Pakistan mob burns man to death for 'blasphemy'

[seagypsy]

But I also see in what spidergoat is saying how the verses incite hatred. By marginalizing infidels and regarding them as enemies, esp. equating them with Satan, the effect on the (shall we say) weaker minds has to be quite severe.

The key right there is "weak minds". Stronger willed individuals, perhaps braver individuals will speak up. Sadly in these countries people who speak up get killed. No one likes to be told they are wrong. It is a power and ego trip on behalf of the masses. Much like the Aryan brotherhood rounding up Blacks and Jews because they have no source of pride but the color of their skin. When you have poor people with nothing to be proud of but their faith they will defend it violently. The rich and powerful stay in power by keeping the poor ignorant so they incite the poor to do their bidding. Any religion will do. Sometimes it isn't even religion, but biological "superiority".

Presumably this is what incites the mobs to show up for public stonings, to satiate themselves, as mere venting of the anger pent up by the language of the verses or at least as a catalyst to other personality issues they probably suffer. How many times, for example, would a wife, whose husband slept with another woman, perhaps think of stoning her everytime she read some of these passages?

been there done that. only i didn't think of stoning the woman, i wanted to stone the man, and I didn't need religious texts to put the idea in my head. It is human nature to want to hurt those who hurt us. It is through cultural training that we choose not to act on these primal instincts.

Then, as soon as someone is up for stoning, that person can go satiate her blood lust.

On a smaller scale you see Islamic practices conferring all kinds of trouble onto women and children by its intrusion into personal lives that seems Byzantine by most other standards. This by itself is what has probably always set them apart from Westerners culturally, at least once we advanced beyond that practice ourselves.

The main players on the stage - Iran and Afghanistan - have replaced the focus previously held by Libya, through hostilities, and Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as allies. And of course Syria is in a class of its own making.

Obviously Islam is a global religion. But ask any person in the street in any of the above countries what Islam teaches them to do with a Jew, or an adulterer, or a thief and the vast majority will offer some kind of gory punishment.

Even worse, you will find this among wealthier and better educated citizens, the ones who ought to know better, at least as far as being able to read the verses as rhetoric.

While it's true that among educated Muslims, your analysis probably largely applies, I don't think it works for the undereducated ones at all. And it doesn't explain why there, as here (i.e. among Christians), people who should know better are acting like vindictive robots programmed by the repetitive recitation of these kinds of verses.

The thing is, most religions, incite hatred of some kind and even encourage violence against those who would offend the ideology. The only thing most of these religions have in common is that they are all invented by the human mind.

Buddhism is pretty tame, but how popular is it? If it is human nature to be peaceful and altruistic, why are we not all Buddhists? For those of us who are free to choose our philosophical path, we choose the path that best suits our individual nature. The one that makes us feel the best. There are many Muslims that would leave the faith if they didn't fear retribution and when they come to America they abandon all but the label.
But if something happens that makes them want to act in a way that could only be justified by their interpretation of Islam then they will reaffirm their faith in a heartbeat, rather than question their own motives.

peace and passivity is simply not in the nature of most humans. Our species would have died out long long ago if it was. But monstrous violence is also not in the nature of most humans. its a spectrum and we all land on it somewhere and can be shifted and swayed in one direction or another depending on the circumstances.

We are all also susceptible to fear. and for the most part those who would not want to be monsters are afraid of the ones who are willing to be monsters. So the monsters rule us. If we are going to fight them, we have to tap into a monstrous side first and bring it full force. you won't tame the monsters by bringing them flowers.

 

[Tiassa]

The obvious question

The person, since atheism isn't a belief system.

Are you suggesting that an atheistic outlook on ethics and morality has no philosophical underpinning whatsoever?

 

[spidergoat]

There is no atheist outlook on ethics or philosophy. There are atheists with an outlook on such things.

 

[seagypsy]

I bet you live in a western country, and so are influenced by the secular nature of western society, where you are allowed to make up your own mind.

Currently, yes I live in the USA, but when I was a practicing Muslim I lived in Pakistan and I stood up for myself and for what I believed to be true about Islam. They argued with me and cursed at me but I shut them up quite frequently by quoting the Qur'an to them. They had no grounds, Islamically, to attack me. I was gaining support too. But due to health reasons and the fact that my children were being abused by my husband we left. Outside the family home I was loved and adored, inside I was treated as the devil himself. If I had had a penis I could have started a new movement there.

On a side note: This thread has led me to the conclusion that the common purpose of all religions is to absolve the human psyche of guilt.

