Halil Arda has done a great service with a new report in the New Humanist about Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist whom I interviewed last October. He fortunately had the resources and connections to reveal far more than I was able in my articles on the man. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see that he found my work useful:

As the American journalist Nathan Schneider argued, to judge Yahya’s message on its scientific content alone misses the point: “its power, for those who are not scientifically literate, lies in its vision of redemption.”

If his information is correct, Arda adds quite a bit to what we now know about Yahya and his organization. He rightly represents Yahya’s circle as a new religious movement first and a creationism promoter second. And he seems to confirm Salman Hameed’s suspicion that Yahya thinks he’s the Mahdi:

Some, like his former colleague Islamist author Edip Yuksel, who was imprisoned in 1986 at the same time, believe Oktar was faking [insanity] to avoid compulsory military service and criminal charges. (“Which is ironic,” wrote Yuksel, “since he was indeed mentally ill; he was a delusional maniac.”) Already by this point, Yuksel reports, Oktar believed himself to be the Mehdi [an alternate spelling of Mahdi], the messiah foretold in Sunni theology.

There’s much more: sex, cocaine, court convictions, and fancy clothes. The works, in far greater detail than I was able to unearth. While I wish Arda had gone further to explore, sympathetically, why people are so drawn to Yahya, his exposé offers a great deal for Yahya observers to work with. I feel very much in his debt.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I talk with literary critic Terry Eagleton about his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Arguments about God and religion, he insists, are more than just tiffs about lofty ideas; they are deeply political and should be understood as such.

Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it. I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off. I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.” It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places. It crops up at the very temples of Mammon. But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions. That’s a pretty comfortable debate. But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that. It has a strong political subtext.

Keep reading at The Immanent Frame. Also, see my earlier review of Reason, Faith, and Revolution for The American Prospect.

Today is the eighth anniversary of “the events” of September 11, 2001. To commemorate it (them?), I took part in a little pool of essays at the New York Times‘s Happy Days blog. My contribution is short, repeated here in its entirety:

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.

This morning I finally did a long-time-coming blog piece (cross-posted at Waging Nonviolence and The Huffington Post) about the connection between the recession and the growth of the military-industrial complex. This is something that has been disturbing me quite a bit in recent months, but I’ve been slow to getting around to writing anything on the topic. I hope this little post will encourage some more digging from those better-situated to do so.

During World War II, government fiat turned thousands of peacetime manufacturers into arms producers for the war effort. Factories that once made cars and home appliances were retooled to turn out weapons. Now, in the present recession, market forces appear to be doing effectively the same thing, threatening to throw even more of the weight of American industry (such as it remains) into the war business.