Author: Tolga Theo Yalur
The Sacred and the Profane
Mircea Eliade, a prominent historian of religion, philosopher, and fiction writer from Romania, profoundly influenced the study of comparative religion. His work The Sacred and the Profane (1956), originally published in French as Le Sacré et le Profane, explores the deep structure of religious worldviews. The book concerns not dogmas but how religious thinking divides the world into sacred and pr...
Pancake Theory of Intelligent Design
Intelligent design was the buzzword of creationists in the 2000s. It was and is an attempt to smuggle creationism into classrooms under the guise of science, concerned with fictionalizing the machine and advanced technologies with a version of messianic exorcise where age-old notions of the good and evil spirits are selected and matched. Science at the service of what Daniel C. Dennett called “the...
Belief and the Human Mind
A 2009 study by the National Institutes of Health cognitive neuroscience program found that the human brain makes no distinction between how it perceives deities or humans. “God” seemed to have the same effect on the human brain as that of any other human, activating the same areas of brain function that humans use to decipher the emotions, thoughts and intentions of other people. Further results ...
Stigmata of Disbelief
Humanists International’s worldwide survey of discrimination and persecution the Freedom of Thought Report, continuously ranks Turkey as having “systemic discrimination” where disbelief often leads to cultural alienation. In time, situations of discrimination that create and maintain atmospheres of cultural ills for freedom of belief and expression, lead to individual and cultural harm. Stigmatiza...
Visual Representation of Prophets
Visual representation of prophets is a contentious topic that varies widely among different religious traditions. Recently in Turkey, a number of cartoonists and staff from a famous cartoon magazine LeMan have been arrested due to allegedly illustrating the Muslim and Jewish prophets. Apparently, the cartoonists pictured not the prophets but two angels flying over Gaza to represent the losses on b...