 

[spidergoat]

Yes, abuse is common around the world, but especially difficult in countries like Pakistan, thanks to how women are treated in Islam. Your case isn't the first I've heard about. I saw a documentary some female lawyers in Cameroon called "Sisters in Law". They had to fight for women's rights in a heavily patriarchal country. But the worst abusers were the Muslim men because they felt justified on religious grounds.

Here's a link to the IMDB site for the movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0474361/

 

[Tiassa]

(Duh ....)

There is no atheist outlook on ethics or philosophy. There are atheists with an outlook on such things.

An atheist with an outlook has an atheistic outlook.

Quit dodging the question.

 

[spidergoat]

There is nothing to dodge, you are just wrong.

 

[seagypsy]

Yes, abuse is common around the world, but especially difficult in countries like Pakistan, thanks to how women are treated in Islam. Your case isn't the first I've heard about. I saw a documentary some female lawyers in Cameroon called "Sisters in Law". They had to fight for women's rights in a heavily patriarchal country. But the worst abusers were the Muslim men because they felt justified on religious grounds.

Here's a link to the IMDB site for the movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0474361/

For the record, I was never physically abused by my Muslim exhusband. It was emotional abuse. Still abuse, but I want to be clear since the stereotype is that Muslim men beat their wives. He did beat my sons though.

My first husband, a baptist minister, beat the hell out of me violently every three months no matter how good things were between us otherwise. He also twisted Biblical passages to justify his behavior.

When staying in a shelter for battered women, I heard stories from other women, and all of their husbands had a means to justify their behavior. Even atheists used biology to justify the beatings.

When human beings want to do something that their peers disapprove of, they find a way to justify it to themselves and then try to justify it to others. if they successfully "prove" their innocence then the behavior can become an accepted norm. And they no longer have to feel guilt over what they probably feel is wrong.

 

[quadraphonics]

Judaism is rife with holy writings such as the midrash, mishnah, and even the zohar. The degree to which these affect the outlook of any individual Jewish person varies greatly, but even in the case of those well educated in these writings, to what degree are such traditions definitive of the faith?

That's kind of beside the point when it comes to an outsider looking in. If a person claims to be of a given faith, and claims that said faith demands certain actions, and nobody of any authority to speak of takes it upon themselves to contradict that, then why aren't we supposed to simply take it on face value that "religion is as religion does?"

Not that my take-away from the news article was anything more than "mobs in underdeveloped areas gonna mob," but it does bear mentioning that the statutory penalty for blasphemy in Pakistan - the crime and locale the victim had already been arrested for/in - is exactly death.

That is to say, one raised according to Lutheran standards, such as I was, is not conditioned to consider these aspects the way a Jew or Muslim might be. And with so many generically Christian churches dotting, for instance, the American landscape—many of which insist on very specific interpretations of the Bible as the only holy scripture—one can expect the relationship between Qur'an and ahadith to be obscured even more.

So... the upshot is that we shouldn't consider the topic as representative of Islam, as a whole, but just of some specific variant of Islam?

Are we allowed to observe that "Pakistan is all fucked up, and radical Islamic politics play a major role in that?"

—and note that many who accuse acute anti-Islamism of dehumanization suggest the critics are failing to grant Muslims the same regard as they would their fellow Christian, Jew, or cultural compatriot.

This old saw of yours would cut a lot better if you could point to some instance of the putative offenders "granting" more "regard" for similar acts committed by their co-religionists, no?

As in: Yeah, we get it. Plenty of Christians are non-canonical; plenty of Jews are non-observant. And just as they learned the traditions through family and community, so do Muslims. And when a Muslim believes what his grandfather told him instead of the Qur'an, he is just being human, as humans tend to be.

So he fails as a Quranic literalist - sure - but what bearing on the question of the ascription of his beliefs to "Islam" is that supposed to have? Those non-canonical Christians still represent at least some portion of Christianity, or they wouldn't warrant the name, no? And "non-observant Jews" seems a very strange comparison to be making in an instance of fundamentalist violence.

Insofar as that might pertain to your concern that people blame Islam for strange or brutal actions of individuals within the faith, the method of such blame is to pretend that Muslims are behaving any differently than human beings.

I'm unsure where a mob of thousands, apparently drawn from surrounding religious schools and capable of overpowering the police, is a matter of "individuals." Anyway, the statutory penalty for blasphemy in Pakistan is exactly death - this is a procedural abberation; the society in question agrees with the premise that you should be killed for blasphemy. So we're up into the 9 figures with the number of individuals we can credibly ascribe the basic, barbaric sentiment to, even if most wouldn't support the mob justice aspect of this case.

Which, sure, they're hardly the first country in the world to go in for religious extremism at the state level. But I'm not seeing the double-standard in evidence in this instance. Where is the theocratic Christian state that penalizes blasphemers with death that your targets are apologizing for?

