No worries, I almost missed the response. I only re-visited the thread to see how it was moving along and to my surprise…
Thanks for your approval, still haven’t gotten a satisfactory response from ** iiandyiii** why he thinks the practise is defensible.
Money and sex can be motivation to act, but it depends on what that act is in obtaining money and sex. I would say that anything that harms another person is bad, and anyone capable and remorseless to commit, murder or theft to obtain money, or rape to obtain sex, is a bad person.
Religion will give you additional definitions of a bad person, such as homosexuals, or non-believers, and then give you permission to murder those people in the name of God. Someone blinded by faith, may at heart be a good person, but may not question killing someone he has been told is a bad person. It is hardly arbitrary.
I have no idea what this is referring to. It might just be bad memory (and missing the right posts when I scanned through it), but could you link to the posts in question?
Not to speak for anyone else, but there are larger issues at play here, namely that condemnations of traditional practices and social structures have long been excuses for imperialism in many of the places where FGM is practiced, and the local sensitivity to such condemnations today can be very high. This doesn’t excuse anything, but it does suggest that alternative strategies might be better to use if we are trying to go for a more holistic approach of improving the general quality of life in the world. To be honest, though, if you asked me what those strategies would be in this case I’m not sure I could give a helpful answer. My opinion of any form of circumcision is pretty bad as well.
A professor I admire very much (who also happens to be a priest) once said of religion that it has two great powers: the power to cast other people as damned or worthy of damnation; and the power to expand our moral imaginations so that we might conceive of people who are our adversaries or competitors, but nevertheless are not our enemies. Religion can offer additional definitions of bad people, but it can also offer additional definitions of neighbor. Often these two impulses have intertwining influence in communities and even in individuals.
In other cases, I am not sure why being blinded by faith is different than being blinded by greed or lust, or why succumbing to hunger or the desire for power so that you ignore the humanity of others makes one an inherently bad person, but a person who succumbs to religious motivations to ignore the humanity of others can still inherently be a good person. Can you expand on this?
It is foolish to compare women rights in India vs Pakistan. All the cases of crimes against women in India receive a lot of attention and have routinely led to stricter laws and allocation of more resources.
Pakistan on the other hand has done the opposite. In fact, Pakistan law allows the murders of women to walk free if the family of the victim forgives them. And mostly, the killers are members of the family who kill their mothers/daughters out of shame.
Around 1,000 Pakistani women are killed every year by their families in honor killings, according to Pakistani rights group the Aurat Foundation.
The true figure is probably many times higher since the Aurat Foundation only compiles figures from newspaper reports. The government does not compile national statistics.
Campaigners say few cases come to court, and those that do can take years to be heard. No one tracks how many cases are successfully prosecuted.
Even those that do result in a conviction may end with the killers walking free. Pakistani law allows a victim’s family to forgive their killer.
But in honor killings, most of the time the women’s killers are her family, said Wasim Wagha of the Aurat Foundation.
Now, this is a simple flaw in the law that can be amended to prevent the killers from walking free. Could you ever imagine a law like this in India? However, Pakistan fails to change this law probably because there is enough support for honor killings in their society.
Further, cases of violence against families and children to stop female education are a direct result of fundamentalist practices of Islam in parts of Pakistan. Would you find such practices in India?
Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai was shot in the face because she wanted to go to school. Clearly there is enough support for Islamic fundamentalism in Swat Valley to allow such incidents to take place on a routine basis.
The 7/7 bombings in London, England were carried out by four British Islamist men. Intact, some of them were born and educated in England. Clearly they came from a democratic society, with an advanced economy and standard of living.
British society still has far, far less violence than those other societies we’re speaking of. In fact, there’s a lot less violence, statistically, in the UK than in America, even though the UK has a far larger percentage of Muslims than the US. So the statement is correct, even when taking various terrorist attacks into account.
We are not talking about overall violence. Clearly, much of the gang violence in Chicago has nothing to do with religion.
Here, I gave a specific example of home-grown Islamic terror that originated within a democratic and well-developed society. Bombings on the streets and subways are not common in London. So, this instance of Islamic terror was a significant event and a clear example of Islamic fundamentalism within British society.
