Woman Behind Pakistan's First Hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, Shot Dead 494
An anonymous reader sends word that Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead. The progressive activist and organizer who ran Pakistan's first-ever hackathon and led a human rights and a peace-focused nonprofit known as The Second Floor (T2F) was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi. Sabeen Mahmud was leaving the T2F offices with her mother some time after 9pm on Friday evening, reports the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. She was on her way home when she was shot, the paper reports. Her mother also sustained bullet wounds and is currently being treated at a hospital; she is said to be in critical condition.
Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the US is hostile to women in tech?
I hope they find the bastards who did this, but I'm not holding my breath. She seemed like a vibrant, engaging, and intelligent woman. Pakistan will need more people like her to continue the fight against their more regressive, barbaric elements. My condolences to her family and friends.
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Pakistan is a very radical Islamic country. Why did they seceed from India when India has millions of muslims? Because it wasn't radical enough. Education is dangerous to the extremists with beards if women started thinking for themselves then how can they have Sharia law?
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
These neat little theories are always so so convenient to explain why everyone else is inferior. Yet Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps the world is more complicated than these little theories suggest?
... the fine print being that she too was murdered (in 2007), with Al-Qaeda claiming responsibility. Arguing that Pakistan doesn't have a problem with militant islamist groups murdering women is a pretty tough sell
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Pakistan is a country of islands of modernity, surrounded by an ocean of the dark age. It's definitely neither uniform nor unified. It has little control over its own mountainous regions, barbarians operate with little repercussion, and even in the civilized areas the government, even the military, is corrupt and purchasable by extremists.
Also, Ms. Bhutto probably has much better protection than the poor murdered girl.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
wrong, get a refund on your history lessons, radical islam not responsible for Pakistan but rather push lead by All-India Muslim league which was concerned with rights for muslims and also by the way led in promoting the democratic process for Pakistan.
only about 15 of the populace of Pakistan would be "radical" by any standard. The rest are "hippy muslims" that drink, smoke (and not just tobacco), watch porn, gamble etc.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
wrong, get a refund on your history lessons, radical islam not responsible for Pakistan but rather push lead by All-India Muslim league which was concerned with rights for muslims and also by the way led in promoting the democratic process for Pakistan.
only about 15 of the populace of Pakistan would be "radical" by any standard. The rest are "hippy muslims" that drink, smoke (and not just tobacco), watch porn, gamble etc.
I'm not sure you are defining "radical" the same as we would in the western world. Does support for punishing blasphemy and apostasy with the death penalty count as "radical"?
Shahbaz Bhatti was Pakistan's Minister for Minorities Affairs and he made his opposition to the blasphemy laws known, and he was assassinated in 2011.
Salmaan Taseer was the Governor of Punjab and he made his opposition to the blasphemy laws known. He was assassinated by his own security guard once again in 2011.
Now, before you declare that assassinations are often a fringe movement, lets look at the treatment of the guard that killed Taseer. Nearly 500 clerics [eurasiareview.com] praised the murder and called for a boycott of Taseer's funeral.
Also take a close look at the blasphemy cases brought up regularly in Pakistan. Very often the accused don't make it to trial or execution before they killed by an angry mob, or while under police 'protection'.
There are moderates in Pakistan that are opposed to the same radicals that we are. People like Sabeen Mahmud, Salmaan Taseer, Shabaz Bhati, and Benazir Bhutto all share many of our more moderate and tolerant views and values. The severity of the problems in Pakistan though are revealed in that same list as those moderates are increasingly ending up dead like EVERYONE in that list. We have survivors as well, like Malala Yousef, the young school girl shot in the face on her bus by the TTP. Of course, she is carying on from Britain right now because the TTP have sworn to finish her off should she return.
Oh, and it should be noted that everyone on that list save Shabaz Bhati were muslims as well. The severity of the extremism in that ?15%? is staggering and I also seriously question that the percentage is fairly characterized as merely 15%.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Funny)
Education is dangerous to the extremists with beards if women started thinking for themselves then how can they have Sharia law?
Exactly, and on a side note, this perfectly illustrates the mentality of men who have beards. Hipsters and women who are attracted to bearded men, take note.
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Hey, if you want to screw hairy-legged women, go right ahead. Don't pretend it's normal though.
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Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
That's like the opposite of what happened.