I think psychology and anthropology will explain those strange or brutal actions much more accurately than any hatred some might show toward Islam in general.

False dilemma - it could well be that the explanation that psychology and anthropology would produce will highlight specific features of an organized religion as big pieces of the explanation.

I mean, I can see what you're saying, I'm just not seeing where the objects of your criticism actually exhibit the sort of delineation between those factors that your criticism demands. Some of them seem pretty clear that the "Islam" they're complaining about is as much a repository of cultural and political baggage as it is any kind of pure, etheral spirituality, don't they?

 

[Michael]

About all you can do is say that a human brain objectively exists and is wired in such a manner that humans have a psychological tendency to subjectively judge each other in a manner approximated by the golden rule.

If you want to make the case for morality objectively existing, then it has to exist outside the scope of a person's conscious experience.

Let's think about this some more.

Vision is a subjective experience. It has a neurological bases.
Feeling of 'my body' is subjective. It has a neurological bases.
Even sexual identity can be traced to specific areas of the brain.

What's to say we can't find an underlying objective truth about morality? Why take morality off the table? We don't do that to vision, body or sexual identity.

 

[Michael]

Can you provide quotes from the Qur'an to back up this claim? This is all I ask. Blame the hadith and sharia all you want. But do not credit to the Qur'an what isn't in the Qur'an. Mohammed was a human being capable of making mistakes. The Qur'an actually chastised Muhammed for slaughtering people. Yes, Mohammed technically authored, by proxy, the Qur'an, but in doing so he admits freely that his actions were bad. If modern people want to cherry pick it and ignore these aspects then the blame is on the ones doing the cherry picking, not the Qur'an.

As an aside, there's no good evidence Mohammed actually existed and some pretty good evidence he didn't. Or Jesus or Mosses for the matter.

I wouldn't waste too much time on "the Qur'an" and it's morals in this thread. That's just running in circles.

AND we still haven't decided whether morals are objective or relative! How can we talk about the morality in the Qur'an with clarity if we can't settle that question? If, suppose, we said morals are relative, then we'd have to agree to which morals we agree to... or we'll talk ourselves in circles.

 

[spidergoat]

For the record, I was never physically abused by my Muslim exhusband. It was emotional abuse. Still abuse, but I want to be clear since the stereotype is that Muslim men beat their wives. He did beat my sons though.

My first husband, a baptist minister, beat the hell out of me violently every three months no matter how good things were between us otherwise. He also twisted Biblical passages to justify his behavior.

When staying in a shelter for battered women, I heard stories from other women, and all of their husbands had a means to justify their behavior. Even atheists used biology to justify the beatings.

When human beings want to do something that their peers disapprove of, they find a way to justify it to themselves and then try to justify it to others. if they successfully "prove" their innocence then the behavior can become an accepted norm. And they no longer have to feel guilt over what they probably feel is wrong.

The difference is there is no biological justification to abuse anyone.

 

[seagypsy]

The difference is there is no biological justification to abuse anyone.

Maybe not to you or me but there are those who would disagree, argue their point, and try their damnedest to convince you otherwise. The actual difference between the "justifications" is that one has an omnipotent being that cannot be proved to not exist, where as biological evidences can be observed and tested.

 

[Michael]

Maybe not to you or me but there are those who would disagree, argue their point, and try their damnedest to convince you otherwise. The actual difference between the "justifications" is that one has an omnipotent being that cannot be proved to not exist, where as biological evidences can be observed and tested.

This is one of the reasons I'm interested in objective morals (if they exist) because then religion/superstitious thinking is (again) superseded by scientific method / rational thought.

It's an interesting hypothesis.

Even if they don't exist, suppose all morality is relative. I then think we'll need a sticky somewhere here to ensure we all know just what those morals are. Else we chase our tails in circles

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Let's think about this some more.

Vision is a subjective experience. It has a neurological bases.
Feeling of 'my body' is subjective. It has a neurological bases.
Even sexual identity can be traced to specific areas of the brain.

What's to say we can't find an underlying objective truth about morality? Why take morality off the table? We don't do that to vision, body or sexual identity.

Understanding the underlying objective truth about morality is absolutely fine. Morality can even be presently defined objectively as a psychological phenomena. The only thing you can't do is propose a scenario and ask whether or not it is objectively moral. To ask a question like that requires morality to objectively exist independent of subjective thought (which it does not). The only valid question you can ask about a proposed scenario is whether or not another person finds it moral or not, which is their subjective opinion.

