Glob-a-log

(Adnan “Yahya” Oktar)

Let me start with confessing that I am not a big fan of Richard Dawkins. As an agnost I find his brand of aggressive atheism as alluring as a Jehovah’s Witness visit on an early Sunday morning.

I have to admit though that I can see how he, over the years, turned into the exasperated, grim loudmouth that we’ve come to know so well. If I had had to put up with as many warped cuckoo clocks as he has had the displeasure to engage with, I would not have ended up as a cranky, wild-eyed but still relatively sane old geezer.

Me, I would have ended up on top of the highest tower in town, with a couple of guns and plenty of ammunition, foaming round the mouth and cackling like a triplet of mad Macbeth type witches.

What’s more, when you’re Richard Dawkins, it just never, ever bloody well stops. Snotty journalists and columnists (and silly bloggers like me) take their potshots at you. Every now and then, some arsewipe politician or publicity-whoring professor joins the fray – and, of course, there are all those Christians out there, be they Protestant or Roman Catholic, who all want a piece of you: preferably presented to them in bloody shreds.

Still, as the Roman emperor said to the circus lions, “It’s all in a day’s work.”

Or, at least, that would have been true for Richard Dawkins too, right up to the moment that he read the following article:

Richard Dawkins is used to being provoked by loony American evangelical creationists. But his latest challenge comes from a strange Turkish figure called Harun Yahya whose lavishly produced (and frankly preposterous) four-volume tome The Atlas of Creation caused a stir last year when it was sent to thousands of academics across Europe.

Yahya (real name Adnan Oktar) has invited Dawkins to debate Darwin’s theory of evolution with him publicly. Yahya believes the theory “has lately suffered a global collapse”.

As if our proselytising atheist didn’t have enough on his plate already.

Right now, Dawkins is probably wondering why, if there is no God, he’s still being punished in this unholy fashion. You can almost hear him think, ‘What next? Hell-raising Hindi? Rabid rabbis? Barking Buddhists perhaps?’

There is of course – and excuséz le mot – no way in Hell that Dawkins will pick up this particularly ghastly gauntlet. He’s already on record as saying that he doesn’t believe in giving precious (air) time and free publicity to the Darwin deniers.

So, I’m afraid Dawkins is as likely to take up Yahya’s kind offer as an orthodox rabbi would be to take his shul to the cinema, on the Sabbath, to go see ‘Ilsa, she wolf of the SS’.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 21:02 and is filed under Columns, Religion, Satire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.