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Sure you do. I mean, unless you’re headed over there.
So you prefer your bigotry decaffeinated?
Are honor killings still a socially accepted practice by Muslims? What about female circumcision?
Are they taking steps to wipe it out? I see in the CNN article arrests have been made and the police chief may be fired. Is it the older generations that are standing by this practice?
Okay, I’m going to abandon this argument, as it has clearly failed. I just want to clarify something first: I didn’t mean to imply that American society is superior to any other. Notice the word “Canadian” in my first post. Beating America at non-violence is like beating a four-year-old in an arm wrestle.
Would anyone disagree that relatively non-violent societies are superior to relatively violent ones?
Aha!
You’re one of them.
People like Ensign Edison who pull the racist/bigot card out of their sock at the first tenuously, vaguely, maybe, half plausible opportunity.
Those who conflate nature=nurture :rolleyes: or culture=race :rolleyes: or civilisation=race :rolleyes: or whatever, in the political context to accuse others of bigotry.
You really are a bit of a fraud Liberal 
I like you anyway. 
Show us the fucking place where one of us fucking wants there to stil be lynchings in this country. YEAH WE FUCKING LOVE THEM LYNCHINGS!!!111111
FUCK YOU!
Some of us are from a subculture where lynchings AND honor killings are wrong and we condemn subcultures and people where they happen. Do you?
I like the OP. It’s especially well-argued because there hasn’t been a single instance of religious violence in “enlightened, advanced Western civilization” for literally thousands of years. You could look it up; it’s an historical fact. So it’s entirely understandable that the Yazidi Kurdish population should be condemned as a completely alien, utterly loathsome and irredeemable culture. They must have some sort of extra chromosome or something, that would allow them to tolerate religiously motivated killings. Maybe they’re robots.
Shamozzle:
Yup.
I’d also add that you run into problems because you are necessarily constrained by your own cultural presuppositions, and its inherent values, when you pass that kind of judgment. There’s no value-free environment in which an objective observer can compare Culture 1 and Culture 2, and decide: Culture 1 is better. Whenever one passes that kind of judgment, one relies on a lot of factors, many of which are derived from the basic values of one’s own culture.
I’m not too comfortable when we start to get into this more abstract level. I suppose it would be possible, and I suppose you might say, in at least that aspect, your infant-vivisecting culture would be inferior to Swedish culture.
At least from my culturally-biased perspective.
But I’m not sure why it would be necessary. This is part of what I reacted to when I was reading this thread. That we condemn the act, and find it revolting and sickening, is entirely understandable to me; but some of the posters then took it a step further, and made a kind of value judgment: “my culture, at least, is superior to that!” And I wonder a bit where this impulse comes from. Why the need to use this horrible incident as an excuse to immediately assert one’s cultural superiority?
Well…I pass judgment against this act with full knowledge that my values are culturally dependent. As far as that goes, I don’t give a shit: stoning this girl was a revolting thing to do, and I hope all of the men involved are punished for it.
But this question about how to balance relative and absolute morality is, in all honesty, beyond my poor capacities, and I don’t know how to give you a good answer for it. As I said, all I reacted to was the assertion of cultural superiority, the “well, at least we’re better than those people,” an attitude that I’m allergic to.
I want to know what the fuck is wrong with you men. MEN!
Women don’t do this shit. Not unless they join male institutions, like that little twat over at Abu Ghraib. What is it about MEN that makes you do this crap?
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
You do realize our “enlightened, advanced Western civilization” was burning witches less than 400 years ago.
From the CNN link.
Sad sad sad. And not unlike a black man being seen with a white woman back in the 1950’s in the USA.
And the black man might be hung.
In the USA and the modern world, we have come to see that such honor killings are abhorrent. And actually goes against any decent human behavior, and what ever God you may happen to believe in.
fessie:
Could it be because we’re culturally inferior?
God. I have a daughter, a sweet darling girl with dark hair and a beautiful round face.
I only caught the beginning and ending of that clip.
I need to go cry for a while.
Nice part in your hair from that whoosh.
Oh nonsense! This is Western civilization we’re talking about! Next you’ll be trying to claim that Catholics and Protestants don’t always get along! I suppose you also believe those urban legends that the interaction between Christians and Jews has occasionally been less than perfectly harmonious. Poppycock, says I! Balderdash! Horsefeathers! Animal crackers!
Besides, they were robot witches.
:smack: Context, context, context.
I’m a man fessie and I can assure you that I am just as abhorred by these types of honor killings as you might be.
It may sound a bit old fashioned, but I believe that as a man it is my duty to protect those that can’t protect themselves.
It’s my job. First off and foremost.
It sucks some times, but it is one of the things that I and most men don’t have to think about. It just is.
I actually like that position sometimes. No need for debate, no need to ponder. I would take on Godzilla to protect my Wife from harm.
I have not seen the video of the stoning. But I can assure you that no MEN participated in the stoning.
Honor killings occur in (at minimum) Muslim, Christian, and Hindu societies. This particular act was carried out by a specific social enclave that happens to live in a Muslim part of the world.
Female circumcision occurs in (at minimum) Muslim, Christian, and Animist societies and is not a religious tenet of either Islam or Christianity. (Animism has no central set of tenets, being a fairly distributed religion of localized practices, so on a region by region basis, it might be religious in nature.)
I’m going to disagree with this. Women are just as capable of abhorrent behavior. For example in most areas where it occurs female circumcision is in fact performed by women, including on their own daughters. Nor do I doubt that they would be up to stoning someone they considered a transgressor if they considered it part of their role to take part. While these societies do in fact tend to be overwhelmingly patriarchal, it doesn’t mean that many of the women in them haven’t bought fully into the roles they are expected to play and are just as ready to take a rough vengeance on “cultural deviants.”.
Edited to add: In fact this reminds me of this old quote from Kipling Captain Amazing posted awhile back.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
That wasn’t really hyperbole. Shit like that DID happen.
And Yazidi, 'twould appear. At that they are no different than there non-Yazidi Kurdish neighbors.
Yazidism is pretty unclassifiable due to its somewhat syncretic nature ( but just baldly calling it a syncretism between Zoroastrianism and Islam as I’ve seen some reports do is really an oversimplification ), but the core of its mythology certainly pre-dates Islam. Possibly all Abrahamic religions, though I don’t think anyone can really confirm that.
At any rate I suspect this has less to do with any scriptures, than it does with the clannish, insular nature of backwoods Kurdish culture generally and that of the even more isolated and not infrequently oppressed and harassed Yazidi Kurds in particular.
- Tamerlane
In my Dearborn area we used to have honor killings. It has been some time since one has been reported.
In America do have a white on black violence that belies our superiority. We lynched blacks ,blew up their churches and shot people who marched to help free them. How can you lay claim to superiority. ?Stoning is prehistoric and disgusting but we have been there .