A Saudi judge in Jeddah has again given the world a taste of law under the country’s medieval Sharia system. A 23-year-old pregnant woman who complained about being gang raped has been found guilty of adultery (even though she is not married) and ordered that she serve one year in jail and receive 100 lashes.
The woman said that she accepted a ride from a man who took her to a house in Jeddah where she was gang rape by him and his four friends all night. In an act of mercy, the Saudis will allow her to have the baby first and then flog her.
The woman’s “crime” was revealed at the hospital when she sought an abortion.
Saudi Arabia has repeatedly punished rape victims under Sharia law, here and here..
In a fascinating interview, one reporters explored the view of some Saudi men that it is perfectly appropriate to rape a woman traveling alone or with a non-family member.
Rape victims have been stoned to death or jailed in other countries following Sharia.
Even in more modern nations like Turkey, rape victims can face “honor killings” by family members.
For the full story, click here.
Patty
You’re recipes are brilliant.
Clint,
Dogma doesn’t defeat my statements. You believe what you want. I have history and logic. What I said is true whether you believe it or not. And I have a lot more theologians in my camp than are in the Fundie camp. Hundreds of years worth. Denial is part of the problem with Fundamentalism. If something comes up that contradicts what you’ve been TOLD is the ONLY world view, the typical reaction is reflexive knee-jerk “your wrong, I’m right” statements like you just made. Your example was bad, for one thing. You need to learn what a parable is and how it relates to teaching. Jesus was a teacher and he relied on parables as was common practice in his day and place. Had he been Greek, he’d have used the Socratic method. Parables work on simile, analogy and metaphor being stretched across a fictive framework. A story to illustrate a point directly but usually indirectly as constrained by the simile and metaphoric forms. You’re literalism is showing. I’ve already demonstrated that a literal interpretation of the Bible is a fallacy. I’m not going to repeat myself because it contradicts your “belief” or your misunderstanding of Jesus’ methods and lack of acceptance about the Bible’s history. If you expect capitulation and conversion, you’ll be waiting a long, long time. It’s not my job to undo the bad ideas that have crept into your head, I’ll gladly point the way, but like all things, the heavy mental lifting has to be your effort. But if you just want to try and browbeat dogma about Jesus being THE son of God so you can retain a sense of being “chosen”, you might want to back off that. Say you disagree and let it drop. Retain your illusion of specialness if your ego requires it, but it’s doing you and the rest of the world no favor. Mike and I have both approached this in a logical and historically accurate manner, yet you still tow the line. Rigid thinking. Believe what you want, but a flawed basis for argument won’t fly in here. I’ve seen them fail time and again. It’s not a winning position in a room full of people trained to argue from fact.
Mike,
Thank you for the encouragement. I do enjoy understanding others’ points of view and friendly dialogue.
If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has chosen to reveal Himself in a specific way, don’t you feel that we should accept Him exactly the way He has shown? One cannot know God unless God wants to be known in a specific way. Either Isaac or Ishmael was taken to Mt Moriah to be sacrificed. Moses said it was Isaac, Muhammed said it was Ishmael. Either one is right or both are wrong.
Buddha,
**”Jesus probably didn’t consider himself THE son of God, but A son of God.”
Jesus is not saying worship him, but that his example is the way to find God. It is often distorted by those who wish to demonize “the other”.**
Jesus’ words are quite contradictory to your understanding of Him. It is not “following his example” that allows us to find God, it is putting our trust in what He did on the Cross.
Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life….whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God….whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
He says that He is God’s only Son.
He states that access to God can only be found solely through Him.
His intended meaning makes his view of access to God very narrow. A good teacher doesn’t say these things unless they are perfectly true.
“The mature folks who contribute here speak the universal language (love) fluently.”
—–
Really? Here’s a taste of my Energy Mgmt:
Not all politicians are slime
Not all of the wealthy are elitist
Not all who enjoy success are crooks
Not all religious practice is, by definition, fanatical
Not all troubled children were sexually abused
Not all women are victims AND
…not ALL men are jerks 😉
Happy Valentines!
Mike S.,
Your clarification is duly noted and true. Thank you, sir. I am glad you enjoyed the post.
Buddha,
“not all Zionists are fundamentalists and not all Jewish fundamentalists are Zionists”
I had too many not’s in there and created a double negative.
Buddha,
So there I was digesting lunch, reading a book and then ready to get back on line to address Clint’s comments to me and what happens? You address them in a breathtaking tour de force that not only encompasses the points I was making, but expands upon them exponentially to the point that the topic was sliced, diced and sewed up. The only nitpick I had was that not all Zionists are not fundamentalists and not all Jewish fundamentalists are Zionists. See the Satmar Hassidim and there brother organization the Naturei Cartei. Other than that minor point there was nowhere that I disagreed with either your logic or your history.
