Say what?
The issue is not violence and warfare between different ethnic and religious groups, it is the prevalence of execution for apostasy by believers of ex-believers. Buddhists killing ex-Buddhists on religious grounds.
"Afghan parliament rejects ban on child marriage saying its “un-islamic” to ban:
Notice they didn’t say “its against Afghani culture”, they specifically quote the Quran and the example of Muhammeds life for why they can’t ban child marriage. Now go and google “Thighing” and the many discussions where islamic clerics discuss the permissibility of it (most say its just fine).
When something is done by your founder, mentioned in the holy book, and still widely practised in modern islamic societies its pretty hard to try and claim with a straight face that its not representative of the religion.
Were there male relatives to help her spend the money?
There are no Buddhist sects that restrict women from worshipping, some sects restrict women from becoming nuns. Gautauma Buddhas own monastery allowed women to become monks. Anyway Buddhists don’t worship, because there is no supernatural being to worship in buddhism, they visit temples to make merit, give offerings to monks or meditate. Women are freely allowed to partake in those activities in all forms of Buddhism I’m aware of.
Now how I did I know that one of your “sources” of commentary on Islam is the lying bigot Robert Spencer?
Or you could see what Al-Azhar al-Sharif has to say about child marriage.
Nope.
Sure, if by “islamic societies” you mean “No one religious affiliation is associated with child marriage. Rather, a variety of religions are associated with child marriage in countries throughout the world”.
No, that’s pretty much the truth. As I said, you don’t know a fucking thing about what you’re talking about. And if you’re citing Spencer’s site, I think I’ve discovered why.
To pick just one of coremelt’s innumerable ignorant misrepresentations of religious history:
[QUOTE=coremelt]
Somehow Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Guru Nanak, Mahavira and other major religious leaders are not recorded as having had sex with children.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, the Buddha probably did have sex with a child below the age of consent, according to our modern definitions of age of consent.
Namely, Buddhist accounts of Siddhartha’s life recount that prior to his renunciation he married the princess Gopa, daughter of Dandapani. Dharmasastra texts indicate that girls at the time (as was common in many pre-modern cultures) would be married shortly before or just after puberty.
So there was probably not much difference in the ages of the young brides A’isha and Gopa when their husbands Muhammad and Buddha, respectively, first had sex with them.
The Svetambara Jain legends of the early life of Mahavira follow a similar story arc: Mahavira was married to a beautiful young princess named Yashoda, who would probably also have been pre-pubescent or barely pubescent at the time.
As for Guru Nanak Singh, the founder of Sikhism, we don’t have to rely on vague ancient legends: Sikh doctrine is very specific in recording that he married in 1487. It is not recorded exactly how old his bride Sulakhani was at the time, but given that Guru Nanak had an elder sister who was born in 1464 and married in 1475 (i.e., at the age of eleven), it’s pretty safe to conclude that the bridegroom Guru Nanak was also having sex with a child according to modern criteria.
Face it, coremelt, adult men all over the pre-modern world got married to nearly pubescent or just barely pubescent girls, who were far younger than modern age-of-consent limits, all the goddamned time.
It was considered normal in most societies, if only as a defensive measure: after all, as soon as a girl approached sexual maturity, she was perceived as being at risk for sexual predation and/or voluntary sexual misconduct that would ruin her virgin status and potentially her entire life. Far more prudent to get her married off as soon as possible to an approved and mature husband, and let him take over the responsibility for her sexuality.
There is absolutely no historically valid reason to think that Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha was any more “pedophilic” than the Buddha’s marriage to Gopa, or Mahavira’s marriage to Yashoda, or Guru Nanak’s marriage to Sulakhani.
On the off chance that anyone reading this garbage dump of a thread is actually interested, the way marriage works in works in classical Sunni fiqh in Islam is this: to be married, you have to have the legal capacity to marry. Legal capacity is defined as two things: reaching physical maturity (puberty, called baligh), and mental maturity (the age at which you can manage your own legal and financial affairs, called rushd). When a child reaches baligh, they are considered to have reached the “age of discrection”, or mummayiz, in which they are presumed to have a full understanding of their religious duties (ahliyyat ada’ diniyyah) and become responsible for carrying them out (fasting, ablutions, prayer, etc). However, it’s not until they reach the age of rushd that they are considered to be fully legally capable (ahliyyat al-wujup), and can do things like enter into contracts and take responsibility for transactions and things like that. The parallel is obviously between our modern Western laws, in which a child who has reached puberty is deemed mentally capable of being responsible for certain things, but isn’t (generally) able to do other things like sign contracts or manage their own financial affairs until they become a legal adult at 18.
A wali (legal guardian, whether biological like a father or just someone appointed to the role) of a male or female minor child (ie, one that has not reached the age of maturity), can arrange a nikah, or marriage contract, with someone else on behalf of their ward, but the contract itself is not executed until both parties have reached mental and physical maturity, and upon reaching that age the ward can dissolve the marriage contract before its execution (meaning the marriage itself never actually takes place).
Qur’anically, one is supposed to be both physically and mentally capable of marriage, and be considered “mature”, in order to get married. The big problem comes in because, in the main schools of Islamic law, the consideration of “maturity” can be rather muddled due to the fact that there are no real hard-and-fast rules about what, precisely, counts as “maturity”. All the schools agree that at the very least no marriage should take place before the age of baligh, or puberty, but none of the schools set a definite age as to when this happens to a child, instead relying on the assessment of the physical development of any given individual - you go through puberty when you start menstruating, as a girl, or start having emissions, as a boy (and, in all schools but the Hanafi, grow pubic hair). In the case of “late developers”, the Shafi and Hanbali declare that boys and girls who have reached the age of 15 to have “gone through puberty”, even in the absence of signs like menses or emissions; for the Hanafi, this age is 18 for boys and 17 for girls, while for Malikis it’s 17 for both. These ages are also the ages at which someone is considered to have reached rushd, when they become a full legal adult.
