(November 27, 2013 at 4:52 am)Rayaan Wrote: The stoning to death punishment existed way before Islam - it was a Jewish law, as dictated in the Old Testament.
The Prophet Muhammad continued implementing that law until a new revelation came regarding the punishment for adultery, which is now 100 lashes for both male and female. The Quran doesn't say anything about stoning the adulterers at all. The punishment is 100 lashes, and there has to be at least 4 witnesses who saw the act in order to implement a lashing (which is extremely unlikely to happen), OR that the adulterers confessed their sin to someone (which they shouldn't), but if neither of those conditions are met, then the lashing punishment cannot be enforced if even they are actually guilty of adultery.
And the punishment for a slave girl is half of that punishment (per Surah 4:25) - which is 50 lashes - so it wouldn't make sense to say that slave girls should get "half the punishment of stoning to death" if stoning was really the punishment prescribed by the Quran. What could be "half" the punishment of stoning to death?
Most Muslims and the majority of scholars do believe that stoning for adultery is a part of Shariah (I used to believe that also), but they support that opinion by citing only 3 or 4 hadiths, where the Prophet himself ordered to carry out the punishment after the adulterers confessed their sins to him. However, those hadiths do not tell us whether or not the stoning punishments took place before or after the Quranic revelations on adultery. So, it is very much possible that the stoning law may have been abrogated after the Quranic verses on adultery were revealed.
Also, a lot Muslims argue that the lashing punishment is for unmarried adulterers only, and that the stoning punishment is for married adulterers. But the Quran simply says that the punishment of lashing is for both a "man" and a "woman" who have been proven to commit adultery (by 4 witnesses), and thus the punishment can apply to any man or a woman regardless of whether they are married or unmarried.
Such a dangerous punishment (stoning to death) would have been mentioned in the Quran if that is really the punishment in Islam, anyways. And it doesn't seem logical to me that the Quran would include so many lesser punishments (100 lashes, 50 lashes, 80 lashes, cutting off hands, etc.) and leave out the greatest and the most severe punishment of all (stoning), which we should be most aware of.
This is what I hate about my well intended friends on the left, especially atheists who blast me for agreeing with Hitchens and Harris. Hitchens calls relgiion poison and Harris says moderates and liberals allow the nuts to fester and grow because of their sense of "political correctness".
Skip the damned labels, this guy is doing no different than the current Pope is doing. You have to water down the holy book. It should not matter if barbarity was in the original language ON ANY ISSUE, or if it was twisted after the fact. If there were no comic book to even imply or suggest what to do, there would be nothing to argue over.
Just like you can use a gun as a cop or a criminal, no gun, no chance of a fight over it and no chance of someone getting shot with it.
It seems the best humanity can do right now is water religion down, and out of all the evils, I'd prefer that because I do think the zealots are actually reading the book correctly compared to the moderates and liberals. Holy books are designed to produce loyalty and conformity, not pluralism.
