Yep. “Judge not lest you be judged” does not scare me when it comes to people who rape and sell little girls, rape prisoners before beheading them, persecute religious minorities, and who believe that democracy is satanic.
FWIW, the guy in the NYT article didn’t think he needed to be forgiven. He thought it was A-OK to rape the girl since she belonged to the wrong religion. Gotta be a different loophole.
Ultimately you need somewhere to stand. The vermin in the article made the girl a means to his ends. It had nothing to do with establishing some pure society. He raped her solely to satisfy his needs (physical, emotional, spiritual…whatever) to the exclusion of her humanity.
Oddly enough I stand against that.
Finally something we can agree on.
I read an article in Rolling Stone about some American teens (I think they were…Iranian-American?) who were caught on their way out of the country going to join ISIS.
I think one could have some compassion in their heart for the recruits of this group. They are being lied to by the slick “salesmen” (and women) who are recruiting them. In the case of these kids, they were over-protected by their parents to the point where the kids were more conservative Muslims than their parents had been. The kids had a lot of passion for Islam and the ISIS recruiters told them lies about the West and Islam, and the kids were swept up in the ideals of the movement and made their way east.
Of course, when they got there they would have eventually figured out they’d made a big mistake. Not even in the “oh hey these are awful people and what we’re doing is wrong” sense but the girls would find out that the women weren’t honored or respected or needed as much as they had been told and they would basically end up as sex slaves and prisoners. The boys would find out that they were expected to live in harsh conditions and go through exhausting training and kill other Muslims. Can you imagine being a kid from the Chicago suburbs and finding yourself living in a desert cave? As if.
Anyway, I think you can feel sorry for the kids and other people lured in to ISIS from their seemingly-mundane lives.
But the crazy people at the top? No.
The premise that contravening religious moralities somehow assign value one another is absurd on it’s face.
Pretty much says it all. :rolleyes:
It’s hard to view the actions of ISIL without using words like evil, inhuman and barbaric. However, as in all war, it is essential to “know thy enemy”, however unpalatable that may be.
[QUOTE=Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”]
So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
[/QUOTE]
In Iraq, the Sunnis lost power and became marginalized under successive Shi’a governments. So many of the Sunni population have no longer felt included in or represented by the Iraqi state.
Between the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government and the Sunni ISIL, the Iraqi Sunnis are caught between a rock and a hard place. It’s difficult to know how many of the general Iraqi Sunni population is supportive of ISIL, but ISIL have incorporated many Saddam-era Ba’athist military and intelligence officers into their ranks. Ideologically, that makes them odd bedfellows, but they share the aim of having their own territory ruled by themselves.
So, in Iraq at least and from the Sunni population’s perspective, the conflict can be framed in the terms of a separatist struggle. Other current separatist struggles include Donbass (from Ukraine), Kurdistan (from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran), Patani (from southern Thailand), Azawad (from Mali), among others. South Sudan, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Sri Lankan Tamils, Northern Ireland, Basque separatism are some recent examples that have ended or mostly died down but continue on a reduced scale. Then there are non-violent separatist movements like with the Catalans and Scots.
In Syria, the protests against Assad that began with the Arab Spring were followed by ruthless government crackdowns on dissidents.
At least some of the foreigners that travelled to Syria to fight against Assad did so with noble and idealistic intentions - to help free their Muslim brethren (ummat al-Islamiyah) from tyrannical oppression. Not dissimilar to the foreign volunteers who went to fight for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
ISIL’s effectiveness on the battlefield meant they were a highly attractive anti-Assad group to join for incoming recruits.
There are reports of deserters from ISIL being executed by ISIL themselves, so it seems that once one is in ISIL there is no way out. It’s difficult to know how many of the foreign fighters fall into this category - how many have a) tried to escape and been executed, b) remain with ISIL purely for self-preservation because trying to leave is a death sentence, c) are youthful thrill-seekers, seduced by the “glamour” and spoils of war, or d) have fully embraced or been “brain-washed” into embracing ISIL’s ideology.
Prolonged and intractable war appears to, almost inevitably, descend into acts of barbarism. Execution of innocent civilians, rape, pillage, child-soldiers, destruction of cultural heritage are things we have seen in wars throughout history. I suppose what makes ISIL different is their fervent appetite for openly sharing these despicable acts with a worldwide audience and the fact that, facilitated by modern technology/internet etc, they can do so with relative ease.
So while ISIL themselves are, in my opinion, as close to “evil” as I have seen in my lifetime, it is possible to have sympathy for the causes they have exploited or hijacked for their own ends, namely the removal of the Assad regime in Syria and fair representation for the Iraqi Sunnis in Iraq. Of course, ISIL have only “bandwagoned” these issues for their own ultimate aim: a global superstate where anyone who isn’t a devout Sunni Muslim is subject to genocide and/or perpetual slavery. It goes without saying, that one cannot sympathize with that.
