Am I supposed to believe religion is a force for morality, when I see so many examples of it more being a force for mindless obedience to arbitrary rules? This story out of Pakistan is disturbing in many ways.
Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a “fanatic”, who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said today.
Ms Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head.
Executed for not having a piece of cloth on top of her head; what god looks down on our world from his cosmic perspective and thinks that is an important concern for humanity? Allah, apparently; I can find commandments in the Bible that make similar demands.
Mr Sarwar appeared relaxed and calm when he told a television channel that he had carried out God’s order to kill women who sinned. “I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment,” he said, adding that Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. “I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again,” he said.
I’m sure religion’s defenders will shout long and loud that this guy Sarwar is simply an isolated lunatic, and that if he’d been an atheist he would still have been a monster. True enough; one asshole might be an exception, and godlessness is no guarantee of goodness, but a series of incidents is a pattern, and we have to look at who is inciting it.
General Musharraf, whose support for the US-led war on terror has caused consternation among Pakistan’s hardline elements, has promised to address women’s rights as part of his more moderate agenda.
But analysts said that the murder of the female minister highlighted the failure of his government in curbing Islamic extremism. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a recent report said that violence against women had increased alarmingly, with some of the incidents incited by Mullahs opposed to women’s emancipation.
Face it, everyone. Religion is not a source of moral behavior. It’s a source of tribalism and obedience to authority, which sometimes coincides with respectable morality, but isn’t necessarily associated with it. We have to find our virtue in one true thing, our common humanity, and these ancient superstitions actually interfere with instruction in how to be good by encrusting it with nonsense.
(via Pro-Science)
“I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment.”
Sick. Of course he has no regrets. He has no conscience!
Don’t be stupid. Of course he has a conscience. It’s just that his conscience tells him that what he did was right.
The real issue is that it’s not really possible for a civilized nation to coexist peacefully with nations stuck in the thrall of medieval societal control systems. Europe had better figure that out soon, or their dealings with the Middle East/US are going to become much more problematic.
But doing evil while claiming a religion is still doing evil. Just because someone blabs about “God told me too” after they shoot up a public place shouldn’t be a reflection on all religion in general. If an evolutionist does something horrible it isn’t a reflection on all of the scientific community, so when one supposed religious person does something horrible it shouldn’t mean all religion is bad. It just means some idiot thinks he is hearing from a god.
Evil is evil. It comes from every belief and every people group on the planet. If one evil person determines the status of the whole community (one apple in a barrel) then no group or belief is good.
z.
Pakistan: Murdered for fighting polio
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=43292
“It started as another of those “conspiracy theories” — in this case the firm belief among clerics in Bajaur Agency that the drops of polio vaccine given to infants were actually part of a western plot to reduce the population of Muslims. On Friday it ended up with the meticulously planned murder of a surgeon promoting an anti-polio campaign.”
2/15/07: Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot
http://tinyurl.com/yu76az
Now define ‘evil’ in an objective manner. Fool.
Nice try, but no cigar. You need to come to grips with the rottenness of the entire concept of ANYBODY doing something just because they think they heard it from a god. Any relationship such a practice has to ethical behavior is purely accidental.
And if we withdraw the vaccinations, how long before polio is decried as a Western plot to reduce the number of Muslims?
The real issue is that it’s not really possible for a civilized nation to coexist peacefully with nations stuck in the thrall of medieval societal control systems.
The real issue is that groups of people react to subjugation in a lot of ways. America, and the west in general has attacked all of those responses that one could classify as progressive, democratic or socialist, i.e. social systems on par with “civilized” Europe, violently and often when they pop up in the Middle East.
More than that, Europeans hold no great claim to being civilized other than the fact that the great powers haven’t been in direct war with each other for 60 years. Yet they, and the United States have a bad habit of attacking countries outside the “civilized world.
z,
The difference between your evolutionist example and what happened is that a belief in the theory of evolution wouldn’t be a justification for such a crime, but religious beliefs often are. The problem isn’t that the person is X and they did something awful. The issue is that the person unquestioningly believes Y, which justifies doing something awful.
