Bolding mine. They were wrong. It was abuse, and the men who did it were disgusting. They were just too primitive to know it.
Now, what’s the difference between Mohammed, and everyone else who was alive back then?
Well, he created a religious empire unlike most people. And unlike most religious empires, its legacy remains 1400 years after his death. Do you mean besides that?
I think your chief problem here is that you’re trying, for your own polemical purposes, to impose a universal one-size-fits-all standard on a biological process that occurs differently, at different ages, for different individuals.
Yes, occasionally a nine-year-old girl will be fully sexually mature, as in the previously-cited instance (which you seem to keep forgetting or ignoring) of the Thai girl who actually gave birth at the age of nine.
And quite often, a girl of 15 (which is where you suggest placing the legal age of consent) will not be fully sexually mature yet.
Hmm, do you have a cite for that? Because AFAICT from sources like this one, Minnesota law as far back as 1975 held that a person under 16 could not legally consent to sex with someone more than 48 months older. A man 20 years old or older having sex with a 15-year-old girl could be charged with 4th-degree criminal sexual conduct. I don’t know what the law said before that, nor whether your teenage years preceded 1975.
You personally may not consider it to be morally equivalent to pedophilia, but it’s not up to you whether or not it’s statutory rape. If it’s sex between an adult and someone below the legal age of consent, then it’s statutory rape, by definition.
The point is that average differences over such a short interval in that age range are not reliably greater than individual differences. Many 13-year-old girls are more sexually mature than many 15-year-old girls.
Fair enough. I have no problem with somebody holding the personal opinion that an entire culture or era is disgusting and abusive and primitive because they condoned a particular practice that is considered unacceptable nowadays, whether the practice is child marriage or slavery or racial segregation or persecuting gay people or denying women rights or whatever.
What I think is a problem is when people try to target their condemnation to one particular individual in that culture or era, without acknowledging that the behavior they’re condemning was considered socially normal and accepted by most other people too.
By the way, in your view, is it also disgusting abuse for an adult man to have sex with a girl shortly after she reaches puberty if she happens to be fifteen years old? Where exactly do you think the line should be drawn between “disgusting abuse” and “basically okay”? Should it be based solely on chronological age, or on the individual’s stage of development, or both?
Personally, I think it makes the most sense for the law simply to rule that adults are not legally permitted to have sex with minors, full stop (with some fairly narrow “Romeo and Juliet” exceptions for situations where the adult is at most a year or two older than the minor). But I don’t think that disagreeing about that automatically makes somebody a “pedophile”.
Huh, I stand corrected. No, I was definitely nowhere close to being a teenager before 1975. I’m glad to hear that it didn’t apply to eighteen or nineteen year olds; otherwise I’d be needing to look at the statute or limitations! 
You’re right that I shouldn’t have said my opinion has any bearing on what IS statutory rape, since it’s a legal term. What I meant, obviously, was that IMO it shouldn’t be statutory rape to have consensual sex with a high school girl. Which doesn’t mean people can’t frown at it: I just don’t think it should be a crime.
Going back to Mohammed: the other people from that era aren’t being held up as examples for the rest of us to follow. This is a particular focus of Islam, with its hadith.
That’s a crappy argument for (at least) the following three reasons:
A) It’s a goalpost-shift away from the issue under discussion, namely, whether it’s historically accurate and appropriate to single out Muhammad as an alleged “pedophile”.
B) In fact, the vast majority of modern Muslims reject the position that Muhammad’s practice of child marriage is an appropriate example for modern Muslims to follow, as noted in the cites I linked earlier.
C) And hell yes, other people from the pre-modern world, with many pre-modern customs and practices that are repudiated nowadays, absolutely are being held up by non-Muslims as examples for the rest of us to follow.
Most notably, of course, the slavery-condoning, imperialism-tolerating, sorcery-practicing scrounging freeloader Jesus. But also huge numbers of medieval Christian saints, including:
- eating-disordered ascetics like Catherine of Siena and Theresa of Avila who used vomiting as a penance/austerity;
- sodomy-condemning homophobes like Jerome and John Chrysostom;
- women-dissing misogynists like Augustine and Clement (and hundreds more);
along with many others who endorsed various attitudes and behaviors that are nowadays generally regarded as unhealthy and/or evil.
Face it, folks, there are innumerable pre-modern people who are culturally “held up as examples for the rest of us to follow” in every modern society on earth. You cannot find a single one of them who is entirely free from condoning and promoting social mores that were normal at that time but which modern liberal cultures now condemn as barbaric, ignorant and/or pernicious.
Trying to claim that Muhammad’s situation is somehow unique in this regard just makes you look ignorant about history and sloppy in your thinking.
