Posted on 11/24/2012 5:16:36 AM PST by arthurus
Nearly six decades ago (in 1956), Arthur Jeffery, a great modern scholar of Islam, reviewed Guillaume’s magisterial English translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, the oldest and most important Muslim biography of Muhammad. Jeffery’s review included this trenchant observation:
Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic biography of the prophet.
W. H. T. (Canon) Gairdner, in 1915, highlighted the dilemma posed by Islam’s sacralization of Muhammad’s timeless behavioral role model, revealed in such pious Muslim biographical works:
As incidents in the life of an Arab conqueror, the tales of raiding, private assassinations and public executions, perpetual enlargements of the harem, and so forth, might be historically explicable and therefore pardonable but it is another matter that they should be taken as a setting forth of the moral ideal for all time.
(Excerpt) Read more at rightsidenews.info ...
"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
Their “cease fire” is probably because they’re running low on rockets and have to wait for a new shipment from Iran. They’re just lobbing those rockets at anything and everything so Israel will use up all of their defenses...then, ka-pow.
BiBi needs to turn a deaf ear to obama and do what he has to do to protect his country. After all, how many times has obama dissed him in the past when he wanted to discuss these problems?
It is central to Islam that Mohammed is considered a Perfect Man, whose actions are to be emulated by all Muslims. And this Perfect Man was a robber of caravans, pillager of towns, rapist and murderer. This tells you all you need to know about Mohammed.
As opposed to the Old Testament, which mandated a 30-day waiting period before the raping began. Which was considerate.
God Did Not Condone Rape
by Kyle Butt, M.A.
Militant atheists of the 21st century delight in accusing God of condoning the most heinous immoralities. They insist that the God of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament, was a murderous villain guilty of far worse than His human subjects. Richard Dawkins accused God of being a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (2006, p. 31).
One attempt that has been made to bolster these unfounded accusations is to suggest that in the Old Testament God condoned rape. Dan Barker commented: “If God told you to rape someone, would you do it? Some Christians, ignorant of biblical injunctions to rape, might answer, ‘God would never ask me to do that’” (Barker, 1992, p. 331, emp. added). If the honest truth seeker were to ask to see the “biblical injunctions to rape,” he would be struck by the fact that no such injunctions exist.
The passage that is most often used to “prove” that God condones rape is Numbers 31:25-40. In this passage, the young women who were taken captive after Moses destroyed the Midianites were divided between the Israelites and the priests. The priests were given responsibility for 32 of the women. Skeptics often suggest that these women were supplied so that the priests could abuse them sexually and rape them. But nothing could be further from the truth. The skeptic errs greatly in this regard either due to his ignorance of God’s instructions or willful dishonesty.
In Deuteronomy 21:10-14, Moses specifically stated what was to be done with female captives:
When you go out to war...and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife (emp. added).
It is important to understand that God has never condoned any type of sexual activity outside of a lawful marriage. The only way that an Israelite would be morally justified in having sexual intercourse with a female captive was if he made her his wife, granting to her the rights and privileges due to a wife. Notice that the Israelite male could not “go in to her” (a euphemism for sexual intercourse) until she had observed a period of mourning and cleansing, and he could only “go in to her” with the intent of being her husband.
When the skeptics’ allegations about God condoning rape are demolished by the very clear instructions in Deuteronomy 21, the attack is usually shifted, and God is accused of being unjust for allowing war prisoners or slavery of any kind, regardless of whether or not rape was permitted. While these allegations about slavery have been dealt with decisively in other places (Butt, 2005a), it is important not to lose sight of the fact that shifting the argument to slavery is a red herring to draw attention away from the original accusation that God condoned rape.
For the skeptic to imply that God condoned rape, using Numbers 31, without mentioning Moses’ instructions in Deuteronomy 21, is unconscionable. It is simply another instance of dishonest propaganda designed to discredit God and the Bible. The irony of the skeptics’ position is that if atheism is true, the skeptic has no grounds upon which to claim that rape is morally wrong (Butt, 2005b). In fact, in my debate with Dan Barker, Barker admitted that fact, and stated that under certain circumstances, rape would be a moral obligation (Butt and Barker, 2009).
In reality, God’s ways and actions have always been fair, equitable, and just. But the errant thinking and self-contradiction of the skeptical worldview continues to show itself to be unjust in its criticism of God, and immoral in its practical application.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=12&article=2333
Christians or Jews stopped following that 2nd century mentality about 600 years ago. Muslims advocate and participate in that sort of barbarism today.
You can look at all the references in the OT involving rape, and the only time the female's preference comes into things is in determining whether the wife is committing adultery (in which case she is executed) or is being raped (in which case she isn't, which is at least an advance on some present-day Muslim practice).
Otherwise, sex and marriage and rape are handled as being violations of property rights of fathers or husbands. Not physical assaults on the female.
It is important to understand that God has never condoned any type of sexual activity outside of a lawful marriage. The only way that an Israelite would be morally justified in having sexual intercourse with a female captive was if he made her his wife, granting to her the rights and privileges due to a wife.
Not exactly. The OT frequently refers to concubines, who were not wives, or at least certainly did not (by definition) have "rights and privileges" due to a full wife.
One of the most bizarre notions of moderns is that the norm in human history is women being given a choice who they will have sex with. The opposite is the actual truth. Female choice (in practice anyway) is limited pretty much to the last few centuries in western societies.
In most other cultures down thru history and around the world, women were quite literally "given" in marriage, with their consent not considered relevant. This of course includes the Old Testament times, when the marriage ceremony consisted of the women being handed over by her father to the new husband. No trace of consent by the women considered necessary.
I quite agree.
But if we are going to condemn Islam because of what its holy book says, as opposed to their practice, we should at least recognize that the Jewish and Christian holy book (in the OT section anyway) differs little from the Koran in the areas of war, slavery and marriage.
Which is not surprising. Both emerged from the Middle East, and they are reflective of the basic society from which they came.
As you say, Christians have gone beyond this.
But it is also fair to point out that females were legally held in bondage, with no legal recourse if raped, less than 150 years ago in this country. While raping a female slave may not exactly have been legal, there was no way it could be prosecuted. The most attractive female slaves, especially those with a large admixture of white blood, sold for the very highest price of any slave type. And it wasn’t because they were expected to be really productive field hands.
You can’t invite Jesse Jackson, Bill Ayers, Sharpton, Rev Wright to be at your side in a public ceremony.
srbfl
Thank You!
You are stretching your credibility to claim moral equivalence to the uber-violent pedophile and other religions. The article is about the destructive nature of islam. Even though mohamed took portions of the OT to give his religion credability, it's not the similarities between the OT and the koran that is important. It's the differences that matter. The two are distinctly different religions with indisputable differences in the behavior of their followers. How is the violence and hatred spawned by islam morally equivalent to any other religion? How is it moral?
Mohammad: Qur'an:9:5 Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.
Jehovah and Allah don't sound like the same guy.
Interesting, if they “love” death so much, how do you explain sleeping in a different place every night?
The followers love death. The leaders are the same. They love death for the followers.
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