“Just because someone blabs about “God told me too” after they shoot up a public place shouldn’t be a reflection on all religion in general.”
So do you consider it a (positive) reflection on religion if an individual does something good while claiming religious motives? If so, why the double standard? And if not, then you are essentially arguing that there is no correlation between religion and behavior.
Religion has long (always) been the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
And of course god demands that he kills a woman. So there is no prominent man anywhere in Pakistan that is violating some arbitrary Islamic law? Not one male leader in Pakistan drinks alcohol for example?
We can’t understand this guy’s psychology without throwing misogyny in the mix (along with religion, mental illness, etc.).
This is just another case of someone using religion to attempt to justify actions that most thinking people would never consider taking. Why think for yourself when you can let ancient, outdated scribblings do it for you?
“He is basically a fanatic,” Raja Basharat, the Punjab Law Minister, said.
He is basically a serial killer, connected to the deaths of four prostitutes as well. “I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again,” he said [my emphasis].
One of the complaints that I hear is that evolution is a cruel story (and yes, it is). Perhaps we should rename religion as “survival of the sinless” to highlight that activist moral judges like this loser engage in their own form of artificial (and sexual) selection.
Right, Sonja. And in Islamic Pakistan, misogyny in embedded in the culture. Many of you may be familiar with the story of Mukhtar Mai, but those of you who are not can start HERE. The fact that a woman in her position typically would have committed suicide says quite a lot.
If there is a g0d – imagine it as the most sadistic bully in junior high school. g0d and its buddies sit around all eternity thinking up new ways to humiliate the cool crowd wannabees: “how much dumb sh*t will they actually do if I tell them that’s what they have to do to be cool (saved)?”
Apparently almost anything.
The only way I can see to make this kinda stuff happen, is more education. Ecuation tends to breed tolerance, and leseen fundamentalism and misogyny. This is a pattern we see again and again.
However, it’s impossible to force people to be educated, as US throw-backs to similar patterns show.
Thanks for that link Kseniya — it is an horrifying, yet hopeful story.
Did I mention I work in the technology field? Some of the Pakistani men I work with (this in the US) are just wonderful, and others can be patronizing as hell.
Nothing good can come of anything built from lies. Grownups lying to each other and themselves as a personal policy is all wrong. Grownups systematically lying to children is even more wrong. So, yes, all religion is all wrong.
If one evil person determines the status of the whole community (one apple in a barrel) then no group or belief is good.
But it’s not just one evil person. Look at this part PZ quoted:
It’s quite a story, isn’t it Sonja… horrifying, yes, but she is amazing, one of my heroines. She knows that educating women is taking an important step away from the kind of authoritarian patriarchy that utilizes – hell, even conceives of – the punative gang rape of a family member of a defendant. It’s so twisted.
I’ve had similar experiences with south-asian men I’ve met, either in school or in the workplace. Typically they are friendly and gracious, but some use that as a cover for a systemic lack of respect for independent women, or for women in general. It’s disturbing. But, western men do it, too, though it does seem less prevalent here. Or maybe I’m fooling myself about that. I dunno.
Education alone is no answer, and may worsen everything. Think of madrassas and of the idiocies in our educational system (ID, Creationism, PC, zero tolerance).
We each need to hold each other responsible for our actions. The guiding principle is turnabout is fair play.
If you want to kill the speaker because you don’t like her outfit, they I can kill you because I don’t like your attitude. In the Arab world, misogyny, or male supremacy, racism, bigotry, and brutality are common because there is no common moral sense. If they want to inflict their madness on other people, they should understand that other people may decide the rational choice is to inflict their sanity on their enemy’s madness.
Yeah, good point. I used the evolution example because it was the first “non-religious” example that popped into my head. I suppose I should have gone with Atheism or something.
Of course there is a huge correlation between religion and behavior. But PZ is making it sound like this one guy is just another reason why all religion shouldn’t be trusted. PZ probably doesn’t consider all religion good because of someone like Mother Teressa, so why consider all religion bad because of someone like this guy. What I am saying is that positive or negative behavior shouldn’t be a reflection on all religion. Perhaps not even the person’s religion.
z.
