Thursday, December 9th, 2004

I thought I’d show a photo of where I spend a lot of my days: the IT department at Ankara University located in the Tandoğan campus. This building not only holds our department, BIM (I have no idea what this stands for), but the biotechnology department, foreign language department, community education, distance learning, music, and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t even know about. I have a nice time here; the people are nice, they help me out when I need it, let me take part in the projects that are going on here, and are generally wonderful friends!

Here’s one of my good friends, Okan. He’s the assistant manager of the department and a really great day. We go out for lunch quite often, talk about all sorts of things and basically get along quite well. I have no fears about asking him personal questions about politics, religion, etc. and he always gives me very truthful and honest answers. We had a very interesting discussion today about Bush and religion. Apparently he read somewhere, I think in a Turkish newspaper, that Bush is involved in some sort of evangelical Christian circle that works closely with Jewish groups. Their goal, according to this article, was to create on earth the criteria for the apocalypse to occur. Okan was very surprised as well as skeptical, and asked me if this is the real deal. Good lord, I hope not was my reply.

It’s a very fishy thing; I’m pretty sure he just read a bad article. But how interesting. You see how easily the actions of our government and politicians can be misinterpreted and misunderstood? Our country used some religious rhetoric along with our goals for the war on terrorism, and now we have people in the Middle East believing that our country has some sort of religious goal behind our foreign policy. It’s no wonder that Islamic fanaticism is increasing when you look at things like this. Okan is an intelligent person and seriously doubted the legitimacy of this, but there are many people in Turkey who do not have the intellectual background to think critically about these sorts of things. Also, knowledge of Christianity is scarce here, just the same as knowledge of Islam in America is generally low. It’s apparent to me that both sides need to start doing a better job of explaining themselves. I’m glad I’m here to do what I can to explain these things, but relatively speaking my words do not reach very many ears. I’m now even more annoyed at the religious language that is used by politicians in American. It helps get support at home, but is the damage it causes abroad worth it? I think not.