Pakistan does not exist because of the machinations of the British. Rather, Pakistan came into existence due to the withdrawal and general shutdown of the British Empire, which like many occupations was suppressing tribal and ethnic dissent in order to keep their territories together. The moment the Empire (which was weak and failing at this point in time anyway) released its hold on the country there was a huge bloody massacre and a civil war ("The Partition") which resulted in the creation of Pakistan.
So it's not like the British stood around and encouraged Muslims and Hindus to fight each other. They did that all on their own.
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Re:Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we did. Like most Americans, sadly, you know nothing of history beyond, say, 1980 or some such. If you did know some history, you would know ...
Like many people on Slashdot you seem to have a defective knowledge of history and the church.
If one were to look into the history they would find that you either grossly exagerate on these matters, or are simply wrong. Many of the early colonies were formed by religous sects coming from Europe. Once in America they adopted the European customs of institutionalizing the church with the government. Although in some colonies other sects were persecuted, few were killed. In any case it was nothing like the scale or severity of European persecution. Other colonies had different views. Rhode Island was formed with the ideal of religious tolerence, and other colonies were adopting laws for tolerance by 1650. Eventually all of the colonies adeopted the US Constitution, became states, and moved past that.
As to the "Christian justifications for the genocide against American Indians" I have to ask, what genocide are you referring to? There wasn't one.
Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans [townhall.com]
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? [historynewsnetwork.org]
As to your claims about "lines of Christian preachers submitted tons of briefs, all saying that their Christian God had deemed that black people were inherently inferior and not worthy of any basic human rights" in the case of Loving vs Virginia, which briefs are you referring to? The only brief I see listed from an organization claiming church affiliation was against Virginia's law.
LOVING v. VIRGINIA, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) [findlaw.com]
Briefs of amici curiae, urging reversal, were filed by William M. Lewers and William B. Ball for the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice et al.; [388 U.S. 1, 2] by Robert L. Carter and Andrew D. Weinberger for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and by Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit III and Michael Meltsner for the N. A. A. C. P. Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
T. W. Bruton, Attorney General, and Ralph Moody, Deputy Attorney General, filed a brief for the State of North Carolina, as amicus curiae, urging affirmance
So it looks to me that your disparagement of Christians is based on what is essentially one half-truth and two whole lies.
Now that would be bad in and of itself, but you also overlook the many positive contributions made by Christians.
The abolition of slavery - Christian and churches drove the abolisionist movement. Perhaps you could start with this man:
William Wilberforce [wilberforceschool.org] - the story told in this wonderful movie: Amazing Grace [amazon.com], released in 2007
Higher Education - Many of America's first colleges were formed by churches.
Health Care - Many hospitals have been founded by churches, or with church backing.
The Civil Right movement - Once again many churches were participants in the Civil Rights movement
There are many more that could be added to that.
Yeah, you Christians are really, really superior to other religions....
Moving past the half-truth and falsehoods you wrote certainly seems to make for a better record to reflect upon.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
> We didn't have any inquisitions.
Unless you were native American, in which case your land and property were taken and your people murdered, partly because you weren't Christian. Or if you were black, in which case you were enslaved and forced to a new language and not permitted to follow your old gods. Or, if you were a member of the Latter Day Saints, who were considered non-Christian and heretical and dangerous and were kicked out of state after state until they settled in the effectively empty, very poor land around Salt Lake City. Or unless you were Jewish, which prevented entry into various political and social clubs and even prevented people from doing business with you in various times and places.
Make no pretense that the USA has been consistently tolerant of religious belief. The modern Christian religions may be accepting of other faiths, but they have not always been this way.
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Unless you were a suspected Commie! (Score:3)
Quite Right!
To suffer a modern day Inquisition in the US you had to be a damn dirty Commie! (or suspected of being one by the right people). :) happy shiny times for all!!
However, thats not a religion, right? so its all ok
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Informative)
Christians ran the colonies from roughly the 1550s when the Spanish colonized Mexico and the Southwest to about 1785 on the East Coast when the Constitution, guaranteeing that the government could not endorse religion (e.g., "Congress shall make no law regarding an endorsement of religion") to bit less than a hundred years later when the Spanish/Russian governance of the west coast ended.
