected in religious circles, but ridiculed in the internet.

This person’s current strategy is to block all the sites which attacks him and his ideas. A few months ago, he made a similar move and blocked “eksi sozluk”, an open dictionary which is, in my opinion, a bastion of free speech in turkish online media, with more than 10.000 writers and about 2.000 entries each day.

Adnan Oktar is taking advantage of the gaps in Turkish laws on the internet, which are sadly on their infancy, to silence all the voices against him. Internet poses a real threat to people like him, where ideas are exposed, and people read them!

As a philosophy graduate who take active interest in evolution-creationism debate, and as a Turkish citizen with the ideal of freedom in the online world, I suggest NOT to cooperate with this person.

We will reach our blogs anyway.

Adnan Oktar sounds the sort of person, that the world has little need of, if it wants to progress.

But then most creationists, don't want to progress, but turn the clock back to before Darwin and the Beagle, and make us believe their utter drivel.