In my post, I also mentioned Afghanistan, where the situation for women is much like under the Taliban. See. Scroll down until you get to the article called “Not the Same as Being Equal”.
Among other things the article says:
Mother Teresa is another data point in my thesis that religion is evil.
Z – Piety should never be confused with Goodness. The real correlation is between action and result. Religion is completely optional. Some of the “huge” correlations to which you refer are quite negative, as this thread aptly demonstrates.
Mother Theresa is another reason to consider religion bad.
oops. someone beat me to it.
Yitzak Rabin was also assassinated on religious grounds.
Wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
Here is a better (worse) example of the vileness of religious law. Under Shira and Biblical law I would be under threat of the death penalty for being bi-sexual. Iran has murdered men for being gay. Isn’t that great? There are plenty more examples of this sort of brutal thuggery in the name of religion. Of course being ‘Gods’ law it’s not subject to change or reform. Then they wonder why atheists are so ‘angry’.
You know, I think the common feature of the religious is the belief in hell and that god makes people rot there forever.
Every time someone makes an appeal to the moral goodness of undifferentiated religiousosity (Mitt Romney, e.g.), I understand it as an endorsement for the effectiveness of threats of torture.
I think it’s only fair to point Z to this article.
People are complex, as is life, and the color of reality is an infinitely variable shade of grey. The truth about Mother Theresa is probably somewhere in the middle, not neither as beatifically rosy or as bleakly corrupt as the Vatican, or Hitchens, would have us believe. But it does seem clear that holding her up as an unimpeachable icon of goodness is simplistic and wrong; another triumph of propoganda over truth.
And not neither can I goodly edit mine own silly postsies. Dang!
-For another example of misogyny, driven (of course) by religion, in a supposedly advanced society, and pretty sickening, look here:
At the article headed: “Feminism doesn’t work anywhere”
“The fact that feminism and “equality” are eviscerating societal functionality in countries that have never known any Judeo-Christian tradition indicates how completely dysfunctional it is.”
An American commentator in this site: … http://voxday.blogspot.com/
I strongly suggest readers of these pages go over there and tell them a few things.
They’ve got some really funny ideas about atheists,as well – I’ve already been told that I can’t call anything “wrong” unless it is not factual (!)
So great fun could be had by all …..
Whilst looking at religious insanity.
Hooboy. Vox Day again. Dunno if I can stomach any more…
And I the mistake people are going to make when criticizing the guy is that “he misinterpreted X”. This is NOT how you deal with insane people. All that argument says is that the activity was result of misinterpretation of a rule, that the activity didn’t have any real secular reason to be bad, just that it ‘went against the REAL interpretation’. Blind faith remains as a good thing. Instead the apologists for which ever religion should judge his actions by the same way they pronounce some “inherent” goodness of the “good parts”; by secular reasoning. I know religious folk still contain at least some of it. Otherwise we would see a lot less disagreement within biblical ‘interpretation’ and they would sound a lot less reasonable in many secular aspects, like theft and murder.
In today’s news, another (less extreme, but still ungood) example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385849.stm
To bring it home: for “Egypt”, “Islam”, “Mubarak” and “Kareem Amer”; substitute: “USA”, “Christianity”, “Bush” and “Pharyngula” (or any number of other bloggers & commenters).
Steven Weinberg puts the following spin on the issue:
We all understand crimes that are normally motivated: the thief who steals to fatten his wallet, the murderer who acts from rage at personal insult, or from personal disagreement long festered, the business owner who burns his failing business to collect the insurance. We condemn them, for going outside the rules. But their motives are understandable. What astounds any person in their right mind about this crime is precisely what PZ wrote: she was killed for not wearing a piece of cloth on her head. It takes something like religion to construct an ideological system where that motivates murder.
My argument is that the great problem with morality based on a deity is that is inhuman. As a consequence, the consequences are often inhumane.