During that time, the Christians did all kinds of good things:
- they ran witch trials in Salem (and other places), hung or otherwise executed lots of people for not believing the right way - aka blasphemy, which is a completely bullshit crime, and anyone who calls for punishment for blasphemy is too stupid to swim in the gene pool;
- they found and perpetuated biblical justification for slavery and the economic excesses of industrialism - remember, kids, Calvinism teaches that your state of being is an expression of whether or not god loves you, so if you're poor or a slave or otherwise marginalized, god doesn't love you much, and you're probably going to hell;
- they abused the crap out of the people actually living in the territories they took over, and decided it was OK to do it because the xtians were bringing the natives the benefits of xtianity - all of which, interestingly, accrued to the xtians, with the natives decidedly getting the short end of the stick, which situation is perpetuated today;
- they elevated biblical literalism - another shallow-gene-pool thing - into a place where they asserted that their dogma, untested, untestable, utterly unverifiable, and completely subject to interpretation, was more true on an objective level than empirical science - as witness the witless xtians who still defend the Scopes trial and question basic science, or who think (for example) that women's bodies somehow protect against pregnancy from rape....
So, yeah, we didn't have inquisitions, exactly, other than bunches of millions of people who died as the result of gentle xtian doctrine over the last couple of hundred years. And we still have a strong streak of aggressively ignorant xtianity which is crudely bound to a set of racist, sexist, hateful, marginalizing beliefs that have achieved ascendancy that scars the political landscape
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Hey! You libtard sjw mongs, a woman's place is to be barefoot and pregnant as a deluxe model sandwich maker.
Sheesh what's this world coming to, what's next? Fags wanting right to vote?
Jeez
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You're not asked to justify abortion, you're asked to keep your fucking nose out of other peoples' business. And how many abortions in the US are late term abortions? Yes, I'm not a fucking retard and saw the clever little rhetorical trick you played there.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? So the mentality of the left and radical Islam is no different then as well I guess... as from the left I hear that Climate Change is true, unquestionable and those who disagree must be hounded out of public life or forced to comply with certain beliefs... and from the radical Muslims we hear that if you do not subscribe to their particular interpretation you should be stoned, beheaded or set fire to.
As you said "There is a difference in the end result, but the mindset is the same"
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What the fuck does this have to do with "women in tech"?
This is Pakistan. Challenge the authority of the religious, tribal and/or self-appointed leaders and violence occurs. Being a woman has fuck all to do with it. Being in tech has fuck all to do with it.
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/... [satp.org]
http://costsofwar.org/article/... [costsofwar.org]
http://pakistanbodycount.org/ [pakistanbodycount.org]
It's a stupid violent place.
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
...when they had alternatives, such as getting the fuck out of the country...
Perhaps these people are intent on trying improve their country rather than fleeing from it? Crazy, I know...
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Tragic... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is truly a tragic death. I often hear a lot from people in our society (United States) is so aggressive and repressive towards women, which I greatly disagree with. Giving soap operas here about how horrible it is is a disgrace compared to those in places like the middle east, who endure credible death threats and the like everyday. I hope this lady will be remembered, and may her death not be in vain.
Time to fire up the kettle... (Score:2)
But seriously - boiling the idiots responsible in oil isn't enough. Let's hope there's a hell.
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There seem to be a lot of these killings (Score:3, Insightful)
Sabeen Mahmud, Anwar Sadat, Theo van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, Lee Rigby, people in the World trade Center on 9/11, Copts in Egypt, school children in Pakistan, Christian girls in Nigeria, Yzedis in Iraq, Kurds in Syria.
It's almost as though there were some sort of shared transnational ideology [battleswarmblog.com] behind all of their attacks.
If only our world leaders could somehow deduce the nature of this ideology, name it, and set about creating plans to fight it...
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More men too, or don't they count? Oh, it's a domestic violence statistic. Of course they don't.
Meanwhile it's a rare day that more Muslims are violently killed than total deaths at the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, but it has happened. It's an rarer month when there aren't.
As the post to which you replied suggested, if only we could identify the common cause here.
Islamic idiocy... (Score:2)
I suspect Islamic religious conservatism was behind this. These cowardly idiots shoot a middle school girl in the head because she blogs. When is Islam going to experience the equivalent of the Enlightenment which softened and matured the Christian world? How long must we wait.
