Oh guess what, we can add Ronald Reagan to the presumed Presidential pedophiles list too, if actress Elizabeth Taylor’s claim to have had a fling with him when he was 36 and she was 15 is true.
Yes, exactly. The difference of course is that there aren’t billions of people using Alexander the Great for a 21st century moral system. There’s no need to ask how he’d behave today because no one is using his values.
This isn’t theology class. If we were just looking at how Islam ranks among the other religions in a passive, disinterested fashion, it would be wholly appropriate to put things in the historical context and see how it was a function of its time.
But that’s not what’s going on. Billions are actively trying to use this moral code in a modern context. And so it’s appropriate to say how we’d view their laws and leaders when placed in modern society.
I have no idea what you’re on about. Murderers, rapists, warmongers, etc. are bad people because they do bad things. Essentialism doesn’t enter into it.
I’ve done bad things. Not murder, rape or warmongery, as it happens, but various other things that I definitely know were bad.
Am I a bad person? How come you can state with absolute certainty that a murderer is a bad person (apparently entirely irrespective of the circumstances of the murder or the murderer’s subsequent capacity for repentance and reform), but you don’t know whether somebody else who’s done other bad things is a bad person?
That, I think, was Human Action’s point.
I think it is clear by now that we are not in disagreement over the question whether the words and deeds of Muhammad should serve as the basis for any law or moral code today. They should not - at least not without some heavy moderation and qualification.
Where we disagree is whether it is appropriate to revile a 7th century figure based on our 21st century values. You are right: we do not look to Alexander the Great for a 21st century moral system. But it is also true that we do not usually call him a slaver or mass murderer. His were different times, and what he did, abhorrent as it would be today, was not unusual in a war of his day.
Sometimes they do it because they have a brain tumor. Are brain tumors evil ?
This isn’t really true. Billions of people today are directly using the values of classical societies as encoded in the ancient Roman legal system, which has been hugely influential in the development of the modern western law codes that we all live by in the developed world.
So yeah, actually, you are at least as dependent on the values of a bunch of un-modern superstition-riddled Iron Age dudes, whose ordinary socially approved behavior would nowadays get their asses promptly thrown in jail, as most of the world’s Muslims are.
I’m not surprised that you don’t grok what I’m saying, it’s a very different perspective from the model you’re following. I don’t want to hijack the thread with it, as it’s just a peeve of mine.
You got it, more or less. Actions can be moral or immoral, but there’s no mechanism for people to be essentially moral or immoral, good or bad.
of course these things ignore that (1) the islamic traditions around the age of Aicha vary greatly and in fact many put her to be significantly older - as Aisha here has in the past cited.
this of course also abuses grossly the modern terms pedophile and hebephile that imply a sexual perversion of preferred desire outside of the boundaries of what is the society norm and standard of the proper sexual behaviour.
As we have many writings attesting to the Prophet’s many marriages, and not much shyness there, we see no sign at all of any preference or any predilections for younger girls - if anything the marriages contracted that seem more of own inclination and less from the tribal alliance building logic that was the dominant of the area for thousands of years, the tendency of the Prophet on his own preference was to the older women.
it is then not more than gross prejudice to (1) priviledge and select the worst possible of a range of possible true facts, (2) to grossly abuse a modern set of terms that at the minimum imply habitual prefered behaviour and that outside of the norms.
As it was even legal in the USA until I think the last century for marriage to be contracted in this age range, it is grossly abusive of fact and nothing more than a blind emotional prejudice attempting to intellectualize itself to run around calling the Prophet (or the founder Thomas Jefferson for that matter) “pedophiles”.
What I read in these statements by the strident anti-religious is merely attempts at intellectualizing hatreds and prejudices in what ends up being no different an approach from the religious bigots.
Kobal highlights how this bigotted approach is empty and stupid
The important observation.
Of course in any case the idea that the approach of these supposed intellectualizing critics is going to be effective is quite ludicrous, any more than the hectoring preaching of the extremely religious will convince them. I see these two as in fact two sides of the same coin of the human intolerance.
Our modern legal systems have been in a process of continuous evolution since their first incarnations. What we explicitly have not done is declare the first iteration to be the immutable word of God and tried to continue using that in spite of societal progress. What we have also not done is declare the creators of these systems to be divinely guided or say that they had access to moral truths that we do not.
Even founding documents like the US Constitution have the built-in capability for change, and although our founding fathers are respected, they are not seen as divinely inspired.
Of course there is. Lots of people have mental illnesses that prevent them from experiencing empathy. Unless treated, these people tend toward actions that harm society.
These people are bad. Not in some weird supernatural sense, but just because they have a defect that causes them to harm others. They’re bad in the same way that a defective car might be harmful to its occupants.
So has shari’ah. It’s not only been developed and modified and argued about and discussed for 1400 years, there are still competing interpretations of it today, ranging from individual faqih issuing different rulings from each other, all the way up to the fact that the different madh’hab often do not agree with each other (and there used to be a lot more of them, too).
No no, only the half informed stereotype must exist. No evolution…
Eh. It’s not like I’m arguing with Islamic scholars on TV. I’m just a voice in society. I can add my voice to a particular chorus and that’s about it. I want to have a clear, unambiguous message to maximize my contribution.
That message, as said, is that transplanting a medieval value system to today is reprehensible. And I think the easiest way to see that is to imagine how we’d treat these people if they were around today.
Change happens at the borders. To the extent that my message has any effect at all, it will be among people on the fence. A child that isn’t quite sure how to make sense of their parent’s religious indoctrination. A homosexual that knows they’re a good person but feels rejected by the society that raised them. An adult looking for just one more reason to reject superstition. And so on.
Again, I do not expect to change anything on my own. I’m just casting a vote. The irrational and credulous yell quite loudly and I need my own clear message to have any effect at all. Rationality seems to be very slowly winning in the West and so I think the approach has value.
You realize you’re making my point for me?
It is precisely via comparing these figures against modern society that we see how insane and alien their world was. How utterly useless it would be to take a moral code they developed and try to use it today.
Their norms. Not our norms.
You seem to think I have an obligation to cast Islam in the best possible light; to always look for an interpretation in which dubious behavior is explained or at least minimized. I have no such obligation and such an approach goes against my interests.
In find it vaguely amusing that you use polygamy has a kind of excuse for Muhammad’s actions with Aicha. Oh, sure he had sex with a 12 year old, but he didn’t really enjoy it, and besides he preferred to spend time with his older wives. You would be laughed at if you used that to explain someone behaving that way today.
As I’ve said, it is the very fact that these figures are incomparable to modern society that tells us that their value system should be wholly rejected. But to know they’re incomparable one must first compare them.
It does not seem to be evolving very quickly.
You’re moving the goalposts.
The reason, I suspect, it’s not moving very quickly (or in any clear direction at all) is because Muhammad is still there as the messenger of God. Every slight change in interpretation still has to refer to Muhammad in some way and so it can never get all that far away.
In contrast, no legal scholar asks what Julius Caesar would have done. The evolution can go as far as it needs from its beginnings. It’s not tied to its origins in the same way.
To strengthen them you must treat them as equals
You and I know that there is an element or group of people who thrive on insulting “others”. They feel an inch taller every time they insult whole in the real world the shrink an inch until they are no more noticed