Perhaps more to the point, it’s also the law ;).
“Of the time”. I’m not interested in minimizing his behavior by putting it in the proper historical context. I want to cast it in a negative light.
In modern colloquial terms, we’d call him a pedophile. Sure, we could more accurately call him a non-exclusive hebephile, but to the average person, a middle aged man having sex with 12-year-olds is a pedophile.
Just like kids raised in religious families always figure out that they’ve been indoctrinated their entire lives?
The super smart ones will figure things out on their own no matter what. It’s the rest that need to hear a contrarian voice. Their parents are already telling them about these great religious figures; I don’t need to repeat it.
How could we westerners, especially those of us here in the US with its constitutional protections of civil liberties, possibly reconcile such a stance with our professed commitment to freedom of religion and freedom of speech?
When Muslim fundamentalists protest instances of anti-Islamic blasphemy and denigration, we come back at them with “Ha ha suckers, freedom of speech, you don’t have any legal right never to be offended! Hee hee, look at this picture of the Prophet using his beard to wipe a pig’s ass!! Awww, u mad, bro?” and similar good-natured banter. :dubious:
And you suggest that we should then turn around and say “Actually, we’ll make an exception to our freedom-loving principles for your speech and your religion, because that’s something WE find offensive, and we only support freedom for stuff YOU find offensive”?!?
Sounds like a perfect way to make our whole society look like, well, like what’s being wiped with the beard in that hypothetical cartoon.
So basically you are not interested in accuracy or fairness - because properly considering historical context *is *part of that - but instead you go whith whatever you think works in order to cast the religion in a negative light? Why? Is that approach of promoting ignorance really much different from whatever it is that you criticize religion for?
Islam, like most religions, has enough problems that deserve criticism. You do not have to resort to half-truths to point them out. As for your “pedophilia” claim, it is inappropriate to call Mohammed a pedophile. But it is definitely a problem that there are Muslims who think that if the prophet married an infant girl in the 7th century, it is ok for them to do the same today. Mankind has learned a few things over the last 14 or so centuries, and religions have a bad track record of keeping up with that learning.
Fairness to what?
The point is that the behavior of Muhammad and other figures is repugnant in a modern context. It doesn’t matter to me that it was acceptable at the time–that’s for historians to figure out. I want people to realize that a moral system based on an individual that would be thrown in prison today, and universally reviled (in the West), is something to be discarded.
Suppose I said that alchemy was nonsense, and that no one should believe in it. And you reply that alchemists had pretty good reasons for believing what they did at the time, and that alchemy was a prototype for modern chemistry, and besides they occasionally stumbled across some true things.
Do you think this would convince me? Of course not; alchemy is nonsense and there’s no need for it with the existence of chemistry. The historical context is totally irrelevant to the question of whether we should use it, and its occasional successes are also worthless in light of the fact that chemistry has the same true answers and many more.
So no, I’m not interested in fairness. Muhammad might have been a really great guy at the time; I don’t know or care. The point is that transplanting his values to the modern era is reprehensible and should be shunned, and any system based on those values should be discarded wholesale.
I’m sensing an irony here.
“Okay, fine, Islam is this violent, evil religion. What do you want us to DO about it?”
Looking at Hilary’s cables
and the (if Freedom House can be trusted) promotion of the worst interpretations of Islam
…probably, if you want to deal with the worst aspects, you have to deal with the Gulf states. But oil, business, etc., I don’t think Americans really care very much so nothing is going to be done.
The British certainly don’t care, given the policing deals between Saudi and the UK police. Does any Western state really care that much ?
So this is going to go on until something drastic happens like the oil running out or ISIS staging a coup in a Gulf State
I personally have never come across a liberal who “defends Islam.” There are liberals who focus on defending those who are unfairly attacked (physically or otherwise) – and because there are more cases of (usually) conservatives unfairly attacking all of Islam, or specific Muslims, than there are of such incidents involving Shintos, it may SEEM like these liberals are focusing specifically on Islam – but they’re not. They’re simply trying to put out fires that were started by others.
I’ll add that, if a “liberal” defends a Muslim (or an action such as building a mosque) who has been unfairly attacked, it is NOT contradictory for that same liberal to agree with every word of Dr. Strangelove’s posts in this thread.
Like Dr. Strangelove, I fervently hope that all religion will continue to erode as generations pass – the faster, the better – but that, meanwhile, the more urgent necessity is secular laws and live-and-let-live attitudes in every country, whatever people choose to “believe.”
Yet, in most social contexts, it would be rude of me to confront an individual moderate Muslim’s belief system to their face. And, I am as dismayed as anyone when an Islamophobe expresses their overgeneralized fear and hatred, either by targeting an individual (violently or otherwise), or by denouncing all of Islam, and only all of Islam, as teh evil.
But you’ll never get people who aren’t already Islamophobic or anti-religious bigots to take you seriously while you’re waving around such a clumsily constructed “straw Islam”.
The fact is that the ethical and spiritual doctrines of Islam are not solely “based on an individual”. The life of Muhammad himself, whether viewed in historical context or from a completely anachronistic perspective, is not the be-all and end-all of Islamic thought. In fact, plenty of Muslim thinkers over the centuries have maintained that true Islamic doctrine requires contemporary Muslims to do such-and-such an action differently from the way that Muhammad did it.