Re:Religious idiocy... (Score:3)
Though the Islamists seem to be quite good at it these days, Islamic fundamentalists don't hold a monopoly on using selective interpretation from unreliably transcribed ancient texts as a means to justify bad behavior.
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Enlightenment took Christians 200 years and they still aren't done.
Muslims are 500 years behind Christianity. You have another 7-800 years before they will improve.
Enlightment was fought by Christians and still is.
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This is going to be a continuing problem until they figure out how to get some separation between church and state. This separation will be difficult to achieve
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1. Why is this level of intensity of religious/political violence mostly confined to parts of the Muslim world? Plenty of places on Earth on war-torn, but petty tribalism and profit-seeking warlords are not quite the same thing as people willing to sacrifice their lives for a transnational, transracial, translingual, transcultural set of beliefs.
1a. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombe
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Religion poisons everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Hitchens says it best:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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In many ways Anita Sarkeesian is asking for what she's getting. The rape/death threats are uncalled for, but she basically goes around slapping the misogyny label on everything and anything, even when there isn't, and it's just fucking annoying.
For example, she railed against Fox for canceling Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles and renewing Dollhouse, when the first is supposedly empowering females and the later isn't. I'm a huge fan of the Terminator franchise, but that show was so lame I couldn't even wa
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And a very subtle troll at that. I mean, citing a respectable place like 4chan.
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If the poster were to die of some horrible illness, I'd make a special trip to wherever he is buried to piss on the grave.
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Trolls hook fish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
You drop a baited line, and wait for a bite. That's the origin of the term, not the mythical monster.
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Things like these make me ashamed of being a member of the human race.
Why? The human race is an amazing work of nature. It is not you that is the problem. It is the people who shot her. They are the ones who are not fit to be members of the human race and need to be culled from it before they can pass on their corrupted genes.
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Genetically there are something like five or six human races; several in sub-Saharan African, and one just about everywhere else.
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Man here, putting in my two cents under the secure veil of anonymity:
1. Yes, women deserve equal rights and should receive equal treatment.
2. It is not only justified, but beneficial, when feminist groups publicly point out and aspire to correct cultural failings in point 1 above.
3. Encouraging video-game audiences to be displeased with disrespectful treatment of women, and to request better treatment of women from game creators, is exactly the right thing to do.
4. Trying to force game-makers to make produc
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Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not, it depends on the particular interests. If they have interests such as following the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and you have interests which include baroque music and classical literature, then it's safe to say that you're more intelligent than them.
There's nothing sexist about it. There's no shortage of idiot men who are big fans of Duck Dynasty, and there's relatively few people of either sex who are big fans of more intellectual pursuits like classical literature.
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Yes, if you really believe there's a "gay agenda" and that homosexuals are bringing God's wrath upon us and that the Rapture will happen any time now, then you are a moron.
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:4, Interesting)
I listen to brutal death metal but i also listen to Tchaikovsky.
Metal has a fair amount in common, musically, with classical music. Metal typically emphasizes complex song structures and virtuosic playing more than other forms of modern music. I'd say country is probably at the opposite end of that spectrum. I like progressive metal like Dream Theater, I also like Bach and Telemann, but I also like Rolling Stones, Boston, AC/DC, etc.
As for all your other interests, none of those carry any kind of political connotations or religious content. None of them indicate that you're a rabid homophobe who thinks the Rapture is coming any day now. Watching Duck Dynasty indicates exactly that. There's nothing wrong with having sexual fantasies or liking different levels of literature and music. There is something wrong (IMO) with watching TV shows or listening to music which pushes moronic religious viewpoints. It's very simple: if you listen to some type of "entertainment" which preaches to you to hate people who were born differently from you, and you buy into this, then you're a moron IMO.
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If they have interests such as following the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and you have interests which include baroque music and classical literature, then it's safe to say that you're more intelligent than them.
Ummm... no. There is no fundamental difference in the level of intellectual engagement required between enjoying "Duck Dynasty" and "Star Wars," and many Slashdotters (including myself) are raving fanboys when it comes to the latter. Your choice of lowbrow entertainment may be because you are dumb, or it may be because you are smart but looking for an escape that has oooh shiny and doesn't require deep thought. To draw inferences on intellectual capacity based on what TV shows someone watches is just snobbi
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Your choice of lowbrow entertainment may be because you are dumb, or it may be because you are smart but looking for an escape that has oooh shiny and doesn't require deep thought. To draw inferences on intellectual capacity based on what TV shows someone watches is just snobbish.
