To honestly judge a religion or the followers of that religion you must consider the time frame of the events. Our founding fathers exterminated the Native American people and then enslaved thousands upon thousands as slaves.
Then our fathers fought the Civil War where more died than during WW2. Then we look at the present time and walla, America elects a black man as President of the USA for two terms.
.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,It does seem .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,Time heals all wounds
This is a pretty deep misunderstanding, but whatever.
Some of them certainly ask themselves what the founding fathers such as slave-owning pedophile rapist Thomas Jefferson would have done, though.
This is wrong, as history clearly shows.
Just to give a little insight into why I dislike that way of speaking:
Denmark is going to the shitter, Sweden is paralysed, in Norway(my home country) we have a party with a long history of racism in government. There’s the situation in Hungary, Geert Wilders here where I live, The Netherlands. In Italy I regularily witnessed people getting beat up by white suppremacists, while the police was watching and doing nothing other than arrest people who had a problem with the situation. I got picked up for wearing a t-shirt promoting equality once.
I heard a guy in Poland say: “I love Poland. I’m french and there’s so many muslims in France. Not that I dislike muslims, only Islam.” I don’t wanna talk to people who say that and doesn’t get why it is offensive.
This has to be marginalized. People need to be held accountable, within reason.
This goes is to Robert163 and Hank Beecher and all others it may also concern:
Muslims are people. You don’t dislike people for having different ideas than you. I don’t personally believe in whatever my norwegian/sami anscestors believed, but I don’t the ascribe motives and actions of an anscestor or person in history unto a person of faith. I’ll form an opinion by getting to know/know about that person. If a muslim does me harm personally, I’ll hold him or her individually accountable for that, within reason, as I try to do with everyone else. Don’t ascribe atheist motives to bigotry and hatred. If you sincerely do not believe in differentiating between people of a certain religion, but that fighting religion is more important than fighting bigotry, quit talking that way as it muddies the water.
Is your argument that Mohammad having a child bride influenced his otherworks to the extent that they became without value. I would fully admit that any modern day Muslim who uses Mohammads example as a dictum that they should obtain their own child brides are evil. But these seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Most Muslims seem to realize that that was a product of the time and separate it from the rest of his teachings.
In much the same way we see value in some of the works of Aristotle even though his ideas regarding womenwere clearly bonkers when looked at today.
Please direct me to these interpretations of sharia which have wholly discarded their connection to Muhammad and his cohorts.
No. The man is irrelevant to the text. And besides, the text can be modified–in fact contains explicit instructions on its modification.
I notice you skip over the first point and distort the second.
I don’t think you have any obligation, but I do recognize the patterns of the prejudice and the bigotry in selective facts, in biases.
it is no more charming from the atheists than it is from the religious. Mirrors of each others hatreds.
Excuse?
I just use some
this is not a fact, it is a supposition according to some but by far not all traditions, i note.
in any case it is a silly excercise this waiving around of the age for shock purposes really
I wrote nothing on this topic.
Of course I noted your abuse of the terms pedophile and hebephile which are used with meanings attached to a prediliction and a preference.
It is simply to note that to use these terms - except as the empty terms of abuse and raging of the haters - one should be analytical and see
there is not any real support in the Prophet’s history that says he had any special liking for the young girls. If there was a Phile tendency of this nature it should have showed and been justified. But Aicha is an exception in fact (and the more ordinary of the traditions have her more reasonably being aged in her mid to late teens). It is irrational to use the terms in fact.
A clumsy demarche, but actually it illustrates something - If I encountered now in say the Central African Republic or the Nepal a marriage by an older man outside of my modern expectations, but within the norms of the community, I would not be so stupid to call it a hebephilia or a pedophilia. If there is not a pattern, these are just words of abuse without any real content or meaning. They become childish emotional flags to wave in a disservice to a soi-disante rationalism.
Otherwise, can you build a more distorted straw man? I suppose so, being very bound up in your emotional hatred and its semi-intellectual justifications.
Yes we can all wait for the day that all the humans become converted to the angry autistic atheism so that they can more purely find modern intellectualized reasons to hate under the thin veneer of a modern rational system of thought… I am sure it will come any day now.
For persons, even non believers who are more rational about the possibilities of the human condition, or even the believer who is open minded and looks at the other religion that is not theirs, a more useful and rational (not expecting a magical transformation of the human kind into something it has never been) approach is to look to the lessons of a benchmark against other behaviour. This is hard perhaps for the autistic readers who insist on an autistic and narrow reading of any text, but for others it is a natural and human way to relate and build a morality.
for the more ordinary believer in Islam, the lesson that is drawn from the Prophet comes more and comes essentially from the most repeated words, Mercy and Compassion, the two primary attributes of the God. Of course the bloody minded can always finds hatreds, even in “rational” and atheistic systems…
There’s been a lot of focus in this thread about Aicha, but that’s hardly the only thing wrong with Islam. It’s just something that’s easily seen to be reprehensible to modern eyes.
Of course I find lots wrong with all religions. The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the worst stories about anything, ever; evidence that the Abrahamic god is psychopathic. I can’t accept any value system which uses that story as a defining aspect of their god.
But this thread is about Islam and so we’re focusing on things exclusive to it. Further, these things revolve around moral questions: the treatment of women, children, homosexuals, slaves, “infidels”, and so on. These questions are directly applicable to whether Islam is useful as a moral system for today. They aren’t tangential side notes.
I don’t want to get too sidetracked in this thread, but I think society did suffer some harm by elevating Aristotle above his ideas. He wrote a great many things, some of which are still valid today and some of which were nuts. His stature was such that he held great influence for many centuries.
