Thursday, February 08, 2007

The Apostate Arrives!

The Apostate has apparently hit a nerve and triggered an over-the-top rant and, amusingly enough, caused the original author to password-protect the article which The Apostate linked to.

Now I'm 100% "feminist" in the sense that I believe that all women should have absolutely equal civil, moral and political rights. I roll my eyes sometimes at some things that some Western feminists write, but hey, equal rights include the right to be equally dumb from time to time (and we men have not always set the highest bar here). In any event, the push-back against Western feminism appears to come mostly from people intent on keeping women in a second-class status, if not actually barefoot[1] and pregnant.

But the whole idea of trying to somehow integrate Islam with feminism simply boggles my mind. Mohammed wasn't just some guy, he was the:
One perfect human [who] had such control, to enact such drastic change, [that] we must realize that if there was anything left for him to enact, it would have been... the Prophet and the Quranic message did not make moral compromises of any sort. What Islam allowed at that time must be considered, for those that love the Prophet (صلي الله عليه و سلم), to be allowed today. What Islam forbade at that time, must be considered to be forbidden today.
Religion is very flexible, but there are some limits. If you don't somehow acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ, you just can't be a Christian. And I just don't see how you can, in good faith, call yourself a Muslim if you don't accept the moral authority of Mohammed's life. And you can't get any sort of equal rights for women from the personal morality of an ehebephilic slave-raping polygamist.

If someone wants to be slave, I'm not going to force them into freedom. But while I might pity them, I'll never have a shred of respect for them.


[1] This bum is barefoot by choice, not by any compulsion or oppression.

3 comments:

  1. The Islam-isn't-really-so-terrible meme keeps popping up in many forms. I've seen a few contorted arguments about how the hijab is actually "liberating", but rationalization for forcing sex on slaves is a new one to me (notice that the same people would never use similar arguments to defend slave rape in the Old South).

    I think the underlying motivation is that acknowledging the existence of a threat is scary, and the consequent necessity of doing something about it is even scarier. It's much more comforting to convince yourself that there isn't really a huge, misogynistic, imperialist ideological movement out there that wants to destroy Western civilization as we know it.

    You can see the same psychological mechanism at work with the global-warming deniers. It's a universal trait, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The password-protection thing is bizarre. If Achelois's original article can't be read, then the only way her words can be known to third parties is by how her critics paraphrase them. It can't be wise to put oneself in that position.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think the underlying motivation is that acknowledging the existence of a threat is scary, and the consequent necessity of doing something about it is even scarier. It's much more comforting to convince yourself that there isn't really a huge, misogynistic, imperialist ideological movement out there that wants to destroy Western civilization as we know it.

    I'm all for multi-culturalism, but really, sometimes you gotta just say, "Eh, screw it; that stuff sucks." That said, I remain wholly and completely unconvinced that Islam represents some monolithic threatening entity. It's not like Judaism was all that warm and fuzzy under that schizophrenic Abraham, either.

    ReplyDelete

Please pick a handle or moniker for your comment. It's much easier to address someone by a name or pseudonym than simply "hey you". I have the option of requiring a "hard" identity, but I don't want to turn that on... yet.

With few exceptions, I will not respond or reply to anonymous comments, and I may delete them. I keep a copy of all comments; if you want the text of your comment to repost with something vaguely resembling an identity, email me.

No spam, pr0n, commercial advertising, insanity, lies, repetition or off-topic comments. Creationists, Global Warming deniers, anti-vaxers, Randians, and Libertarians are automatically presumed to be idiots; Christians and Muslims might get the benefit of the doubt, if I'm in a good mood.

See the Debate Flowchart for some basic rules.

Sourced factual corrections are always published and acknowledged.

I will respond or not respond to comments as the mood takes me. See my latest comment policy for details. I am not a pseudonomous-American: my real name is Larry.

Comments may be moderated from time to time. When I do moderate comments, anonymous comments are far more likely to be rejected.

I've already answered some typical comments.

I have jqMath enabled for the blog. If you have a dollar sign (\$) in your comment, put a \\ in front of it: \\\$, unless you want to include a formula in your comment.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.