Bullshit. If I want to do stuff that doesn't involve deep thought, I play some mindless video game (like an old NES game with an emulator, or an old arcade game like Pac-Man), or I go hiking or biking, or maybe watch some silly TV
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There are plenty of women who are fans of classical literature and baroque music. They just tend to cluster in occupations that do not intersect those of the typical Slashdot reader.
And as a side, those who consider a college degree in humanities or fine arts a waste of time should not be surprised when their co-workers spend time discussing the Kardashians or Honey Boo Boo.
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There are plenty of women who are fans of classical literature and baroque music. They just tend to cluster in occupations that do not intersect those of the typical Slashdot reader.
Yes, this is exactly my point.
And as a side, those who consider a college degree in humanities or fine arts a waste of time should not be surprised when their co-workers spend time discussing the Kardashians or Honey Boo Boo.
This is true too. Unfortunately a lot of people in technical professions have this mindset. It's not ju
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't care for what other people think or their interests, why would they care about your ideas and interest?
Really intelligent people - those who are smart over the whole range, not just the logic puzzle part, are normally a delight to talk with.
And although they might be smarter than you, and know more about the world, they generally do no tell you so.
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If you don't care for what other people think or their interests, why would they care about your ideas and interest?
He's not saying he cares one way or another, it was a personal observation, that somehow he has an easy time finding men who share his more intellectual pursuits, and that women who are intellectual are very rare for him to cross paths with. This is likely due to several factors, including his particular career field and geographic locale.
As an engineer, I generally see the exact same thing.
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Maybe, but that's why I was pointing out that this was very likely due to his unique perceptions and experiences. I've had many of the same experiences, due to my choice of profession, and also my lack of socializing or outside activities which have a lot of women in them; it's not because women are necessarily stupider (on average, obviously there's always outliers, as the OP himself pointed out), but quite possibly because he and I have had limited opportunities to meet more intelligent women, and instea
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The only problem with your post here is the bit about your professional and personal life. Where do you live and work that you're surrounded by men on your intellectual level, but all the women are vapid morons?
You should try moving to Manhattan (NYC); there's tons of women there who do nothing but talk about all kinds of academic subjects. Go to OKCupid and read their profiles; they'll drone on and on about their favorite authors, obscure musicians, theater, etc. (I'm not criticizing this, I'm pointing
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Yeah, you need to get over that and try packing up everything and moving somewhere entirely different. You haven't really lived if you haven't ever relocated to someplace very different (and you don't need to go as far as leaving the country and learning a new language; the subcultures in different parts of the US are already very different from each other).
It sounds to me like you're in a place which simply does not have many peers for you, and you're not a good fit for the local culture. I'm in the same
Changing Norms (Score:2, Insightful)
Your fifth point is notably in error. The issue is one of changing norms; you can change the norms of behavior that people expect of themselves and others in part by changing how they think about other people. That's why you dehumanize the enemy in war with names like "Charlie," for example. That means changing the internal narrative that people use when they think about the person or group of people they are interacting with. Popular entertainment--be it television, video gaming, or via other media--is
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I am no friend to Muslims. If all of them were slain, I would not weep a single tear. (Can you hear the 'however' coming up?)
However, back then men were basically either a warlord, a vassal, or a slave. Also, back then it was commonplace to take humans that we now classify as 'children' in marriage. Or if slaves, use them however the master liked, including sexually. They were just slightly smaller meat puppets than all the rest of the meat puppets. The point is, Muhammad was of his time.
It is just as
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:5, Insightful)
as it is for his followers to keep using those long out-dated moral standards from then in today's world.
The problem is that a large portion of the world's population (that is, everyone who follows an Abrahamic religion, which is probably at least half the global population) does exactly this.
That's the whole problem with these religions: they hold up these "holy books" as "the inerrant word of God", and claim that everyone should follow the moral standards contained in them.
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Christianity and Judaism were reformed. Islam admits no reform...well, it does but the reformers are soon pushing up daisies. There are still a few nutjob Christians and Jews around, but they are a small minority.