The issue is the cases when a child is adjudicated to have gone through puberty before the specific ages given above. Some scholars declare that merely reaching the age of baligh is sufficient for full marriage, either disregarding the requirement for reaching the age of rushd or considering that the age of rushd automatically and concurrently is reached as soon as puberty is reached regardless of chronological age. Others consider baligh to be a necessary but not sufficient requirement, and don’t consider that person eligible for marriage until they have reached one of the ages for rushd too, even if they have gone through puberty. Complicating things is the ability of a wali to arrange a marriage for a child who hasn’t reached either of those ages yet, because in far too many of those early “betrothals” the issue of age of rushd is almost always ignored, and even the requirement for baligh can be treated as a formality at best and also ignored at worst.
One additional aspect of all this, which especially affects both the kind of arranged child marriages described at the end of my last paragraph above, and Western perceptions of the age of marriage in Islamic law, is the fact that in addition to setting a “maximum” age of puberty, the Hanafi school also sets a minimum age: 12 for boys and 9 for girls. However, like the tendency described above where the age of rushd is sometimes just sort of handwaved away as being the same as the age of baligh (regardless of actual chronological age or mental maturity), this minimum age is sometimes taken as a “given” for when baligh has been reached and the girl is deemed capable of marriage, regardless of the actual age at which she physically goes through puberty. Though this attitude isn’t actually limited to the Hanafis - the Saudis are rather strict Hanbalis, for instance.
As regards to the age of 'A’isha in relation to all of the above, she’s usually considered to have been both balugh and rashid at the time of her marriage to Muhammad (whether one considers her to have been actually much older than 9, or was simply remarkable in that regard if she was actually 9), or used as ammunition for the Muslims who argue that strict chronological age and not physical or mental development determine baligh and rushd).
The age of Aisha at marriage was widely accepted to be 6, consummated at 9 up until the 20th century. It’s only in modern times that some (the minority) of Islamic scholars have attempted to white wash this.
"“It is reported from Aisha that she said: The Prophet entered into marriage with me when I was a girl of six … and at the time [of joining his household] I was a girl of nine years of age.”Bukhari, Book of Qualities of the Ansar
But as has been exhaustively pointed out to you, all the historical evidence indicates that she was probably somewhere around puberty when she first had sex.
Which, as I noted, would make her marriage circumstances pretty typical for the brides of many famous pre-modern religious leaders.
You have it backwards, actually. It wasn’t until the 20th Century that Western Islamophobes found anything condemnatory about it. It was perfectly normal and acceptable even to them before then.
The Christian Middle Ages also saw a lot of child-brides, and the records of these among the nobility are easy to find. It was a “medieval” thing, not an “Islamic” thing.
Also, good point that it wasn’t hammered on, say, during the Crusades. If it were such a big deal then, certainly the Crusaders and Popes would have made a big deal out of it. They didn’t bother, probably because their cousins were all doing the same thing.
Her own recorded words are that she was 9, possibly she had hit puberty then but thats pretty unusual. And as A’isha admits thats the minimum age for marriage for women in various islamic schools of thought precisely because of Muhammeds example. Heres a more neutral source for the Afghanistan parliaments statement that banning child marriage is “un-islamic”.
Since becoming a monk or a nun is one form of worship, a restriction on becoming one is a restriction on worship.
That is not true for all sects of Buddhism.
You’re proving yet again exactly how aware you are of what you’re talking about: not very. The practices of obeisance do not require the object of worship to be supernatural. At any rate, there is a wide practice of worshiping one manifestation of Buddha, Kwan Yin, as a goddess, a supernatural entity able to answer prayers.
My main point, though, is that you said you respect Buddhism although its founder abandoned his family and although some of its practitioners today murder others for not being Buddhist.
Weren’t the Crusaders also keeping themselves a bit busy by raping Muslim women and even women they just thought might be Muslims, not to mention the way they were treating Jewish women?
For example, note that in England it wasn’t until 1875 that the age of consent was raised to 13; previously it had been set around 10-12 years of age in common law.
In most US states, the age of consent was 10 years as late as 1880, while in Delaware at that time it was as low as 7.
Buddhism is certainly not perfect when it comes to equality of women. However men and women visit the temple together, there is no separate prayer area for women as is common in most forms of Islam. It’s true that Buddhist nuns are supposed to be subordinate to male monks in most forms of Buddhism, like I said its not perfect.
But lets look at the very clearly spelled out inferiority of women in Islam:
Quran (2:228) - “and the men are a degree above them [women]”
Quran (4:11) - (Inheritance) “The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females” (see also verse 4:176).
Quran (2:282) - (Court testimony) “And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not found then a man and two women.”
And then there’s the Quran verse making is clear its lawful to have sex with slaves that you capture in war:
Quran (33:50) O Prophet (Muhammad)! Verily, We have made lawful to you your wives, to whom you have paid their Mahr (bridal money given by the husband to his wife at the time of marriage), and those (captives or slaves) whom your right hand possesses - whom Allah has given to you…
12 year old girls can get married in Massachusetts with parental or judicial consent. 13 in New Hampshire. 14 in Texas. Regardless of consent laws (16-18 nationwide barring some Romeo and Juliet laws), marriage provides consent.
So it’s legal for a 12 year old girl, in the United States, in 2016, to be married and have sex with her husband. How’s that shake up your spinal column?