 

[seagypsy]

Even if they don't exist, suppose all morality is relative. I then think we'll need a sticky somewhere here to ensure we all know just what those morals are. Else we chase our tails in circles

With this I can agree to an extent, but we do have that laid out to a certain degree. Anytime you agree to the TOS of a website you participate on, you are agreeing to the morals dictated by the admins.

As crunchy cat stated, morals being relative, forces one to only be able to ask, is it moral to you? The only way you could realistically come to the conclusion of absolute morality is if suddenly EVERYONE on the planet fell into agreement with one another on everything. Then world peace would break out all over and we'd all die of boredom and we'd have very little to discuss.

 

[spidergoat]

The fact is people are getting executed all over the Muslim world for actions that ARE NOT CRIMES.

A Sri Lankan youth employed as a domestic aid has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for worshiping a statue of the Buddha, which is considered an offence according to Shariah law.

According to the Bodu Bala Senaa, the youth bearing passport no. 2353715 identified as Premanath Pereralage Thungasiri has been arrested by Umulmahami Police, which is a grave situation.

The organisation states that information has been received regarding a plan that is underway to behead a Sri Lankan youth employed in domestic service in Saudi Arabia.
http://www.ceylontoday.lk/16-9052-news-detail-arrested-for-idol-worship.html​

 

[seagypsy]

The fact is people are getting executed all over the Muslim world for actions that ARE NOT CRIMES.

A Sri Lankan youth employed as a domestic aid has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for worshiping a statue of the Buddha, which is considered an offence according to Shariah law.

According to the Bodu Bala Senaa, the youth bearing passport no. 2353715 identified as Premanath Pereralage Thungasiri has been arrested by Umulmahami Police, which is a grave situation.

The organisation states that information has been received regarding a plan that is underway to behead a Sri Lankan youth employed in domestic service in Saudi Arabia.
http://www.ceylontoday.lk/16-9052-news-detail-arrested-for-idol-worship.html​

I understand and empathize with your sentiment. I don't like that people are arrested and executed for such things either, but in those countries their actions WERE crime. A crime is a violation of a written, accepted and enforced law.

Each country makes their own laws, and determines the punishment for each crime. We don't get to tell everyone else how to live. It is up to the people of that country to rise up and challenge the laws. In many of those countries people ARE starting to stand up and challenge their governments. It is a slow process. As more and more people gain access to the internet and become aware that things don't have to be the way they are and that God is not smiting their "enemies", and that women most certainly are very capable human beings, they will start to rise up and challenge. It just takes time. If our ancestors did not stand up against the church of england we would still be controlled by it today. Other people can learn our history and see how we acheived freedom and follow our example. Or they can take what they have and cherish it for whatever it is worth to them. They have to decide for themselves that life CAN be better.
But they certainly do have the right to determine for themselves what is moral and what is not.

That is where we get the expression,"When in Rome do as the Romans do."

Meaning respect the laws of the land you are in. If you cannot agree to those laws. Get out or don't go there. If you cannot get out, do what is necessary to get the laws changed.

 

[spidergoat]

Not to pick on Islam alone...
Mormon Sect bury Kitten alive in concrete

 

[seagypsy]

Not to pick on Islam alone...
Mormon Sect bury Kitten alive in concrete

I don't know of any religion that condones those behaviors. But apparently it is an accepted course of action among a specific group of people. These people are responsible for their actions. If they concoct religious justification for their actions, they are still responsible for their actions.

It is another example of human beings using intimidation as a means to try and control someone they perceive as a threat.

In the United States a person can for the most part choose their religion. If an adult consensually practices the tenets of a faith that encourage what most Americans consider assholish behavior, then it is because the person is an asshole that they choose that path.

When I voluntarily without the enfluence of any intimidation whatsoever, converted to Islam it was because the Qur'an reflected what I already held to be true in my own mind. When Muslims told me that Islam was something other than what I read in the Qur'an I stopped calling myself Muslim. Not because I agreed with their interpretation but because I knew the majority of people around the world accepted their definition of Islam over the Qur'anic definition and I did not want to be associated with the mindset they demonstrated. In my heart I was still Muslim by MY definition. When I reached the conclusion that there was no god then and only then did I truly stop considering myself Muslim.

I don't deny that in theocratic countries, people rarely get the opportunity to question their upbringing, or to learn about alternative ways of thinking and in that sense the religion is forced on them. But with the world getting smaller via the internet and people finding out things can be different, they are becoming less tolerant of the oppression they are experiencing.

This is why those countries want to censor the internet and block western companies from coming in and influencing the thoughts of their people. You cant wish for what you don't know exists. This behavior is bad by our standards.But in their eyes, they are protecting their interests and I am sure some of them even believe that their people are better off as they are. Because they TRULY believe in Allah.