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they aren't. Many of the "reformed" sects are the worst ones. All those fundamentalist Christians aren't part of the old Roman Catholic church (or any offshoots of it), they're offshoots of the Protestant movement. For all its faults, the Catholic church had a good idea, that just letting people read the Bible themselves and interpret it their own way would lead to all kinds of bad things, so they tried to keep people from doing that; the Protestant reformation is exactly what led to fundamentalism. Of course, the root problem is the whole idea that a book is "holy" and sacrosanct; trying to keep people from reading things for themselves is guaranteed to fail eventually.
Anyway, probably at least 1/2 of Protestants in the US are evangelical and/or fundamentalist. Just look at how popular the "Left Behind" books are and various other wacky Christian media warning everyone of the "Rapture". Calling it a "small minority" is ignoring a very large and serious problem in our society, no different than Muslims ignoring their own extremists and then waking up one day to find that ISIS has taken over their city.
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For all its faults, the Catholic church had a good idea, that just letting people read the Bible themselves and interpret it their own way would lead to all kinds of bad things, so they tried to keep people from doing that
Wait, you don't really believe that shit, do you? You're crazier than the catholics if you do. Keeping people from information is always done to handicap them. True leaders create more leaders. The Catholics only want more followers.
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I know all about their religions. Good Christians and Jews, the ones who follow their books, do exactly this. It's right there in the Bible: if your children misbehave, you are to stone them. There's countless such examples. Also, women are to be subservient to men. A large number of Christians in America believe this.
Maybe you should look up the No True Scotsman fallacy.
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No True Scotsman.
You're just another religionist trying to say that 99.9% of other people in your religion are "doing it wrong".'
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Wrong. It isn't some "tiny subset", it's a huge number of Christians in America who are like this. Look how many American Christians believe in the Rapture. IIRC, that's based on one tiny passage in Revelations. But probably about half of Protestants in this country believe that and watch Christian movies about how the end is near. One such movie is in Redbox kiosks right now. You don't get your movie in a Redbox kiosk nationwide without having a huge number of potential viewers.
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Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a generality to say that "neither Christians nor Jews do this". Certainly, Christians do this sort of thing at much lower rates.
Jews? It's really ludicrous to even bring up the Jews. Jews don't exist. Numerically, that is.
A third of the world is Christian, roughly. (50% Catholic, 40% Protestant, 10% other, including the Orthodox churches)
A quarter of the world is Muslim, roughly (90% Sunni, 10% Shia)
15% of the world is Hindu, roughly.
Two tenths of a percent of the world is Jewish.
That means for every Jew, there's over a hundred Christians, over a hundred Muslims, around seventy Hindus, thirty five Buddhists,
There's more Sikhs than Jews. The Jews are roughly equal to the number of practitioners of Yoruba, and the Jewish number tends to include more non-religious folks than many of the other groups.
So if all religions were equally likely to incite violence, you'd expect for most violence to be Christian, then you'd expect Muslim, then Hindu, the traditional Chinese practitioners, then Buddhists.... you'd have a long list to get to Jews.
In practice, we hear more about Muslims than anyone, and we do hear about Christians some times. The fact that you don't hear about Jews doesn't mean anything- numerically, they don't exist. If you heard about Jewish violence at the same rate as you hear about Muslim violence, then the Jewish religion would be over a hundred times as violent or something. The fact that there's still some very violent strands of Islam that are extremely active right now is what makes the news, but seriously, Muslims as a group are so massive that it seems hard to make a comparison to billions based on the actions of thousands.
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> Jews? It's really ludicrous to even bring up the Jews. Jews don't exist. Numerically, that is.
And yet, their cultural identity as the foundation of Christianity and Islam make them culturually. And they are politically very powerful in the Middle East, for many culturual, economic, and technological reasons. So the whole "compare by numbers" concept falls apart very quickly.
Also, many Muslims and even other nations take the ongoing battle with the Palestinians over land, security, and self-government v
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But if you are comparing noise made by a few bad actors, as you are when pointing out Islamic violence, then yes, the numbers are really relevant. If, for instance, one out of every 10,000 Muslims were some violet nitwit, then you would have an army of 150,000 violent nitwits. Similarly, if one out of every 10,000 Jews is some violent nitwit, then you have a gang of 1,400 violent nitwits. These are very different things, and if you were trying to make some statement about religions, you would hear about
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but poll numbers show Muslims think Jihad in the name of Islam is perfectly potty, just as long as it isn't Muslims getting whacked. Also, Muslims believe political power comes from Allah, most Western (and Christian, I might add) nations believe political power comes from the people. As long as Muslims indulge themselves in this belief of Allah and political power, they will have no problem killing off non-Muslims, and they will never assimilate into Western nations. They will, instead, look at Western nations as nations not yet taken over.