However, I do owe Clint an explanation of where I’m coming from because i think that he seems a good person to have around adn as a romantic I tear up for newlyweds.
“Mike,
“any system that believes that only IT has the truth, or that IT knows God’s purpose, is both ignorant and blasphemous.”
But, somehow you do believe that that is the truth. Believing that no one has the truth is still, by implication, a belief that you do.I don’t think any of you are dumb. I think that most (if not all) of you are far more intelligent than me. I haven’t even finished college and may never have an opportunity to do so. It seems that your presuppositions about my beliefs have ruled your dialogue with me. Do I think you are wrong in many ways…yes. But, you feel the same towards me.”
Clint,
Good luck on your marriage and I wish you a long, fruitful and happy life together. We Jews believe that in marriage, one discovers our other half and thus find completion. I hope that comes true for you.
As for the first part of your statement I wasn’t saying that I don’t believe in anything, or that I don’t believe in things that I hold to be true. What I meant was that while personally I have many things I believe in quite strongly, I do so also with the understanding that I could be wrong. The problem that I have with fundamentalists, or with those who follow any “isms,” is their inability to acknowledge that anything in their belief could be wrong. I find that kind of absolutist belief to be both ignorant and blasphemous religiously.
I believe this because if one accepts the concept of a creator of this entire universe, one has to understand that a being such as that is way beyond our understanding. How can that be otherwise? How can we confidently state the Creator’s purposes, when we are dealing with a force beyond human comprehension? How could any finite book fully explain the infinite? Even if you believe that the various holy books were created as God’s message to us humans, the Creator would really have to quite severely shorten the message so it could be comprehended by frail, fallible beings such as we.
Given that, anyone human that state’s he/she “knows” God’s will is arrogant, fraudulent and a blasphemer. The 3 Prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claimed that God spoke through them, not that they necessarily understood God. They knew that it would be blasphemy for them to state otherwise and revered God too much to do so. Yet today we have frauds that claim God speaks through them and tells them to tell us what to do. What is most interesting about these latter day prophets is that much of what they state as God’s word contravenes what the various holy books of their faith expostulate.
Finally, whether or not you finished College is no determinant of how intelligent you are. My father dropped out of school in the 9th Grade and yet he was one of the smartest, well read men I ever met and that’s not a sons’ hero worship. Perhaps too I have had an incorrect, pre-conceived notion of where you are coming from and I apologize for judging you on scant evidence. Please keep returning because all non-Troll points of view are welcome. Intelligence, by the way, is more a factor of a person being open to new thoughts and ideas, even if after mulling them over conceptually they reject them based on sound reasoning.
I should also point out that Jesus probably didn’t consider himself THE son of God, but A son of God. In fact, his deification was done against his express wishes. Again, words have been twisted to Earthly agendas.
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by me.” Jesus is not saying worship him, but that his example is the way to find God. It is often distorted by those who wish to demonize “the other”.
How did Jesus worship? He did so from within. Hmmm . . . now where have I heard that before? cough cough Buddha cough cough. “When you see my life and how I communicate with the Heavenly Father, you should know how you too need to communicate with Spirit.” Jesus plainly said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
Those are the words of A son of God, not THE. Articles can be important.
Clint
Should I ever create that scenario I’m equipped. The language is universal, “love”, and all that it encompasses, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance.
I sincerely invite you to keep coming back.
The mature folks who contribute here speak the universal language fluently. Peace
CCD,
“What’s vital to me is the present.”
Then eat drink and be merry. I hope you never have to comfort a rape victim with “right and wrong” not working for you.
Buddha,
Jesus was far from a good teacher/man if he was remotely inaccurate in his claim to be the only way to God. That is the height of arrogance. I don’t have perfect knowledge whatsoever. But if I claim that Jesus isn’t necessarily who He said He was, then I really have no business accepting any of his teachings. Perfect knowledge cannot be attained, but enough knowledge can.
Thank you for congratulating me. I appreciate the kind words. I’m not aggressive because God usually humbles me when I am and makes me look like a complete idiot. Thanks for the civility.
Clint
You stopped aiming where you pick and choose to put your personal energy?
I don’t know about eternal value. What’s vital to me is the present.
What am I creating right now. Good luck with right and wrong, that doesn’t work for me. It will fail you at some point.
CCD,
Thank you. One lives to be of service.
I stopped aiming. Someone hit the proverbial target on my behalf. Variety is great when it comes to things short of eternal value. Contradictory truths mean either one or both are wrong. But that’s a bit politically incorrect given our nation’s religious plurality.