We’re talking about tomndebb’s quote – that “When the society has established various levels of democracy and an advanced economy, the people living in it tend to behave in less barbarous ways, regardless of the religion.” This is true – Muslims (and members of all other religions) in the UK are statistically far less violent than Muslims (and others) in non-first-world countries.
It was an isolated incident that doesn’t tell us anything about Islamic society in the UK as a whole. Islamic bombings are not common in London.
Cite? And why Sri Lanka? Muslims are less than 10% of Sri Lanka.
I’ve read extensively about it. I oppose Muslim extremism, in the UK and elsewhere.
Isolated incidents like this tell us pretty much nothing about the community at large, any more than an abortion-doctor shooting in the US tells us about Christians in the US.
You were defending the position - “hardly any Muslim violence in developed countries”. What is the % muslim population in UK and US? In UK it is 4%.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that the 4% muslim population in UK has caused less terror than the 10% muslim population in Sri Lanka, a much poorer country. You made the first claim didn’t you? Cite?
There have been attacks on the Muslims in SL but there have never been major retaliations. There have been no cases of Islamic terror in SL on the same level as the London bombings.
Actually, abortion doctor shootings tell us a lot about Christians in the US. It is pressure from the religious public that has lead to laws being passed that close down access to abortion for millions of women in the US.
It would also be fair to say that Christianity was responsible for blocking stem cell research in the US and for the blocking of contraception (e.g. condoms) in parts of Africa suseptible to the spread of HIV.
I made the statement about violence in general, not about terrorism. The crime stats for various religious demographics are not easy to find, and impossible (as far as I can tell) for countries like Sri Lanka. The murder rate in the UK is about 1 per 100,000 (and about 4.7 for the US). Specifics by demographics are very hard to find, but according to this link (not exactly friendly towards Muslims), Muslims in the UK commit crimes at about three times the rate of the UK as a whole. So as an estimate, the UK murder rate for Muslims is about 3. In troubled Muslim areas, like Iraq or the Palestinian territories, the murder rate is around 8.
Thus my statement that Muslims in western countries like the UK are less violent than Muslims in troubled, poor countries.
I don’t think murder rates (or crime rates) always correlate well with religion or poverty. For example, Bangladesh, a very poor Muslim country has a murder rate of 2.7 and based on your figures, appears to be much less violent that USA as a country, and British Muslims (estimate 3 per 100,000).
So, in this case, Bangladeshi Muslims appear to be much less violent than British Muslims. And do take into account that population of Bangladesh is 156.6 million…
2.7 is not “much less” than 3. My statements were about violence, not just terrorism, and murder rates were the best estimate for rates of violence I could find (I couldn’t find country-by-country rates of overall violent crime).
If you haven’t seen it, last Friday on Bill Maher’s HBO show Affleck and Maher got into a very heated debate about whether Islam is a different sort of religion in practice and that liberals are failing in refusing to denounce it.
I stand with Maher on this. Despite the rare killing of abortion providers, Christianity is not a violent religion. Maybe 400 years ago it was, but not now and not for a long time. The same goes for freedom of speech, treatment of women, treatment of minorities, etc. Islam is the only major religion that openly practices this sort of repression. Not all Muslims, of course, but a significant minority does, and a majority refuse to denounce the practices.
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The religions have not changed. The Bible still retains the same texts professing the commanded slavery of conquered people by God, the stoning of disobedient children, the moral reasoning of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth”, etc. If you agree that the practice of Christianity use to be different, then you should also agree that religion is not the independent variable here.
To address two points you made about Christianity, as it’s practiced today, not being as violent or openly discriminatory towards minorities as Islam; Take Uganda. Uganda passed it’s Anti-Homosexuality Act just this year. The bill called for the death penalty for homosexuals, but was amended to life-imprisonment due to the threat of losing aid from western countries . Uganda has a 4/5 Christian majority, and has an electoral government. The most prominent justifications for this bill have been religious.
What is your point? You point to one country where a religion other than Islam is used to ugly ends. You point to one Christian country that is as bad as many Islamic countries on just one metric. Just what do you think this says about Islam and Christianity?
