Okay, so admittedly yesterday’s post was petty (though I remain annoyed with the Mormon Times). But my grievance in this post is most definitely not petty. From Fox News:
An Iranian woman faces being stoned to death after being accused of committing adultery with two men involved in the killing of her husband, the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.
If the barbaric sentence is enforced it would be the first stoning to take place in the hardline Islamic Republic in years, the Israeli paper said.
Infidelity is outlawed in Iran and usually punished with lashes or prison. Execution is permitted under Iranian law but stoning is rare, experts say.
Sakineh Mohamamadi e Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother-of-two from the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz, is accused of having affairs with two men, who were accused of murdering her husband in 2005.
Ashtiani was originally sentenced to 99 lashes for having “illicit relationships” and sent to jail, where she remains.
She was then tried for murder and found guilty, and the sentence of death by stoning imposed, the Post said.
According to the Guardian, she was convicted on the basis of “judge’s knowledge—a loophole that allows for subjective judicial rulings where no conclusive evidence is present.”
Due in part to international outcry, Iran is reviewing the stoning verdict. She is still expected to be hanged, however. And while this has received a lot of coverage throughout the world, Iran has imposed a nationwide media blackout of the story.
Barbaric acts like stoning and honor killings are often done in the name of Islam, but the Quran—unlike the Bible—does not explicitly call for stoning adulterers. The practice is instead based on the disputed sayings of Muhammad, known collectively as the “hadith.”
In defense of the ancient Hebrew Law, capital crimes required two witnesses. As a result, stoning was infrequent.
How is that a defence? Nearly everything was a capital crime, or if not, some other barbaric tradition was enforced like selling your daughter to her rapist.
Islamic law requires four witnesses. But that is often sidestepped (as it was in this case).
Craig,
Sometimes your not worth responding to. Your caustic statement doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that I recognize an ethical maturing process through human history. At some point you must recognize that a just society does have to decide what is ethical and what the community does with people who do unethical things. Instead, Craig, I suggest (to you especially) that a barbaric society is one that permits all actions without judgement. The mere fact of establishing Law in the Hebrew tradition was a huge leap towards a more just society. Requiring two witnesses for capital crimes was also a great step towards a more just society. Continually improving laws, punishments, and judgement systems are good things. Craig, your requirement that ancient civilizations be 21st century modernists is silly, if not idiotic. How about you try to recognize an occasional advance by an ancient group or two even if you don’t agree with everything the did? Also please recognize that not every theist is a conservative literal biblicist. I am not.
John,
The 4 witness requirement probably makes any conviction of a capital crime nearly impossible. It maybe seemed like a higher standard over the Jewish requirement, but they soon were required to compromise the requirement to get any conviction. Their direction of compromise has apparently corrupted their attempts at a more just society.
Craig and John,
The witness comment is made independent of whether I agree or don’t agree with stoning of adulterers. I don’t, but I do think adultery is a destroyer of lives and community. This story offends us because the woman is probably innocent and the penalty is extreme and ancient. Let’s not lose sight that societies have to at least try to make ethical judgements to maintain a reasonable society. Certainly adultery is no longer considered to be a capital crime. (Again please recognize my abhorrence of the unjust situation in the story posted by John.)
Actually, I get especially angry at rapists, child rapists (priests included), and promiscuous STD-infected lovers who don’t tell their partners (a worst case scenario for adultery). In my darkest, angry thoughts I might just agree to stoning if I sat on a jury. Every once in a while I would like to add a CEO or two to the stoning list for justice sake. I cry out for justice over crimes as well as unjust judgements, but, in the end, stoning will have to be left in the past.
“…but I do think adultery is a destroyer of lives and community.”
Only because of the ridiculous notions we have about monogamy and sex in our society.
“In my darkest, angry thoughts I might just agree to stoning if I sat on a jury.”
Creepy.
“Sometimes your [sic] not worth responding to.”
Then don’t respond.
I don’t disagree completely with your statements on monogamy. Instead, if two people communicate that monogamy is not expect or desired when they meet up, then that if fine. But if some prefer to have an agreement of exclusivity, then they have a right to expect that to be honored. In both cases, expectations need to be communicated. In recent studies, ‘swingers’ have a very high rate of STDs, because of their non-ridiculous notions about sex. Also, ridiculously monogamous couples typically have sex more frequently and STDs less frequently than people outside of monogamous relationships. But I agree in all cases, good communication about expectations is the key to ethical sex.