I always like something that Pamela Bone once wrote (can’t find it on the web sorry) “If they stop calling us (athiests) immoral, we’ll stop calling them stupid”.
I get the impression that piety is a lot like comedy, in that, the harder you try to look, or even be pious, the worse and worse you get.
Bush has no regrets either.
What everyone in this thread has forgotten is that Condoleeza Rice is helping Pakistan buy F-16s. F-16s are really cool and I’m sure they can help solve this problem.
I suppose the moderate position between letting women wear what they want and murdering them is to just give them lashings or something.
Good men do good things while evil men will do evil things.
Only religion makes good men do evil things.
In today’s news, another (less extreme, but still ungood) example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385849.stm
To bring it home: for “Egypt”, “Islam”, “Mubarak” and “Kareem Amer”; substitute: “USA”, “Christianity”, “Bush” and “Pharyngula” (or any number of other bloggers & commenters).
Not to contradict you, but the charges of insulting Islam seemed to be tacked on as a bit of an after thought. And if the godbags here in the U.S. really want to see what agressive secularism looks like they should check out our middle east allies Egypt and Turkey.
And yet I bet you can’t find one instance of a fundamentalist Christian killing a woman for not wearing something they thought she should or for being involved in politics.
I think the important point is not that evil is committed because of religion, but that it is committed despite religion. It reinforces the idea that religion isn’t necessarily moral or immoral, but indifferent. Which makes it pretty useless in practice.
Just a very small point I’ll mention, I always thought that God and Allah were two words for the same thing, not words denoting seperate dieties. I believe Jesus of Nazareth refered to the beard in the sky as Allaha in Aramaic. I can see that next time some bible bashers knock on my door on Saturday morning we are going to have to have a long discussion on this topic.
You’d lose that bet, because in times and places where the authorities were on the side of the loonies, many such atrocities have occurred. You can thank secularists for the historical advent of governments that have mostly put an end to Christian atrocities. But even in the good ol’ US of A in our era, there certainly have been cases, for example, of Fundie lunatic fathers engaging in violence agasint daughters who dressed the “wrong” way. Not to mention backwoods Mormon polygamists kidnapping teenaged girls to add them to their collection of wives.
That’s a great line. There are many times when I’m arguing with my fundy relatives and they throw out the “Bible is the source of morality” canard. An argument like PZ’s could effectively neutralize this by pointing out the reasons why religion sometimes increases moral behavior and but also sometimes decreases it.
That makes it easy doesn’t it?
I’m not ordinarily a supported of the death penalty but this is one guy who ought to be sent off in search of the virgins.
I always figured religion is just an excuse people use for doing the things they want to do, often the bad things — sure, you can use it as a force for good, also, but that’s mostly about the person and their internal value system and reasoning ability. Religion is a tool, like a Swiss army knife of convenient rationalisations (as well as some good stories and some interesting ideas, which people ignore or not, depending on their moods). Organised religion gets dicier because getting large groups of people together always brings out the crazies and the obsessive followers, etc.
This guy is just like the abortion clinic bomber that was put to death, vowing all the way down death row that he’d do it again and that God would vindicate him in Heaven.
Few things earn my anger more than men oppressing women, and doubly so when they abuse or kill them in the name of religion.
DSM:
The dearth of examples of fundy Christian violence directed at women relative to examples of fundy Muslim violence directed at women is not due to a difference in the desire to do violence to women. It’s due to a difference in the ability to get away with doing violence to women. Christians tend to be concentrated in more-or-less secular nations in which killing a woman because you’re scared of her vagina is generally frowned upon. Muslims tend to be concentrated in religio-fascist nations where such actions are not necessarily considered a bad thing, and may even be actively encouraged (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Of course, if you include violence that doesn’t result in death, the gap between Christian misogyny and Muslim misogyny narrows dramatically. But again, that has more with the difference in opportunities to commit violence against women, rather than with the desire to do so. And it’s certainly not like the West has never seen a serial killer whose trigger is a fanatical religious belief of some kind (which this fellow just might be, as Kristine alludes to).