The reality is that a huge percentage of Muslims are like ultra-orthodox Jews and ultra-fundamentalist Christians in their extreme fealty to ancient religious rules, which in the case of Islam are predominantly hadith (the words and actions of Mohammed). All three groups are a problem, but the other two are dwarfed in size by conservative Muslims. Which therefore means that less conservative Muslims in many places have to keep their heads down for fear of attracting unwanted negative attention from their more conservative neighbors.
If this vague stab at statistics happened to be accurate, then what we better do is lump all the Muslims together, talk about how terrible Islam is as a whole rather than being specific about extremists, and alienate moderate and liberal Muslims who we definitely don’t want as allies against extremists in their communities. That’s how we win. Hail Frank Gaffney and Sam Harris!
My wife just discovered a podcast hosted by Dax Shepard called Armchair Expert. I’ve long been a fan of Shepard’s and particularly relate with his adamantly atheistic slacker character on the show “Parenthood”. Turns out Shepard himself is also an atheist, and a big fan of Sam Harris’s podcast. So he had Harris himself on his podcast a few weeks ago, and it is an interesting listen:
Dax digs into some of the controversies around Sam’s positions on Islam. Sam makes the crucial point that he is criticizing ideas, not people. He acknowledges that in some cases Christianity can be even more toxic and Taliban-like than Islam, specifically citing Uganda. But he also notes that in the vast majority of places, Chrstianity has been “wrestled into submission by modernity” over the past couple centuries, and this has yet to happen to nearly the same degree for Islam.
Dax echoes this point, saying that he often says to people that if he were living during the Crusades, he’d be complaining primarily about Christianity. But at this historical moment, it is Islam that is the primary problem.
Dax does blame U.S. foreign policy more than Sam does, noting how there wasn’t a lot of Islamic terrorism until the U.S. mucked around in Iran and elsewhere.
Check it out!
ETA: Sam terms what Andy is talking about “the ‘narrative’ narrative”. He’s so clever, that Sam Harris.
On the specific issue of child marriage, which is what we’re talking about here, opposition to it among Muslims is widespread and open. In fact, the civil laws governing most of the world’s Muslims explicitly prohibit marriage of people under 18, and set 16 or above as the age of consent (which, btw, is higher than your own proposed age-of-consent cutoff).
Although there are many Muslims worldwide who still condone child marriage, just as there are many Hindus, Christians and members of other faiths who also condone it, opposition to child marriage is absolutely commonplace in Muslim societies (and enshrined in law in most of them). It is not an issue that moderate or liberal Muslims “have to keep their heads down” about.
:dubious: This argument for historically informed and culturally aware principled modernist critique of archaic and oppressive social systems might seem more sincere if you hadn’t just spent a couple of pages of this thread trying (and failing) to justify calling Muhammad a “pedophile”.
You have made it very clear that your fundamental goal is spreading hatred and bigotry against Islam, whether that involves criticism of ideas, criticism of people, discredited myths, misused statistics, or outright lies.
Later on, Dax gently pressures Sam on whether he is ever willing to admit he is wrong. Crackling stuff there.
ETA: Kimstu, you’re an outstanding defense attorney, but you are stuck with a very difficult client to defend.
Wait, outright lies? I can’t believe I almost didn’t notice that one. I guess my eyes were glazing over by the end of your list.
Care to be more specific about this accusation?
It’s not actually difficult to refute obviously malicious and/or ignorant slanders. And I’m not attempting to refute any reasonable criticisms, so there’s no difficulty there.
The only difficult part is getting past your stubborn obtuseness and ignorance so that you’ll recognize that you’re not getting a pass on your outright bullshit. But, again, what really matters is not so much whether you manage to recognize it, but whether other people reading the thread find it helpful.
To be fair, it’s entirely possible that the many false statements you make are the result of ignorance and credulity rather than conscious deception, so I’m willing to replace “outright lies” with “blatantly false assertions”.
Mmm. :dubious:
Such as? Just the blatant ones please: we don’t want to be here all night.
Oh, we would be, if we tried to list everything you’ve posted in this thread that’s blatantly false. Just in the last few posts that I can see on my “Reply” screen, we’ve had the “Minnesota age of consent was 15 when you were a teenager” claim, the “other people from that era aren’t being held up as examples for the rest of us to follow” claim, and the “nine can’t possibly be postpubescent” claim. Want more?
:rolleyes:
Andy, I just read an article that helped me see that you are a very Cool Guy:
I don’t see how you would know that when you don’t what his treatment of women in real life is like and what he adheres to in practice. This seems like hollow provocation.
And please, a pop sociologist could tell you this whole Cool Guy thing as described here is nothing new.
So without even a shred of evidence you’re happy to insinuate that I mistreat women? Fuck you, you ignorant, racist piece of shit.
I seem to remember there being a rule about bumping your own threads over and over again. SlackerInc, perhaps you could find a new racist angle to cover in a new thread and let this piece of shit die an organic death.