RE: Damned Muslims
October 20, 2010 at 11:56 am
(This post was last modified: October 20, 2010 at 11:59 am by thesummerqueen.)
(October 20, 2010 at 10:22 am)ib.me.ub Wrote: As if women in the Western World don't get beaten as well.
It is a particular disease in all the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sects. Actually, fact is, in the Western world it was only some Native American cultures and Celtic ones that I have read gave women equal social and religious rights, or occasionally ran on a matriarchal system. I don't know the eastern ones very well, so I can't speak for them.
This isn't to say either that an atheist isn't capable of beating his wife - but neither are atheist parents and figures of authority teaching their children as they grow up that it is permissible for a man to beat a woman if she 'misbehaves' and that she should accept such treatment.
I'm sorry, Rayaan, but the fact is that we're all human, and we will interpret things and act the way we chose according to our emotional/mental state at the time. It doesn't matter how "gently" a holy book treats something like this, it is still loose enough for a man (or woman!) in an enraged state to use it as an acceptable excuse to abuse a person who should be able to trust them implicitly. Even if the Koran says that it's a last ditch effort, who's going to be the judge of that? These domestic acts of violence aren't judged by peers and meted out in front of people who have agreed on the set punishment and will witness it to make sure it doesn't go too far. It's entirely up to the abuser to decide what is appropriate, completely colored by their emotions at the time.
Both Testaments and the Koran give ample statements to be cherry picked for how you are allowed to treat your spouse if you become angry with them - call me crazy, but without bringing the word of some invisible daddy in the sky into it, it would seem to me that the logic follows thusly: you treat everyone else around you with at least a bare modicum of respect anyway (do unto others, and all that), and you don't go around beating people who misbehave around you, what gives you the right to "lightly" beat the woman or man you have chosen to partner yourself with and share all the intimate things you'd never show the rest of the public? What gives you the right to treat differently the person who will help you bring new life into the world?
People argue that these laws were created in a time when there weren't secular governments to keep them in line, so they were necessarily brutal. They said the same thing about Vlad the Impaler, but you don't see anyone condoning making an example to your enemy by staking people - it's considered medieval and wrong, and we're supposed to be more civilized. Why shouldn't religious laws be the same way? Why should we cling to archaic allowances just because they're in a holy book that was written by HUMANS?