It’s the belief that the Christian Church has replaced Israel as “God’s chosen people,” and that all of the promises made to Israel by God in the Bible have now been shifted to Christianity. Judaism, in replacement theology, is now just a heretical remnant abandoned by God.
Such people exist. I’ve met them. They don’t strike me so much as malicious or intentionally bigoted so much as just really naive.
The only Doper I know of to ever defend Jack Chick was His4Ever. (I don’t think she made the transition when the board went pay, though, did she?)
PF:I’d cry too if I admired someone who had sex [with] a nine year old girl.
How do you feel about your admiration for someone who put the civilians of a conquered enemy under saws and harrows of iron and burned them in a brick kiln? Or your admiration for someone who ordered the mass slaughter of the male children and married women of a conquered enemy, and mass rape of their virgins?
Oh well, you say, those were different historical circumstances and people didn’t apply the rules of warfare the way we do today, etc. etc. Exactly; and they didn’t apply the age-of-consent laws in Muhammad’s day the way we do today, either.
As far as we can tell from tradition and history, Muhammad consummated his marriage with his wife Ayesha when she was nine years old, with the full approval of their society and community, and probably at the request of her own family. Child marriage was by no means an unheard-of custom in the Middle East of the seventh century, and there were plenty of Christians and Jews who also practiced it.
That’s not to argue relativistically that we have to approve of such customs from our perspective of today, any more than we have to approve the bloodthirsty genocidal slaughters that leaders like Moses and David were accustomed to. But we do have to recognize the difference in impact that such actions had in societies where they were the norm, as opposed to the impact they’d have among us today.
So quit going around calling Muhammad a “pedophile” as though he were somebody who’d been caught raping a grade-schooler last week. If you don’t, Muslims have every right to come back at you with the accusation that Moses was a genocidal baby-killer and rapist. (Most Muslims, of course, having far more knowledge of and respect for Jewish historical figures than you have for Muslim ones, would never dream of doing such a thing; you’ve got the ignorance and bigotry all on your side in this instance.)
Between these two new tracts, this is my favorite bit, at the end of Squatters*—
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do here, so I drew in an extra box, “ Against Jesus But Without All That Sin And Lake Of Fire Stuff.” So I’m covered! Woot.
For Date, I wrote in, “no thanks.” Shudder.
*(the which title I choose to pronounce “Shkvotters,” followed by “Now is de time ven ve vitness”)
You can name-call all you want. Here’s the Webster’s definition of a pedophile:
“An adult who is sexually attracted to a child or children.”
We can assume that Muhammad was sexually attracted to the child, Aisha, as he married her when she was six years old and gave her the old in-out, in-out when she was nine.
The guy was a pedophile. Whether pedophilia is morally aberrant or not is your own decision.
After you’re done calling me an “ass” and telling me that my post was “crap,” I want you all to observe the fact that nobody can respond to the truth here. Muhammad had sex with a prepubescent girl. When he was fifty-three years old.
What we have in response to what I’ve said is a scattering of meaningless insults towards me and silence. Silence because unlike some of the blatantly opinionated things I’ve shared with the community on these boards, the Hadith quote about Muhammad and Ayesha is irrefuteable and unadulterated.
You can do two things here: You can, as Kimstu has done, offer a contextual explanation for Muhammad’s pedophilic behavior, giving examples of how it relates to other religious figures, putting it in some kind of perspective or another. This is interesting and contributes to the discussion.
what’s the point of trying to reason with you when it’s obvious you don’t want to, that it’s obvious that you sit there with your smug righteousness? No matter what we say to you, you’ll ignore it and pop up with the same nonsense in another thread.
Actually, the veracity of the Hadith is doubted. Not everyone believes that all the Hadith are true. Particularly since they were compiled after his death, amid schisms and a political climate which did try to discredit a lot of what Mohammad had said - such as who would succeed him, and then, as now, people sling dirt at their opponents.
PaulFitzroy:Here’s the Webster’s definition of a pedophile: “An adult who is sexually attracted to a child or children.”
Here’s the Webster’s definition of genocide: “The deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”
PaulFitzroy:The guy was a pedophile. Whether pedophilia is morally aberrant or not is your own decision.
Moses was a genocidal baby-killer. Whether genocidal baby-killing is morally aberrant or not is your own decision.
PaulFitzroy: * I want you all to observe the fact that nobody can respond to the truth here. Muhammad had sex with a prepubescent girl. When he was fifty-three years old. *
I want you all to observe the fact that nobody can respond to the truth here. Moses ordered all the innocent male children of a conquered enemy slaughtered, along with their mothers and all other married women, and ordered the rape of all the virgins. (Some of those virgin girls were probably prepubescent too, by the way: “But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:18).)
I don’t think we can assume that, even if the account of their marriage and its consummation is 100% accurate. Marrying someone just because you’re sexually attracted to them is a fairly modern idea, and most people of the time would have considered it a rather foolish thing to do. If Mohammad had some other reason for marrying Aisha (money, politics, etc.) then it would make strategic sense for him to marry her and consumate that marriage as soon as possible even if she were much younger than he would have liked.