DSM wrote…
“And yet I bet you can’t find one instance of a fundamentalist Christian killing a woman for not wearing something they thought she should or for being involved in politics.”
And how about the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer)?
http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/
The Salem witch trials? Of course, they were equal opportunity oppressors in that little episode, but it was mostly directed against women.
Or the inquisition in general for that matter.
Or how about from Christian scripture. How about the biblical stories concerning these women… Dinah (Genesis 34), Tamar (2 Samuel 13), the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19), Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11), Vashti (Esther 1), Suzannah (Daniel 13).
Not a pretty picture let me tell you.
Or the whole idea of women being subservient to men by biblical decree (Ephesians 5:20). Turn domestic violence laws in this country back 50 years and you would have plenty of fundy sanctioned violence against women.
One can certainly argue with near certainty that if not for the Enlightenment, and various women’s rights movements, the lives of western women would not be all that much different from those in Pakistan or Saudi. Just a different set of misogynous laws promoted by the male powers that be under the auspices of a different deity.
{parody} But you guys! Religion isn’t what’s wrong. Can’t you spell O-I-L? She must have been covered in oil! Or maybe she invaded her country! Or maybe she was involved in dirty politics and her killer was too crafty to give the real reason he killed her! Or maybe he was just poor, because you don’t see muslims killing people in the rich and inconsequentially secular US right? The particular creede of Islamic belief is just a tool! I mean, are you saying that poor Jainists arn’t murdering people?{/parody}
In the Arab world, misogyny, or male supremacy, racism, bigotry, and brutality are common because there is no common moral sense.
You, sir, are an idiot and a racist.
Just a different set of misogynous laws promoted by the male powers that be under the auspices of a different deity.
Same deity, mostly the same laws.
And of course god demands that he kills a woman. So there is no prominent man anywhere in Pakistan that is violating some arbitrary Islamic law? Not one male leader in Pakistan drinks alcohol for example?
We can’t understand this guy’s psychology without throwing misogyny in the mix (along with religion, mental illness, etc.).
I agree. God wants him to kill people who don’t follow Islamic law, and there are all kinds of laws being broken and people who need killing, but he’s only one man and he can only do so much. Women who make speeches in public particularly bother him, so he’s going to sign up for that.
True…I especially like this quote “Face it, everyone. Religion is not a source of moral behavior. It’s a source of tribalism and obedience to authority, which sometimes coincides with respectable morality, but isn’t necessarily associated with it. We have to find our virtue in one true thing, our common humanity, and these ancient superstitions actually interfere with instruction in how to be good by encrusting it with nonsense.”
Dominic B
My favourite bit of biblical clothing law is from the big book of fun, Leviticus (19-19) where god tells Moses that many sorts of mixtures are wrong (crops, cattle, etc).
The verse ends with god telling Moses that blended fabrics are against holy law. (specifically, linen/wool). It’s mentioned again in Deut. 22:11, along with a rule forbidding a fourth tassel on a square shawl(!)
So god doesn’t want you to mix kinds of fabric – wearing cotton-polyblend shirts may damn you to hell. It’s unclear from the text what the secular punishment for such a horrifying crime should be.
Maybe the secular punishment should be leisure suits and hot pants.
Wearing polyester is its own punishment. It’s not prohibited in the Bible, of course, but then sawing off your own leg isn’t either.
I’ve got one of the colossal squid photos set up as my desktop background! SQUID!
I get the feeling that we’re not far off from making the IDiots start in with a similar campaign against we godless.
But *I* am willing to get that you *can* find those types willing to pass laws to arrest, and make such people rot in jail for years, for wearing the wrong things. Sorry, but kinder gentler evil doesn’t make it less evil. All it does is give the lunatics commiting it false justification for how much “better” they are than the guy that would put a bullet in your head instead. Its like arguing that a bully that only steals your lunch money for being a dork is *better* than one that beats you up every day for being a dork. The fact that you get away *less* injured from the former doesn’t mean a damn thing when talking about morals and ethics.