BIL
Nice wow, that’s why I keep coming back to drink at this cyber saloon.
Clint,
The facts of human nature are this – anyone who says they have all the answers is a charlatan out to control you or the victim of a charlatan who is out to control you. To salve any argument you may have that I don’t know what I’m talking about, you should know I have a Pentecostal mega-church in the family. I know how it works from the inside out. In far more detail than I’d like.
Your statement that “Believing that no one has the truth is still, by implication, a belief that you do.” That’s semantic and childish. It’s the equivalent of “are too” “am not”. It’s belief over logic and fact and it’s mathematically untrue. Your false assumption is about truths and a state of perfect knowledge. That being said, not all Fundamentalists are as I am about to describe, but the majority of them I know are. And I know hundreds. My sample space is valid.
Belief in absolute truths are not the same as the belief in an externally dispensed “Divine” absolute truth. That’s the distinction. You can ferret out absolute truths with logic and ethics, a human endeavor, but as I’ve stated before perfect knowledge is not possible as a mathematical fact (see the works of Kurt Gödel). THAT can be proven with pencil and paper. You can disbelieve that all you like if you want to be considered delusional. If you want to argue that, go to a math blog. But anyone who says they have an exclusive lock on God’s thoughts and intentions is lying. Plain and simple. They lay claim to perfect knowledge. A God by definition is not constrained by the rules of the physical universe. We are in and of the material world. As humans, we would not have a proper frame of reference to understand a God by any name. It’d be like a fish trying to comprehend quantum mechanics. And before you say “He told them to write it and keeps them from changing His word”, that’s an appeal to authority and specious reasoning. It’s also wishful thinking considering it doesn’t take much scholarly work to show that the words of the various gospels have indeed changed over time. Either through mistranslation, direct edits like the King James version or by editorial selection.
The Fundamentalists assertion is that their version of the Christian God is the sole provider of not just absolute truths, but absolute truth. I can’t count the times I’ve heard them say the equivalent of “If you don’t believe as we do, then you’re going to Hell.” I even had an uncle tell me as a 13 y.o. that I was going to Hell. Out of the blue. No warning, no run up discussion. He was there to tell me I’d been judged. He isn’t the only one to try that either, not by a long shot. And you know what the Book says about judging others. Not persuade me of the validity of his positions, but using a threat. He wasn’t the only one to try that tactic either, not by a long shot. This is usually followed by a display of what this means to them – you’re NOT ONE OF US. You’re fair game for whatever shitty behavior they want to act out. From “we’re not going to talk to them or treat them with respect due a human” to “let’s go beat up some Niggers and Jews and Catholics, we’ll beat on some Muslims if we can find any”. I’ve seen the whole range. In person. Yeah, not even close to Jesus’ teachings. He was a live and let live kinda guy. What Fundamentalism is is pure ego and arrogance. The feeling that “We’re chosen”. “We’re special”? No, not really, unless you count ego worship as being special. The “chosen” mindset is rooted in “I”. Not the Bible as a tool and a guide to seek truths but as the granter of the divine equivalent of God Himself giving you a “gold star”. That’s a reward, “salvation”. Your life is somehow more valid than others because of your blind belief that you’re Sky Dad’s favorites and solely worthy of His reward. Entitled not only to be the sole recipients of His mercy, but the sole dispensers of His word. There’s a problem with that. That’s pure ego and as we’ve discussed many times the evils of the world can all be traced to ego. And lest you think I’m picking on Christians alone, you are not the only ones guilty of this error and fallacy. I point to the Jewish and Islamic counterparts in Fundamentalism as examples – the Zionists and the Wahabists.
Fundamentalist Christianity is also based in a lie.
