Those of you who wish your children to pray in schools, to continue to recite oaths to God and country, to keep your religion forming the backbone of secular law... please consider how governments rule when they have the freedom from accountability allowed by religious governance.
It seems so safe and normal when it's *your* particular flavor of religion, but as you contemplate the horrors granted through sharia law, remember that your god is just as strange to non-Christians as Allah is to you.
Stoning victim 'begged for mercy'
I have a teething baby and a sick husband to take care of, so I'll link to some reviews of this story that explain my thoughts on this story better than I can, right now.
Pharyngula - God and sex: two potent ideas that never get along well together
Cuttlefish - 13 Years Old
I cannot come up with any words that would remotely resemble a calm intelligent comment.
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming you like comments from other viewpoints too :), so I'll attempt. I can see where you and the writer to the last link are coming from. First of all, I'm absolutely horrified by this news story. I feel so physically sick every time I think about it. Honestly, although I think church and state should be seperated, we only have control of that in our country. It hasn't worked well for us to go "enforce" the same constitutional ideals of the US on other countries. So I don't know that even if we keep prayer out of our schools it will ever help any other nation with problems such as these. Although for the record, I don't think prayer in public school is constitutional anyway, or necessary.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to religious viewpoint, I think that the writer of your bottom link has a good quote on his left side about gods and the societies who worship them. I will add that I think those are distortions of the truth, which as a believer that there is a Satan, I believe one of his greatest powers is that of immitating or mimicking the truth similarly enough to tempt people to group the good with the bad. I know that the God I believe in, does have priests and servants that are similar to him, but he does not expect the people to support them but rather them to give freely and generously to the people they serve, while at the same time earning their own living. The God I believe in looks on the heart and so would never call rape adultery or hold a 13 year old accountable for hardly anything.
Really, in conclusion, I see your point, and I believe that this story needs to be SEEN and HEARD by this world.
At the same time I still think there is a God and I think there are people being decieved in horrible ways in what I consider the last days. So thought I'd share :).
I appreciate your blog, it's fun to be able to discuss things like this.