I don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding Mohammad and Aisha’s marriage so I don’t know what his motivations might have been, but I think it’s at least as reasonable to assume that he forced himself to get the consumation over with because otherwise their marriage would have little legal standing than it is to assume that he really enjoyed it. Not that this makes having sex with a child any more acceptable from a modern perspective, but it would make Mohammad, by definition, not a pedophile.
PaulFitzroy:You can, as Kimstu has done, offer a contextual explanation for Muhammad’s pedophilic behavior, giving examples of how it relates to other religious figures, putting it in some kind of perspective or another.
But you’re persistently missing the point of my contextual argument, which is that it’s meaningless to apply modern psychological and criminal terms out of context to religious and historical figures.
If you’re going to call Muhammad (the vast majority of whose sexual relations were with adult women, btw) a “pedophile” because he conformed to accepted custom in consummating a marriage with a nine-year-old girl, then you also have to call, say, Adam and Eve sexual exhibitionists because they walked around naked. Moses, of course, was a paranoid schizophrenic who hallucinated conversations with flaming shrubbery, and we’ve already covered the pathology of his bloodthirsty mass murders and rapes, as well as those of King David (although we left out those of Joshua). Jephthah, of course, was a filicidal monster who deliberately slew his own daughter. Other brutal acts of terrorism, murder, and genocide by Biblical figures presented as heroic leaders are too numerous to name.
In fact, Muhammad’s “pedophilia” pales in comparison to some actions of these perverts and psychopaths among the Biblical Jews. Honestly, Paul, aren’t you ashamed of yourself for admiring bloodthirsty criminals and sickos like these? I think you need to run away into a corner and cry.
Either that or show a little common sense when it comes to applying modern labels to historical figures. Just because you get gleeful jollies out of calling Muhammad a “pedophile” doesn’t make it a valid argument, and it definitely makes you look like an ass.
As I noted in the link above, the bride was daughter of the first adult male convert to Islam and the man who would become the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr himself was by all accounts an exceedingly clever politician with many strong ties within the all-important Quraysh tribe in Mecca. Hence his engineered succession after Muhammed’s death as a more acceptable candidate to hold the new community together than the volatile, polarizing Ali.
Prophetic visions aside, the marriage was definitely political in nature. Similarily with Muhammed’s marriage to a daughter of Umar ( the second Caliph ). Also similarily was the marriage of two ( successively ) of Muhammed’s daughters to the man who became the third Caliph, Uthman. The fourth Caliph, Ali, was of course married to yet another of his daughters.
None of the rest of his brides were prepubescent, though a couple were apparently in their late teens ( freed slaves ). Most were around his own age. If Muhammed had some driving predilection for the younger set, it certainly doesn’t come across clearly in the historical record. Most of his later marriages come across as charitable/political in one form or another and it is worth noting that while he seems to have produced several children with his first wife, he produced only one other child with his later wives, a son who died, with one of the aforementioned ex-slaves.
See, I doubt that. I think it is far more reasonable to think he had sex with a just barely pubescent girl.
What I mean is…and this is all in keeping with the blessing of his society and her family on his marriage…he was very likey engaged to her when she was six and married her when she “became a woman”. When she was impregenable.
The idea that a girl was marriagable when she had had here first period was hardly unique to Mohammad’s society. Certainly just as common to anceint Hebrew societies.
And I think it’s more than reasonable to say that’s what happened here. Which is why I reject the “pedophile” label. He didn’t see a passing 6 year old and think “I want me some of that”. He did what was common and contracted a marriage with a family he thought would provide him with a good wife. And when she was ready for marriage (see above) he married her.
She was ready to provide him with children. At least that is what I will contend given the socialty approval. And that was enough for him to marry her. Given the provided definition, based on sexual attraction…no, I don’t think he qualifies.
Anybody else wondering how the Vatican is managing to control Russia and China?
Imean, I wasn’t aware that Catholicism was that influential in Communist atheist states, and I always thought that the Russian orthodox church would be the big church power in the new Russia.
betenoir:He didn’t see a passing 6 year old and think “I want me some of that”. He did what was common and contracted a marriage with a family he thought would provide him with a good wife.
Or perhaps, as Tamerlane noted, he accepted the matrimonial overtures of a family that, for political and personal reasons, wanted to be connected with him.
Fair enough. But then my point was not so much how it was contracted but that it was within social norms and not based on some dubious sexual prediliction on his part. So we are essentially in agreement, no?
You’re against the war, but you’re for the troops?
I got given a copy of the all-time classic Dark Dungeons yesterday at a gaming convention, but I don’t think that really counts - they were being given out for the comedy value.
We also had a good chuckle at the thought of a meeting of Chick’s Church of Jesus Christ, Asshole where the congregation would be asked to pray for Brother Ellis, “a true brother in Christ who bought three hundred copies of the tract and set out to save so many misguided souls!” Meanwhile, we’ve got 25 copies in the charity auction and are busily bidding for the right to burn/shred/pulp/wipe our backside upon them.