As to my creepy statements … I have always had an elevated sense of offence probably because my mother worked as a state welfare worker with child and spouse abuse victims. She would come home crying and managed to dry her tears before entering the house. How far do you judge ‘ridiculous notions about sex’ to go? How about my Scout Leader who regularly had sex with his daughter until she committed suicide. Is it a ridiculous notion that I should be offended by his actions? Rape and child rape were first on my list of ridiculously unethical sex. I don’t think you would put them into the category of reasonable sexual activity. In fact, I would suggest that we agree more than disagree. However, I recognize that you might not join me in my ‘dark thoughts’ about pondering the justice of having the truly creepy scout leader stoned his LDS peers. O well, you probably have your own creepy thoughts.
Yes, sometimes I don’t respond to your [not sic] comments. And, yes, sometimes you’re [not sic] reasonable.
Stoning adulterers to death may be extreme, but a lesson should be taught, perhaps to crippling? They whip adulterous men in some countries, I wouldn’t oppose it here. Some things are right and some are wrong, some are wrong to the extent that public severe reprimand is appropriate. A town full of people who only want to rape innocents to death deserves far worse than nuclear holocaust, but that’s the humane thing probably, except for the radiation problems. If you don’t want a society that views marriage as an oath before powers greater than you could ever be, that should never be violated (divorce for abuse is a good reason to do so, divorce because of a drunken fling is advocating parasitism) then you are happy to find somewhere else to go.
I’m not in an orderly mood tonight, but point is this: any functioning society requires laws, moral codes, standards, and a free for all is nothing but hippie bums wanting to eat in paradise while never having to grow the food. It falls apart, it has through history, not because of Chomskian big bad wolves or villains or made up coporate bodies, but because of the people themselves. Punishment for adultery isn’t a problem, I have no respect or value for adulterers so we can throw them in volcanoes for all I care. Adultery is destructive the same way rape is, it destroys people at a deep level of their trust. But the problem becomes when judgment is made out of cheap fear or emotion, and that’s all the free for all societies are and have ever been, formed out of cheap emotion. You want the atheist liberal form of this stoning? Try the bloodbath of the french revolution and the Soviet gulags, massacres committed in the name of protecting the individual from accountability.
I have no problem with the death penalty, some people deserve to die. Mike Vick should be shot, child traffickers and sex abusers should be shot. A woman selling her child into prostitution for drug money should be shot. Evil exists, it cannot be pot smoked and kumbay yaed away. For a society to not function in fear and cheap emotion, it has to establish what it is, what is right and good, and destroy those things that are evil. Some societies get it wrong, and ours is sometimes lethargic. Why we haven’t gone into africa and started exterminating janjaweed is a mystery, but maybe because we’re too busy telling everyone that condoms will solve everything. Anarchy is an escape, not from the corruption of a sick world that truth sometimes is, but from reality, from the world and from laws beyond our material realm. Egalitarianism is the same thing. Live and let live is, more often than not, a desire to escape judgment of the self. People don’t want to be judged out of fear, so they don’t want rules to be judged by.
Funny thing about that is, I hear it most from liberal atheist types, who promote evolution as a solution. Evolution works by natural selection, and nature is about as cold and mechanical a judge as you’ll find. All the better to me, or else we’d be mired in mediocrity, instead of landing on the moon.
(crowd together): GET ON WITH IT!!
I think adultery is wrong, I don’t think punishing them harshly is a bad idea. I don’t think our methods of matrimony here, as they should be, are screwy or backwards or wacky. I support gay marriage because a marriage is a matter of responsibility not entirely of gender, and adultery in any case violates that responsibility. People fail that responsibility because rule of majority, most people aren’t good people, not these days anyway, because we’ve lowered our standard enough that they aren’t expected to be any better. Humans are physical and therefore imperfect creatures. I don’t level down marriage rules because of that. This country would be healthier if it didn’t either. But if this stoning is wrong (the woman is innocent and accused and not tried fairly) that’s more a sign of the people protecting their individual selves out of fear, the sign of a fallen society, because it decided that impulses and individualism mattered first, including fear.
If we are creatures and merely physical,then the definition of imperfect does not apply;as ‘imperfect’ is a spiritual idiom.
If we are creatures and merely physical,then what is the consequence of slaughtering another ‘human’?
Murder is also a spiritual idiom.If there is no god and no spirit within us,then murder does not exist!
There is no ‘wrong’ in nature,there is no ‘good’.For wrong and good are questions of morality;and morality is no different from religion!
I am not one to preach,but I will quote:” Let him who is without guilt,cast the first stone” Jesus of Nazareth.