There are some people who’ve made a case that it was this man’s inherent predisposition in his personality to be violent, misogynist and fantasy-prone that lead him to this criminal act and that we shouldn’t place the blame on the culturally accepted religion that endorses violence, misogyny, and fantasy-prone thinking, which may enable him to do this. Indeed if he wasn’t already inclined to do such things the cultural acceptance and endorsement of the religion that promotes this behavior wouldn’t persuade him to do it. But I believe that we have missed the actual root cause of this shooting. While this man may have a predisposition to do such things, he couldn’t have done it with out one even more fundamental condition: HANDS.
If this man didn’t have hands then the religion that supported his natural inclinations would never have resulted in the murder of this woman. Lets get to brass tacks here people. Cut your hands off today. They are the real root cause, and not a religion that promotes and enables violent, misogynist, fantasy-prone thinking all at the same time by giving it cultural and historical significance.
That’s why I’ve cut my hands off. I’m typing this with my nose.
Crosius, you didn’t happen to see Bill Maher’s interview with John Amaechi on Friday, did you? Amaechi picked up on exactly the same point – his comment was (I’m paraphrasing) “Why doesn’t society go after all those people wearing mixed fabrics, and then come after us [homosexuals]?”.
“And yet I bet you can’t find one instance of a fundamentalist Christian killing a woman for not wearing something they thought she should or for being involved in politics.”
Considering how loony, angry, and cranky the Christian Right is in the U.S. even with their large screen tvs, plentiful food, and all the other trappings of middle class life, it’s not much of a stretch to think they’d get to that point pretty quickly if living under the conditions present in rural Pakistan.
John Amaechi on Real Time with Bill Maher
From a news story linked above:
And DSM claimed
Not killed as a routine thing, no, but fired, yes.
The Baptists are picking up the theme in the United States. While not (yet) klling women, they’re firing them because … wait for it … the Bible says they can’t teach Hebrew to men. From the Dallas Morning News:
thank you for this one
“You know, I think the common feature of the religious is the belief in hell and that god makes people rot there forever.
Every time someone makes an appeal to the moral goodness of undifferentiated religiousosity (Mitt Romney, e.g.), I understand it as an endorsement for the effectiveness of threats of torture.
Posted by: D | February 22, 2007 11:29 AM
As to the question, are there any serial killers of women (or men for that matter) in the western world or Christian world who say god told them to do it. I do not want to make the study of that subject as it would be too depressing but I would bet that it would not be hard to find many examples of just that sort of crime. The press or the public just does not pay very much attention to the “ravings” of a serial killer very seriously they judge them as psychotic.
Is extreme religiosity a form of psychosis?
Yes, I’m glad we don’t kill women for not wearing head scarfs. Here in the west we simply drown our kids because they are possessed by the devil.
http://rnasecure.org/media/03seattle/white1.html
Or beat them up for being insolent (ie. not bowing to God)
http://www.funygroup.org/articles/beating.html
But no, no killing women over a scarf. That would just be wrong.
He killed her because she disobeyed religious rules. At various times and in various places, he would have the law on his side, not hers. I would expect that his motivation included making her death a lesson in Sharia law to all the women in the country. The Imams teach this kind of misogyny to the girls as well as the boys.
How then is this no reflection on all the ‘good’ followers of Islam? His ilk think they are the good followers and want to lead the others by example.
“You know, I think the common feature of the religious is the belief in hell and that god makes people rot there forever.”
Nah, Buddhism and Hinduism don’t have a hell.
Why do I not even find this news story surprising?
Buddhism and Hinduism both have hells. Plural. They’re just not quite the same thing as our concept.
That one’s going in the ol’ random quote generator.
Correlation=Causation?
Not to mention the first few paragraphs try to sell murder as state sponsored execution through “not-quite-lie-by-omission.”
Holy crap. You are spouting the same ignorant babble the religious zealots use to cow their followers.
Warn us before you start slaughtering altar boys for not doing evolution term papers.
Brian, are you aware that the murderer used religion, and religious law, as his principal reasoning for doing the killing? That’s a pretty heavy piece of causation right there.