As a Fundamentalist, the Bible is the literal “Word of God”. That comes from a place of extreme arrogance and historical inaccuracy. The arrogance is illustrated above. The historical inaccuracy is that the Bible was not written by God as the Fundamentalist stance states. It was written by men, many of whom never met Jesus and had third or fourth hand knowledge at best. Much of it was written well after the Jesus’ life. In fact, the authorship of the Revelation of John has been perpetually questioned as possibly having more than one writer, not a single source, and it didn’t show up until at least a generation after Jesus was dead. Hardly fresh or reliable as evidence of Jesus’ teachings, but instead relies on John’s assertion that the message was delivered by an angel specifically to him. In essence, the appeal to authority and the his being “chosen” again. The New Testament was assembled by men out of many gospels that are out there, all of which were written by men. Look into the Council of Nicea, particularly the Second Council. God isn’t even the editor of the Bible, much the the author. The prejudices and political agendas of those who sat on the Council shows clearly in their selection of gospels and their infighting is documented. Here’s a hint: much of it didn’t have to with Heavenly concerns like preserving the core tenets of Jesus (although that was a topic that floated around Revelation), but Earthly concerns like consolidating Papal power. And your beloved “Book of Revelation”? Most didn’t wanted included in the New Testament because it was counter to the idea of a just and loving God as espoused by Jesus. As an artistic metaphor for the dangers of evil/ego worship and perseverance under repression, it’s fine, but as a theological document to base your world view on, it’s insane. And to use it to divine the future? That’s even crazier. It’s self-destructive. It’s called “self-fulfilling prophecy” when you act on it as fact instead of metaphor, which by the way, it was. Early Christians knew that not just John, but the other apocrypha out at the time (and there are MANY more than one) were metaphors for the struggle to maintain belief under persecution. At that time, it was the Christians on the receiving end of the persecution stick in Asia. The contemporary Christians of the time knew this. Many of the objections to John’s little tale historically as to it being included in the New Testament are based on the possible misuse and abuse of the metaphor. It’s not a new argument. They were having it at Nicea and have been ever since. Thomas Jefferson excluded it from the Bible he edited for many of these reasons and it’s excluded in other versions of the Bible as well. Well, when you construe a metaphor to be a map for a plan of action directly given to you by God Himself, that’s both abusive Jesus’ teachings as we can ween from those gospels written by those close enough to Him to get at least parts of the message correct. And a little insane. Welcome to Fundamentalism. It creates false values that are totally contrary to the core of Jesus’ message that “God is Love.” It’s oxymoronic that we are all God’s children and he loves us all, but some more so than others, and the rest are all going to die in torment and spend eternity suffering. It has no internal consistency. An all loving God is not exclusionary or a torturer. Otherwise, He’s not all loving, is He? That version of God sounds like a spiteful little shit killing the ants in his ant farm because they didn’t build the tunnels to His specs.
On top of that, you are all just as guilty of trying to gain converts through coercion as the most militant of Muslims or Zionists. As mespo pointed out early, enforced virtue is no virtue. Yeah, you can call it proselytization all you want. If someone doesn’t want to hear your message, none of you have a problem trying to force the issue in my experience. Again with the ego. You want to use Christ’s teachings as a guide living a better life, I’m all for it. He was a wise teacher and a good man. But when you misuse the parts of the Bible that are known to not be the direct teachings of Jesus as a weapon or a justification for bad actions, you really missed the point of what Jesus said just as much as you missed the nature of the Book of Revelation.
Fundamentalism is the route for those willing to give up their free will, a gift from God in almost every religious tradition, to the will of other men who misuse the Book. At it’s worst, it’s done for pure profit like that asshat Robert Tilton. At best, it’s cynical in that I’ve talked to Pentecostal preachers, away from the flock and in debates much like this and heard more than one say something like this. “Yes, I know it’s conflicted, but my job to make them feel safe and guided. I know I’m babysitting a lot of people who are basically dysfunctional and lost at some level.” That last sentence by the way is a DIRECT quote. How’s that for arrogance and ego?
Your assumptions about the nature of truth and the history of the Bible are built on a foundation of lies, misrepresentation and misinterpretation. It makes you pawns, not free thinkers who embrace love as the standard, but users of exclusion. A tool that divides, not joins. Jesus was a carpenter, not a fence.
I endorse your right to believe as you wish – up to the point you want to force those beliefs on others or cause harm, but it is unwise to speak of open mindedness when your position is clearly based in something else entirely.
Your assumption is a corner on perfect knowledge, a mathematical impossibility. The assertion that no one has perfect knowledge has no assumption, but is instead based on mathematical fact. Disbelieve math at your own risk. Gravity can kill you whether you believe in it or not.
And on a personal note, congratulations on your recent marriage. I wish you and your wife nothing but happiness. Don’t take any of the above as a personal attack, but as a refutation of your assertion. If you think that was my war face, you need to read some of my past exchanges with Bron. You actually seem far more reasoned than many and certainly less aggressive. But on perfect knowledge, you are – pardon the pun – fundamentally mistaken.
Clint
You know it, “We reap what we’ve sown” it can’t be any other way.
Unless grace enters into it.
I have considered how very badly Souls have wanted to incarnate here.
I truthfully don’t know other than to think, “If you want to know how your past lives were lived just look at your current life.” “If you want know how your future lives will be just look at your current actions.”
Honestly Clint you and I are aiming at different targets. Variety is the spice of life.
CCD,
“Personal energy management” That’s a new one for me. I wonder if that would comfort some families in Darfur.
“Missed the mark”
Already have, and I missed just like you.
Clint
“Sin” translated from Greek, when the archers “missed the mark.”
Just load another arrow, and take another whack at it.