Sigh
March 20th, 2006 - 10:22 pm
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman faces execution for converting to Christianity 16 years ago. Doug Mataconis has everything you need to know, here and here.
As Doug wrote, “these guys are supposed to be our friends?”
I’ll have my own thoughts on the broader indications of this story in a couple days.
Tolerance of other religions while taking a hard line on apostasy isn’t uncommon, really. Of *course* it shouldn’t be the death sentence! But, as an example, Luther’s oft cited anti-semitism wasn’t so much anti-semitism but anger at conversions to Judaism from Christianity. If you wanted to go to hell, that was fine, but to remove someone’s salvation by converting them… he considered that evil. (Yes, the idea of evangelical Jews is somewhat mind-bending.)
Anyway, tolerance for other religions isn’t necessarily related to tolerance of conversion. That doesn’t mean that intolerance of conversion is okay, only that we might have thought that tolerance for minority religions, written into law, was as good as we could reasonably expect to get just now.
I hope they don’t execute this guy. And his family turned him in? I suppose they were hoping it would force him to recant.
Why can’t they just let the afterlife take care of the punishment? And people think that Christians believing other people are going to hell is so terrible? Wouldn’t it be nice if the court looked at this guy and said, “You’re apostate. You’re going to burn in hell for eternity, now get out of here and go home.”
I think that would be a rather significant improvement.
And I guess that’s the difference between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Moslems.
But don’t you know our sorts of fundies are just as dangerous… I heard someone say so.
But I keep getting told Islam is a religion of peace.
Meanwhile, our “trusted ally,” the UAE, criminalizes attempted conversion of Muslims.
Different magnitude, but same pathology.
Fish: Well, this is no datapoint against that. Peace, after all, is not the same as kindness, niceness, tolerance, or kittens.
A religion of peace is one that doesn’t promote war, or better yet actively opposes it. This example doesn’t bear on that.
(Whether or not Islam can accurately be described as such is a hard one to answer thoroughly, but fortunately irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether or not this kind of behaviour demonstrates it.)
That’s right, Sigivald, Islam is offering this man the peace of the grave…
We should do WHATEVER IT TAKES to keep them from killing him. If it takes killing 1000 mohammedans, so be it. Or a million, or even all 1.2 billion mohammedans. We should do whatever it takes.