And the first few paragraphs doesn’t try to sell it as “state sponsored execution”, but as religion sponsored execution. If you read the article, you’ll find that this is quite a valid description, though only for a supgroup of religions.
As usual, generalizing from one incident is a problem. Yes, this particular Pakistani moslem is a despicable killer who finds it convenient to justify his misogyny with his religion. Given how open religion is to interpretation, it probably isn’t too difficult to justify any action based on any of the world’s religions.
However, I hope this doesn’t lead people to think all Pakistanis (or all moslem men) are misogynists. Reality, as usual, is very heterogeneous. My experience from a trip in Pakistan some years ago is that roughly speaking, there was more misogyny in uneducated and rural groups, but with several exceptions as well.
We also saw a gradient of increasing misogyny from east-to-west: in Lahore, lots of women were in western dress and few covered themsleves completely; in Islamabad/Rawalpindi, there were more women in chadoras; in Peshawar, all the women were covered head to toe; finally, in the North-West Frontier Province (bordering to Afghanistan), no women were to be seen in public at all.
@ #80:
“As usual, generalizing from one incident is a problem. Yes, this particular Pakistani moslem is a despicable killer who finds it convenient to justify his misogyny with his religion. Given how open religion is to interpretation, it probably isn’t too difficult to justify any action based on any of the world’s religions.”
The generalization I’d make from many incidents is that people who rely on religion as a moral compass use defective reasoning.
“And yet I bet you can’t find one instance of a fundamentalist Christian killing a woman for not wearing something they thought she should”
We may not have so many men here who would kill a woman for not wearing a head covering, but serial killers do seem to frequently target what thet consider ‘immoral’ women, for example prostitutes. Of course these women are often vulnerable targets as well, but that is not the whole story.
Also it’s not that unusual for men (and sometimes women) to react aggresssively or violently to someone wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes in the sense that they are dressing wrongly for their gender. I was shocked by the aggressive reactions from strangers when I had very short hair and dressed ‘boyishly’ for a while, and I imagine it is even worse for men who cross-dress or don’t conform to gender expectations.
I don’t mean to excuse or mitigate the violence against women in Pakistan, however we in the Christian and secular societies are not perfect either.
Coathangrrr said:
Nah, Buddhism and Hinduism don’t have a hell.
They have plenty of “Hells”, they’re just not eternal ones.
Kristjan,
As the argument in part is that the religion is the state, I don’t see a distinction. The gentleman in question did not act on the wishes of an organization, he acted through his own judgement (or lack thereof). While it is true you can execute someone, as an individual, the murderer did not have the political power or influence to “execute” as an individual (no royal we here).
“(often be executed) carry out a sentence of death on (a legally condemned person) : he was convicted of treason and executed. • kill (someone) as a political act.”
-from New Oxford American Dictionary.
He did not execute anyone, he murdered them. The truly offensive bit in all this, though, is the laying on of religion so many unrelated social issues and crass generalizations about people who carry religious beliefs. These are social and political problems folks, and just like getting rid of rap music wouldn’t rid Washington of crack addicts, the tribalism would exist with or without the religion.
The constructive question and argument is why are these people so easily polarized and how is that remedied?
People are so easily polarized because it was a useful trait for a tribe to wipe out competitors, and it can be remedied through a wide range of simple processes by which the life functions of humans can be stopped.
The dead can coexist peacefully. The living cannot.
Ah, Caledonian being grumpy again.
I get the impression it’s a question of will.
Ah, Caledonian being grumpy again.
I get the impression it’s a question of will.
http://jackehammer.blogspot.com/2007/02/unspeakable-vileness-of-professor.html
I must respect this man. He absolutely followed Islam. He is not a fanatic. I am happy most Islamic people are not so dedicated. I do, however, absolutely disbelieve Mohammed, that he did not have teachings from God out in the lonely desssert, and that the Koran is hocus-pocus. Where is the justification? There is none.
“And yet I bet you can’t find one instance of a fundamentalist Christian killing a woman for not wearing something they thought she should or for being involved in politics.”
If they could get away with it, there are some who would.
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