And the Muslim saying, "if Allah wills it" shows just how morally bankrupt they are. They will never lift themselves above dictatorships or dictatorships masquerading as theocracies. And don't bother pointing at Indonesia as a counterpoint, they periodically have pogroms targeting non-Muslims.
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Jews? It's really ludicrous to even bring up the Jews. Jews don't exist. Numerically, that is
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Sure, they very much don't exist in some places, but they are extremely unevenly distributed due to some deliberate and deft political decisions on the part of the UK. They created the nation of Israel and one of the most complicated regions in the world got even more complicated — to the benefit of everyone but the residents of the region where the Jews were installed. And people are still lauding them for their benevolence, which is the most hilarious part.
Tell you
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First, not in all countries. Second, yes. This over representation is even small part of why "Jewish conspiracies" got traction. If you looked at the tiny Jewish population and the large number of Jewish scientists, mathematicians, etc. it would be fair to draw a conclusion, but much more difficult to pinpoint exactly why (culture, religion, genes, environment).
IMO gefilte fish is nootropic :P
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet they're amazingly well represented in finance, media, and law.
European culture made sure that they couldn't do anything else. Historically, Jews in Europe were not allowed to be members of a trade-guild, because doing so required making a Christian oath. For city dwellers (i.e. non-farmers), peddling and money-lending were two of the only jobs available until quite recently.
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It was extremely interesting to visit Prague and visit the Jewish area to read the history. The Jews were constantly being segregated into their own towns or areas in cities and not able to have very many jobs. Since Money Handling was against the law for Christians, the Jews became money lenders, bankers, etc. And in reading the historical plaques and documents, you can see how that 'The Final Solution' was just the culmination of years of persecution and segregation.
Very enlightening.
[John]
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Bullshit. Most men back then just wanted to live their lives without any grandiose delusions of conquering everyone just so they could tell them what to do and make people think their dicks were bigger. Mohammed was no different except for the late stage schizophrenia and using religion as a way for political control. Christ didn't arise in a vacuum, yet Mohammed decided fucking up people was better than being nice to them.
Re:truly an inspiration. (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Hypatia (Score:5, Informative)
"Hypatia [wikipedia.org] (born c. AD 350 – 370; died 415[1][3]) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Byzantine Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy."
"One day [smithsonianmag.com] on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict."
I hate these islamic extremists at least as much as anyone here. But it isn't just islam that is capable of such things.
Re:Remember Hypatia (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes think that Islam hasn't had it's version of "The Reformation" yet. In the west that somewhat reduced the power of religion compared to nation-states. But In "Islam-land" the Religion has more even MORE power than it does here.
And they haven't learned that oppressing a gender makes them weak because they're not using all of their "human resources" at their disposal.
Imagine if tomorrow women in the US were required to stay home and not have jobs....it would destroy the US economy very quickly.
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I sometimes think that Islam hasn't had it's version of "The Reformation" yet. In the west that somewhat reduced the power of religion compared to nation-states.
This is, more or less, Bernard Lewis's thesis. Check out the book "What Went Wrong" by Lewis. Interesting read.
But In "Islam-land" the Religion has more even MORE power than it does here.
Famous scholar of Islam and the Middle East Marshall Hodgson coined the term "Islamdom" for "Islam-land" (and to echo "Christendom"). Islamdom thus is Morocco to Western China, Central Asia to Central Africa (roughly). Good term. You can refer to Islamdom without referring to Arabs, Persians, South Asians, etc.
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I sometimes think that Islam hasn't had it's version of "The Reformation" yet.
Are you aware of the Baha’is? Founded by a leader who taught non-violence, forgiveness, equality of women, (and was killed for teaching this), they are a reformation in the Muslim religion and are now being terribly persecuted for their beliefs.)