Unfortunately, it took until roughly the Enlightenment to really systematically go through all these old ideas and reevaluate them. Suddenly it was the idea and not the man that held primary importance. And many of the ideas were found wanting.
For the ideas that did survive, we do not keep them because they originated with Aristotle. We keep them because they hold up to experiment and analysis. Aristotle could be erased from history and it wouldn’t make one iota of difference because the idea is the important thing.
My apologies; it was Kobal2 that made the inappropriate comment that while Muhammad might have had sex with Aicha, he wasn’t doing it for fun at first (but maybe later, pukey smiley face).
I am not using the terms in a clinical way. It’s a simple truth that a man today that has sex with a girl barely past menarche will be branded a pedophile, regardless of his reasons.
They are not merely words of abuse. They represent a few of the underpinnings of modern western morality: the idea that children have rights, that consent matters, that sex is a particularly horrendous thing to force on someone, and so on.
Regardless of what we call Muhammad’s behavior with Aicha, his actions violate the same exact values that true pedophiles today violate. We feel the same degree of repulsion in both cases.
And of course the same is true for any similar behavior today in Africa or elsewhere. We can decline to call it pedophilia, but there is still an older man having sex with a girl without her consent (without any possibility of her consenting). It’s a distinction without a difference.
You forgot “submission”.
Actually, this thread was begun with the intention of exploring what can or should be done to alleviate the violence associated with the extremes of Wahhabism and the even more extreme proclamations from ISIS, with “Islam” used as a token word to avoid getting sidetracked (as such threads routinely do) into whether the violence is an outgrowth of the religion of a subset of it.
That being the case, EVERYONE will take their beliefs and feelings about the evil of Islam or any portion of it and go open a new thread.
Address the OP: What should or can we do?
Stop the hijack, now.
[ /Moderating ]
The OP says nothing about ISIS or Wahhabism, regardless of how much you would like to push your narrative that the violence, and other damaging effects of Islam, only originate from some tiny minority within it.
You are very persistent in your attempts to limit criticism of Islam, I will have to give you that.
That’s not how I interpret the OP at all, which says:
One answer–my answer–is that I do not have any of the concrete goals in mind that the OP listed as possibilities (such as war). Rather, I wish to simply have my say in setting the tone of discussion about Islam. My hope is that a persistent view of religion–and Islam in particular–as a violent, obsolete myth will eventually lead to its weakening.
The OP doesn’t mention Wahhabism or ISIS at all and I see them as essentially irrelevant details in a broader cultural trend.
White supremacists also have endless arguments with each other about the details of their ideology, with various adherents ranging from those who use the ideology only to inform their own personal behavior, to other extremists who support or use violence in the advancement of their agenda. This does not stop us from rejecting this belief system as a wholly unacceptable basis for modern morality.
I never said Islam is not like Christianity at all, that would be stupid, and is merely another of your convenient fabrications.
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
Also, I borrowed the phrase “camel-flavored Christianity” from an Arab ex-Muslim. She used it in frustration at those many simple minded Western liberals who see Islam as neatly similar to Christianity, and are ignorant of the important differences. Again, you are using accusations of racism and bigotry to shield Islam from criticism.
Thank you so much for your snarky elucidations of, …something?
So, you do know, right, about that Muslim cab driver in New York, passed along info that thwarted a terrorist plot? How people all over New York were saying “Who was that mosqued man, I wanted to thank him.”
No, I am saying that it is one very obvious way, and one that is very popular. Muslims are not stupid, they can see these ad hoc revisions for what they are just as I can.
By answering “it’s OK to abuse children because the Prophet did it” only with “no it’s not because he did not”, one implies that the behavior is acceptable if one can prove that he did. This is dangerous because of the very real possibility that these ad hoc interpretations will be rejected.
So what?
Sure. So what?
Jews have been at the forefront of religions innovation since before Islam existed. And many people do tell Jews, and anyone else who believes in the vengeful, manic depressive desert psychopath God, that it is stupid to base morality on Stone Age mythology and codes of conduct. And many, if not most, Jews agree.
We are discussing Islam because of the high percentage of Muslims who favor barbaric punishments.
The subtext of her arguments is that it is favorable, or at least acceptable, to base morality, behavior, codes of conduct, ect on the verses of the Koran and the deeds and actions of the Prophet. In this way it is she who agrees with and lends support to the extremists. I am fully aware of and have admitted that the approaches I favor come with downsides, but she can not admit that her’s do as well.
Oh, so you mean that, like, not all Muslims are bad people and stuff. Golly gee thanks brah, I never would have, like, known about that. Duuude.
There are also genuine traditions in the Islamic world of placing rationality above scripture, and of disregarding the fanciful claims of Islam.
What is pig ignorant is your presumption about what informs these opinions. In my case, I almost exclusively have gotten my impression about what Islam is from current and former Muslims themselves. I have been told in nearly identical terms, for example, in Mosques both in different parts of America and on different continents, that Islam provides a “complete way of life” and that to be a Muslim means to submit to God’s wisdom, as revealed in the verses of the Koran and the deeds and actions of the Prophet as recorded in Hadith, even when our own modern morality would cause us to want to reject them.
All of us should elevate humanistic principles above theological ones. That is what the revisionists like Aisha here are actually doing; attempting to cram Islam into a shape compatible with her and our modern values. But, until it is done explicitly, her efforts are very easily countered by those fundamentalists who will easily point out the greater scriptural and historical basis for their positions.
The advise is to elevate humanistic principles above religious ones. This means that their moderate interpretations must be accompanied as such: “You can’t even prove for sure that the Prophet ever had a child bride since those sources are not reliable by the standards of modern historians, and* even of he did that would be no excuse to do such a horrible thing*, instead it would be a reason to abandon his example as a moral guide”.