Here is a piece of news which says that Sweden is planning to forbid even private faith schools to teach a faith as the truth. Look at this comment of the author of the blog: “The decision looks like a really startling attack on the right of parents to have their children taught what they would like.”

Turkey is not worse, not more militantly secular and not more repressive of religion than this liberal country called Sweden. Although, Muslims cannot set up religious schools, there is a small amount of religious education in schools which mostly teach Islam as the truth, at least for the time being. There is a “presidency of religious affairs” which is run mostly by religious Muslims. You might have heard that the secular state established that presidency to control religion. Yes, that’s true but not the whole story. The institution is very far from being just an organ of the secular state.

Another affiliated institution of the state called “Turk Diyanet Vakfi” has even been producing a vast knowledge-mine in the form of “an Encyclopedia of Islam” in Turkish. Most of its authors are academics in the faculties of theology in Turkish universities, and it is obvious from their articles that they are mostly pious people themselves.

So, I don’t think the west is less militant in secularism than in our country.

Again I agree that many in “the West” don’t see it that way, and, like Dawkins, use evolution as some kind of God-killer. But just because they are wrong doesn’t mean Yahya’s paranoid accusations of conspiracy and Satanic ruses are appropriate. The scientific community is not conspiratorial, it is rather extremely transparent and open to all.

I hope it is clear that I am not a “believer” in evolution as a origin myth for our species. I stopped “believing in science” when all the dinosaurs of my youth were deconstructed, reassembled, and renamed. What became of the stegosaurus, the brontosaurus, the diplodocus, the creatures I spent untold hours reading and fantasizing about? I will never forgive them

Seriously, there are many aspects of evolutionary theory that are not satisfactorily worked out, the inadequacy of random selection at the top of the list. But God created the world through ways and means and science is the discovery of those ways and means. I don’t see how Yahya’s screeds are contributing to finding the true ways and means of God’s creation.