Your straw Islam isn’t going to teach anyone to reject religious oppression or rigid adherence to faith-based creeds. It’s just going to reassure ignorant Islamophobes and anti-religious bigots in general that their uninformed prejudice is all they need to understand these issues.
Reassuring ignorant people that they don’t need to bother overcoming their ignorance is not what we’re supposed to be doing around here.
[QUOTE=Dr. Strangelove]
[…] alchemy is nonsense and there’s no need for it with the existence of chemistry. The historical context is totally irrelevant to the question of whether we should use it, and its occasional successes are also worthless in light of the fact that chemistry has the same true answers and many more.
So no, I’m not interested in fairness. Muhammad might have been a really great guy at the time; I don’t know or care. The point is that transplanting his values to the modern era is reprehensible and should be shunned, and any system based on those values should be discarded wholesale.
[/QUOTE]
The thing is that your proposal for discarding historical systems of religious thought and replacing them, presumably, with modern theories in physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and other (mostly) science-based disciplines looks less like swapping out alchemy for chemistry and more like swapping out historical languages for Esperanto.
Sure, you could in theory (and eventually) produce an equivalent in Esperanto for pretty much anything that’s been recorded in any non-artificial human language. Just as you could in theory and eventually replace any idea known from any system of religious thought with some equally functional (for modern purposes) idea with no overt religious basis.
But in both cases, you’d be trying to disentangle your desired idea from an immeasurably huge and complex amount of historically contingent context. I don’t think much of your chances, tbh.
In modern colloquial terms we wouldn’t call him anything, because his country’s mores wouldn’t have encouraged him to marry his friend’s 12 year old daughter to cement the alliance between their families. And even if it did, it would *still *be wrong to call him an anythingophile, because the fact remains that he didn’t marry or fuck Aisha for his personal enjoyment. Well, not that first time anyhow - I expect they did eventually get to fucking for fun at some later point :o.
Judging historical figures by modern standards was, is and will always be not just unfair, but profoundly stupid on every level. These people are not like us. Their world is not like the one we know. There is no commonality between them and us whatsoever, save for biology (and even *there, *they’re still different. Shorter, for one thing).
So is the behavior of Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or Charlemagne …
I suppose with sufficient knowledge we would find that almost every historical figure of more than a thousand years ago held views or performed actions that we would very strongly disagree with today. It is also reasonable to assume that some of the views we hold dear today will be viewed with similar dismay in the far future.
If you are not interested in fairness, I probably cannot help that. I agree with your basic premise that an unreflected transference of medieval values to our time is fundamentally wrong. I do not agree that you have to give up fairness in order to make that point.
Like you I do not know whether Muhammad was a great guy in his time. And because I do not know that, I see no valid reason to revile him as a “pedophile” or whatever. I believe that it is quite likely that Muhammad, had he lived today would have handled a few things quite differently than he did back in the 7th century. Moral values are not set in stone. They evolve over time. Religion has traditionally found it hard to keep up with that evolution, but that is not the same as saying it has not kept up at all. Islam, like all religions has the more modern and the more conservative among its followers. It would be good for our world, if the modern element were strengthened, but wholesale insults against their founding figures will not achieve anything of the sort.
My quick answer to the original question about what those people who are hating on Islam and what they want to do about Islam. I think if asked, they wold want to send all the Muslims back to the middle east and then drop a Nuke on it, and they wouldn’t think about the consequences. Then they would go to have pizza and beer an celebrate. People are mean.
A thousand ? Try a hundred. Hell, try 50.
So there are “bad” people, eh? How does that work? They contain more than 100ppm of evil, as measured on a standard Evilometer? Essentialism for the purpose of dehumanizing others…doesn’t get much more religious than that.
Sure, the military knows how to recondition people too.
He was neither a pedophile nor a hebephile, notwithstanding the incorrect opinions of average people.
But in how many Muslim countries could he publsh those things now and live to old age?
It isn’t just Islam; religon, or to call it by its right name, superstition is the root of the problem. The sooner mankind gets beyond such fooleries the better.
Not as many as there should be, but the example of al-Khawarizmi shows that the problem isn’t Islam (since I’m pretty sure the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate 200 years after Muhammad’s death was pretty clearly Muslim), it’s the culture of those countries. There are things you can do in Malaysia that you can’t do in Saudi Arabia, which has nothing to do with anything like one being less Muslim than the other.
Thomas Jefferson. One of the founding fatherd of America. Probably its most important thinkers, whose writings are still looked to as guiding principles in this country and who helped draft its core governing documents. Someone commemorated on its currency and in giant marble monuments in the capital. A slave-owning rapist.
Excellent point. I have no animus against Islam especially, it’s no better or worse than the other major organized religions. It’s the irrationality of religion itself that troubles me.
A slave-owning rapist pedophile, according to the testimony of Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’ second-youngest son.
He asserted that his mother, who was born in 1773, was pregnant with her first child by Jefferson (who was said to have died in infancy) by September 1789. Hemings had been living in Paris since 1787 (when she would have been fourteen and Jefferson forty-four) to help look after Jefferson’s (legitimate) daughters during his ambassadorship there.