Piffle. Crimes against women in India may provoke some people to promote laws against those actions in some of the more developed regions of the country. They continue, unabated and with no serious governmental interference in the less developed regions. I suspect that you read a few stories from the last couple of years which happened to have been reported outside India where India finally moved against the women’s attackers, (apparently responding to pressure from the outside world). However, this sort of thing has been going on for many years and this response is recent. In the mean time, honor killings (Muslim and Hindu) and dowry killings, (primarily Hindu), and acid attacks have continued with not much more than scolding from the courts and parliament.
This is silly. Utterly silly.
Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski, and others were all people who were born and raised in Christian environments in the U.S. Anders Breivik was born and raised in Norway and, at one point, freely joined the Lutheran church. Robert Cottage, Martyn Gilleard, Nathan Worrell, and Neil Lewington are all anti-Muslim Brits whose only difference from the subway bombers was that they got caught before their attacks instead of after, (and David Copeland actually made successful attacks). One can find violent nutcases anywhere, members of any group.
My statement explicitly noted that the people living in more democratic societies with advanced economies tend to be less barbarous. I made no silly claim that a more democratic society or a society with a more equitable economy would eliminate all forms of violence. Muslims living in France, the UK, Germany, Spain, and other European nations are, as a group, less violent than Muslims, (or Christians or anyone else), living in Third World countries. Their religion does not appear to override the surrounding culture to inspire them to be violent.
Cherry-picking persons and events as though they represented some great truth about a group when all the other evidence regarding the group points in the opposite direction makes no sense.
My point was expressed explicitly both in the OP’s quoted text and my rebuttal. The OP stated Christianity (as it is practiced today) is no longer as violent or as openly discriminatory as Islam (as it is practiced today). I gave a clear counterexample to this.
The fact is indicative, however, that religion is not the primary factor, despite supporters of the bill suggesting otherwise, when compared to western countries. The fact that you don’t see bills like this being proposed in western countries is evidence that Christianity is at least not the sole, or predominant, reason for this discrimination and lust for violence. The same sound reasoning should be applied to Islam.
Much of the “honor killings” in Pakistan goes unpunished because of a specific law in the legal system that they refuse to ammend. One can be not-charged for murder if the victim’s family forgives the murderer. So, if a brother kills his sister in Pakistan, and the parents permit the murder and forgive the brother, then there is no punishment for the brother. This is the Diyat and Qisas law.
This my friend is the big difference that you ignored while continuing to attack me personally. Could you find me a similar provision in Indian law? Could you find me a single piece of evidence to suggest that this problem of honor killings is the same in India and Pakistan.
Acid attacks and dowry killings have nothing to do with religion. These are “crimes” just like murder and rape. You appear to be equating India with Pakistan - which is an utterly foolish thing to do. India has a homicide rate of 3.7 (per 100,000) which is even lower than the US rate of 4.7. Needless to say, the rate is much lower than Pakistan.
With a very strong independent media, growing economy and increasing education (especially for women)- India is bound to completely eliminate crimes and discrimination against women with the next decade. Only a fool would compare problems in India to that in Pakistan.
Throwing together a much of names without any context makes no sense and is not even relevant to this discussion.
Timothy Veigh was seeking revenge against the Feds. What does that have to do with religion?
David Copeland was terrorist and was diagnosed by five psychiatrists as having paranoid schizophrenia. Again, what does this have to do with any religion?
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? Or are you going to make such baseless claims and continue to string together a bunch of meaningless claims?
How is the 10% muslim population of Sri Lanka more violent than the 4% British Muslim population?
Why would you compare Muslim immigrants across countries? Isn’t that silly? Only an idiot would compare drug related crimes for Muslims in Singapore to drug related crimes for Muslims in Afghanistan. Also interesting would be drinking and driving for Muslims in Pakistan vs UK, France, etc.
Clearly, the bombers, three of them British-born sons of Pakistani immigrants; and one Muslim convert born in Jamaica were highly influenced by Islamic propaganda. The attended training camps in Pakistan and wanted to punish the British for stepping on the Islamic Holy land.