Both Christianity and Islam penetrate into all aspects of life. This is true of all theistic religions. Believing in the existence of an omnipresent, all-seeing, omniscient God necessitates vigilance against whatever can harm the consent of the deity.What is absurd is to see a civic religion, a secular dogma turn into a kind of religion and penetrate all aspects of public and private life. An ideology that has no belief in the omnipresence of any kind of divine or human subjects should not, at first sight, be able to say something on all aspects of private life. If it does, it has already become a religion: a religion without god.
Thirteen years have passed since the Feb. 28 memorandum. The junta that ruled over the country after the memorandum was in fact a “junta behind the scenes,” an “unseen junta.” This made the “Juntaism” nurtured by that particular junta even more religion-like. It had superior beings that ruled over the private and public lives of people and, even worse, these beings were invisible. This gave them an almost divine “untouchability” and angelic (or should I say satanic?) powers of penetration into all domains.
Revelations about how the Juntaists intervened in the press, the judicial organs and the education system were made only after a decade. Today we know that the Juntaists even influenced the style of the headscarf, despite the fact that they were against it altogether. They influenced literature and put their mark on novels written in their era. They intervened in the people’s consumption; they intervened in the education system and victimized hundreds of thousands of vocational school students. They forced the employees of state-owned companies to shave their beards and mustaches. They saw all and they touched all.
Another basic difference between science and religion is the openness of science to counterarguments and the non-negatable nature of religion. The “wet signature” is a good example at hand. When the controversial action plan against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the faith-based Gülen movement was revealed, the “believers” in Juntaism claimed that this was a “piece of paper” prepared by enemies of the army to discredit the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Since the “piece of paper” was a Xerox, the Juntaists used the fact that the signature on the document was not a wet signature as proof that the plan was altogether a conspiracy. Later on the original paper with the wet signature was unearthed, and the Juntaists endorsed an absurd explanation claiming that there was a machine in the United States that can reproduce wet signatures. Later on the army prosecutor confessed that the signature was authentic and that it belongs to Col. Dursun Çiçek, who is under arrest on charges of conspiring against the people, but the Juntaists claimed this time the paper that carried the signature was not original. This will go on forever, and in the end they will even claim that the Dursun Çiçek whose wet signature is on the original paper with the original plan is not the original Dursun Çiçek.
Juntaism has become a religion without god. But God has mercy and the junta does not.
