Interviewed by Turkish Newspaper!

Apparently I'm getting my fifteen minutes of fame in Istanbul! I was interviewed last week by Radikal Daily, one of the country's liberal news sources that's fighting the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. Here's a link to the article:

Din ve bilim arasında 'güçlü olan kazanır'

Unfortunately I don't speak the language. But the Google Translation is pretty funny and seems to have some relationship to what I said. (But I don't recall being asked, "What is breast?" Machine translation still has a long way to go!)

If anyone speaks Turkish and has an hour to spare, it would be fun to see a real translation of the article.

For those of you who don't speak Turkish, the article was in response to a survey that came out recently claiming that 91% of the people in Turkey are religious. There is a big movement in Turkey to get rid of the secular government and turn it into an Islamic republic. The survey is being used as justification: since the overwhelming majority of Turks are religious, shouldn't the government be religious?

It's the same argument we hear in America all the time, and it's a flawed argument. If Turkey adopts an Islamic government, its progress forward into the technology age will come to a screeching halt. Instead of becoming a full member of the European Union, it will join the ranks of Middle Eastern Islamic theocracies.

Radikal is fighting for political and religious freedom so that all Turks can worship as they please. If Turkey's citizens can resist the Islamic forces and keep their secular government, Turkey can become a full member of the modern world of science and technology.