I love diverse cultures.
An Egyptian doc in Saudi Arabia got 5 years and 700 lashes for malpractice in treating a Saudi princess. He appealed. Now he has 7 years and 1500 lashes.
There are certain kinds of crimes for which this punishment might meet with my approval, but I suspect that the only crime here is lese-majeste.
Maybe they can show mercy and spread the lashings out over seven years. If they do it monthly, he just gets 17 a month. Not so bad. People at the Folsom Street Fair take a lot more than that.
But, since all cultures are equal*, I keep my Eurocentric white opinions to myself and just sit and appreciate the diversity. Way cool.
HT to Bookworm.
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*Obviously I do not believe this, and the title of my post is sarcastic. Where would you rather live, Yemen or Canada?
Islam is a very problematic religion. It is theocratic, that is, from Muhammad's time onward, it makes no distinction between religion and any other sphere of life, including politics. Islam can only function completely in an Islamic state. And in that state, non-Muslims must be (at best) second-class. Sura 9.29 Furthermore, it is expansionist, missionary, global in its goal. In addition, because of the central and dominating power of the Divine Will as expressed in a completely perfect Holy Book, a sinless and perfect Prophet, and the long history of legal codes based on this, it has an extremely difficult time altering its shape.
Just one example. Muhammad owned slaves all his life, even as he praised liberating them as a good deed. He bought and sold them. So how can modern Muslims hold that slavery is wrong if their sinless prophet owned them? What gives them the right to assert a morality higher than Muhammad's?
An interesting and intelligent description of the patterns of Muslim history here.
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1 comment:
Surely you know by now that the floggings would have to be administered by white Christians for it to be a real news story.
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