They believe in progressive revelation, seeing their founder as the successor to Christ and Mohamed. Alas, as progressive as they are - claiming to have no conflict with science - they hold absolutely to the founder's views: e.g., while not a raging homophob
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I love how you have to go back 1600 years to find an example of Christians being assholes. Meanwhile, today, _every single day_, islam kills, tortures, maims, and rapes.
Not good enough for you? Christian faith requires that you love each other; killing is one of the worst imaginable crimes. Islam requires that you hate all who are not muslim; killing others is mandatory according to the quran.
DON'T pretend that "all religions are equally wrong"; they are not. Most of the world's religions are (relatively) p
Re:Remember Hypatia (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Christians did that 1500 years ago.
Muslims killed Sabeen Mahmud yesterday.
Pray forgive me if I see the Muslims as a significantly larger threat.
There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.
In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.
The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo [wikipedia.org].
When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists [rationalwiki.org] and those who can best be described as the American taliban [rationalwiki.org]. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.
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Right so exactly where in the Koran is it justified to kill a woman that have done nothing wrong? [hint: it isn't]
The ones that focus on Islam instead of the real reasons (extreme misogynistic traditions in many cultures) are either Islamofobists or just idiots. Islam isn't the power behind genital mutilations, rapes, killing and mutilation of women - the idea that women/girls aren't worth shit is.
One can (and should) criticize Islam and other religions. This? Just a fucking show of ignorance.
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The ones that focus on Islam instead of the real reasons (extreme misogynistic traditions in many cultures)
Islam is an extremely misogynistic tradition. That is the real reason they can't progress their cultures. You can see this at work in every Islamic state. Their culture progresses more slowly, because they've got rules to make that happen. No different from the Amish, except there's enough Muslims to be a problem, and the Amish are grossly outnumbered.
Re:No body guard? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What could have been (Score:5, Insightful)
But then I saw the cat pictures.
These were, of course, her own cat pictures. It is sometimes the most ordinary things in our lives that speak the loudest, if you are willing to listen.
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Neo-nazi. Why don't you listen to the words of mid-eastern Muslim leaders who still deny the holocaust, while at the same time praising Hitler. Pull your head out of your arse. Islam is a threat to life around the world. It is at least a great a threat as Nazism was, or the Soviet.
Re:No comments about SJWs yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
She wasn't a "SJW", she was actually trying to help effect change in an environment in which women are not only oppressed, but it is distinctly easily visible in most, if not all, walks of life in Pakistan (and other countries with an Islamic majority that isn't too opposed to Sharia law).
SJW's are usually trust fund babies and well-off morons that got bored with collecting tangible things and began collecting stories of oppression as bling. They're charlatans and ideologues, profit mongers and zealots.
Ms. Sabeen Mahmud was far closer to Mahatma Gandhi than any "Social Justice Warrior" (who often, without a shred of humility, compare themselves to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, or hell (I've yet to see them mention her but she fought for women's rights) Theodora the Empress alongside Emperor Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire).
Everyone lies sometimes, SJW's lie more often.
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malcolm x was a racist bastard, no better than a grand wizard. Why would any sane person want to associate themselves with him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
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malcolm x was a racist bastard, no better than a grand wizard. Why would any sane person want to associate themselves with him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
He was a racist bastard, something he came to greatly regret before his assassinate. Seeing whites and blacks praying together in Mecca, and seeing white struggles for black freedom in Northern Africa made him retract his earlier statements about how whites and blacks could never be at peace together.
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You should read how the bible treats women. It isn't any different from sharia.
Females are considered second class citizens in all monotheist religions. Fortunately the USA and most of Europe is made of descendants of various pagan religions that Christianity had to adapt to. Christianity had to add local customs. Things like Christmas, Halloween, new years, Some of those pagann religions had women as equals. It took centuries. But it happened.
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Hogwash. Not only do the majority of Muslims* protest against Islamic* terrorism, they are the main target of that terrorism. Not only have they had their reformation, the majority adheres to that reformed form.
Wahhabism* is a form of Islam* that goes against the mainstream.
(* guess what)
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The whole area in the middle east is intolerant to accepting people of different faith, ethnic back ground and culture. They claim to be so holy but offer little as examples of peaceful people. They act like the world is thousand of years in the past. No the US is not perfect and the example of perfect will never be achieved because we are human. This is just another example of how little these people have advanced in hundreds of years.
That's islam for you