You are picking Bible scripture without full context. The Bible commands us to judge, but warns about hypocritical judgment.
Also ISIS is not your enemy, so you’re not required to love them.
That the advice is bunk.
As others have said, the injunction to judge not is really rather to expect to be judged by others (at least) as harshly as you yourself judge others. So judge wisely. It means no more than that.
The other advice is bunk from end to end. As a non-reader of those sorts of books of mostly-bunk I’m under-informed to debate whether it’s misquoted bunk or misunderstood bunk or genuine ab initio bunk. But bunk it is.
I suspect that raping a 12 year old Yazidi girl is not “amoral” or “immoral”, to the ISIL fighter. Religion is a tool for, among other things, fostering in-group identification and bonding. The evil of ISIL is that they’ve drawn the lines of the “in-group” so tightly. Raping a Yazidi girl is not immoral because she’s not a person - since she does not adhere to the shibboleths of the ISIL fighter’s religion (that is, she’s not within his circle of empathy), she’s not a person and has no agency or rights that he can violate. To him, she’s a sex doll, nothing more.
At least, that’s how I imagine ISIL justifies rape, and how they can claim to be devout Muslims, while committing horrors. It’s an visciously evil mindset, but it’s by no means new - every warring group tries to depersonalize their enemies, the better to massacre them.
I have a twelve year old daughter. The mindset of a piece of shit who would find pleasure in holding her down against her will and invading her body is not one I would care to understand.
I think that, ultimately, people are complicated products of their biology, upbringing, and culture. I might stand firmly against certain behavior, might approve of punishment/suppression/harsh action against those who do ‘bad things,’ but I also truly believe that there is little more than circumstance that separates me from those who commit heinous acts.
I’m downright veracious!
Obviously labeling someone ‘evil’ is a judgment in itself. If we are not to judge, we wouldn’t use that label.
Now, do NOT accuse me of promoting political correctness, I am just following this train of thought. Go ahead and label them evil if you want, this thread isn’t binding yanno.
I saw a bit on the Bill Maher show the other night. Maher had some graphics explaining the difference in the sizes of the forces of various countries in the region. He had ISIS at about 30,000, surrounded by countries with a combined 4 million+ soldiers. He wanted to know how it was that the local countries couldn’t defeat ISIS.
That’s a good question, no? It’s almost as if the local countries don’t judge ISIS. Maybe they have some justification for loving them, and you just don’t shoot people you love. Maybe, it’s just speculation.
I don’t remember any U.S. politician that prayed then raped a 12-year-old and prayed again. Affairs, sure. But it’s all about religion. I’m ISIS, I’m right, my religion is right, women are shit and I can treat them like that because I’m ISIS, I’m right…
It’s the same circular logic every religion uses. There’s your loophole.
To expand on this, link:
If we can’t call Jesus good, I don’t think we can call anybody evil, either. No? No one is evil except Satan alone?
He didn’t say that, and even if he did, he’s a fictitious character.
Link.
And … BBC TV just a few moments ago reported Isis has executed the man who was in charge of taking care of Palmyra, a Unesco World Heritage site they captued. He’d worked there for more than 50 years and had written scholarly papers on the site.
Fuck Isis.
Apparently their motive is to draw the US into a land war in Asia, for either geopolitical or Islamo-apocalypic motives, maybe both. They are counting on publicity of their atrocities making Americans etc. feel like they have to invade.
You see? ISIS is bad, don’t get me wrong, but they are trying to jerk the world around by its feelings. They seek to draw the US into a land war in Asia with an appeal to pathos.
I think some people may be confusing this thread with witnessing, and that isn’t what this is. One thing that has always bothered me about religious leaders is that they won’t “break character” and just tell me what will be achieved by getting people to believe what they preach. There must be a practical goal; tell me that. But you can’t get 'em to do it.
In this instance, I can tell you what’s the use. It goes back to the classical modes of persuasion: pathos, ethos and logos aka feelings, ethics and reason. Appeals to pathos and ethos may often be persuasive and successful in getting people to change their behavior, but on closer examination they often turn out to be fallacious.
So, what if you cut off those fallacious pathways to persuasion in yourself? What if, pathos-wise, you felt only universal love? In that case, no matter what anyone did, your feelings would remain constant and you would be utterly unassailable to any appeal to pathos.
What if, ethos-wise, your only position was one of forgiveness, such that no matter what anyone did, your response was pre-determined and neutral, insulating you from any appeal to ethos?
Do these and you can only be swayed by appeals to logos. Isn’t that how we should make high-level decisions? Should America engage in a new land war in the Middle East because of the perpetration of atrocities there? Um, can you refer to a time when atrocities were not committed in the Middle East, or a time when military intervention decreased the rate of atrocity there? And, shouldn’t we rightly regard modern warfare as a kind of atrocity in itself, and therefore an obviously paradoxical solution?
’There Are No Prescriptions’.