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Anti-Education Attack Poisons 150 Afghan Schoolgirls
An anonymous reader writes "The water at a high school in Afghanistan was contaminated today, poisoning roughly 150 girls in attendance. Afghan officials say this was a deliberate attack: 'We are 100 percent sure that the water they drunk inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls' education or irresponsible armed individuals.' From the article: 'Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said. They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated. ... None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.'"
is what happens when you coddle and religious groups extreme behavior and the myth that they have a right to tell governments what to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.'"
Bad guys do bad things and people are afraid to even name them for doing the said bad things... I think the bad guys might be winning.
Religion of Peace. We should be tolerant of their views.
Show me in the Koran where it prohibits educating girls?
It's a cultural thing. Traditional (read patriarcal) societies that treat women as second class citiczens or as property all do horrible things like this.
And it's not right at all. Any culture that values males more than females is a backwards culture. In varying degrees, India, China, Japan, the Arab nations, Persians, most of the African countries, you names them - all backwards cultures. And most of them are paying a very heavy price for it. And in just about all cases, religion is used as an excuse for their deplorable behavior - it's not the cause.
There were many, many opportunities during the 20th Century to deliver sorely needed aid to Afghanistan, and put some money into helping the country modernize and industrialize. Under Western Cold War Political Doctrine, however, that simply wasn't seen as being "necessary" or a "priority". So after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan by the Western-armed Afghan Mujahedeen, Afghanistan was left to its own devices (= the country was left to rot in abject poverty). With the bone-crunching poverty, and political-abandonment by the Developed World came support for the Taliban. With the Taliban came a particularly hateful, denigrating view of women (women should cover at all times, girls should not go to school, girls should be married to older men by arranged-marriage). ----- Here we are many decades later, wondering why Afghanistan is an underdeveloped s__thole of place, where someone can so pissed at girls being educated, that he poisons their drinking water. Afghanistan should have been helped decades ago. The West, at the time, was too cheap to commit money to such a project. And now we have a genuinely "failed state" to deal with. "You reap what you sow", as they say.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Oh, like a wandering band of Shinto Priests did this?
I was just watching a talk by NDT on "Intelligent Design". In that, he made an excellent observation about how, for a 300 year period, the Arab world was the center of intellectual progress in the world. 2/3 of all stars with names have Arabic names. They discovered 0, they gave us algebra.
Then... a new religious philosophy arose that taught that mathematics was the work of the Devil. This wasn't Mohamed.... it wasn't there in the beginings of Islam. For many years, these problems didn't exist.
The sobering thought there is... as he points out.... this period of advancement ended with the rise of this anti-scientific ideology. Just think, there are a Billion Muslims, and only a handful of Muslim/Arab nobel prize winners. If they hadn't ended their period of advancement hundreds of years before Europe became the new center of intellectual progress... where would we be today? How much raw talent just went totally unused because of these ideologies.
Honestly.... I have little doubt that there would be people posting comments from Lunar or martian colonies by now if not for this terrible ideology.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's a conservative thing. Conservatives everywhere attack education. Whether it's literacy for women in Afghanistan, or sex ed and evolution in the United States, conservatives are anti-education.
Why are conservatives anti-education? Because their beliefs cannot be supported by facts, and so the more factual ideas you teach, the less conservative your people will be. There is a positive correlation between education and liberalism for a reason.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Last sentence: "Education for women was outlawed by the Taliban government from 1996-2001 as un-Islamic."
As opposed to Tennessee, where teaching of science to children of any gender is considered un-Christian.
Oh, wait, you say the Christian fundamentalists are just a bunch of loons who contort and abuse their religion to justify pre-existing cultural and political biases, eh? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, if that could possible apply to fundamentalists in general, Islam included. You think?
Quran-only Muslims are a small minority, and their rejection of Hadith is heavily criticized by mainstream Muslims. So saying "The Quran does not state" really has no weight for the vast majority of Muslims. If it's in Hadith, it's part of the religion.
Ask a devout Christian or Jew if that's the case and see what he says.
No, I'm not sure a religion is defined by its followers. You could say it's defined by people who do NOT believe in it, too. Mostly though, you could say it's defined by a very small number of elitists at the top who almost certainly have a political/social agenda.
This is one reason why there absolutely should not be tax exemption for religions. None of them. Now, if they want to organize some specific social welfare program, then that could be tax exempt. Muslims want to start a hospital? Tax exempt. Catholics want to start a soup kitchen? Then that should be tax exempt. But there is no compelling interest in society for allowing churches to make money and not pay tax on it. Maybe I'm just thinking about taxes because I just wrote a check a few minutes ago and the Catholic Church doesn't have to pay a nickel on the money they use to hire lawyers to defend guys who rape children - not to mention the money they use for moving expenses for the child rapists to move to a new parish where they will be free to rape children. .
Religious people can have a very positive effect on society. I see it around here every day. Religious institutions, on the other hand, should have to continually prove themselves though. They bear watching. They should not get special privileges just for existing.
Now these sick muslims who would poison girls just for trying to get an education are an example of what can happen when religious extremism, especially in educating the young, is allowed to run wild. But there's no question that it's a spectrum. Before they got to the point where they're poisoning their daughters, they had to get to the point where they had control over the way society educates. And before they had control over the way society educates, they had influence in schools' curricula. And before they had control over schools' curricula, there had to be some holier-than-thou stroke like Rick Santorum, telling people what's right and what's wrong based upon his interpretation of what God wants (and in his case, not even what God wants, but what some extremist convert decades after Christ wrote that he had decided God really really wants despite the fact that Christ didn't mention anything about those things. And apparently, God wants women with entropic pregnancies to die horribly painful deaths).
I'm not saying that Santorum is the same as guys who would poison little girls, but I'm saying that you don't get to guys poisoning little girls except by first having guys like Santorum. And it's fewer steps from one to the other than you might think.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, they are setting churches on fire, in their annual attacks on Christians around Christmas. Then some kids burn, and some firemen who come to fight the fire get shot at, but of course, no one gets punished. After all, non-believer public worship is illegal.
Funny that you would mention Malaysia. The above paragraph happened there. Wanna guess at the AVERAGE number of Christians they kill for Christmas every year?
As for Jordan, I have to admit that they do prosecute attacks on Christians. But now, given that the highest profile case was against people who tried TO BURN KIDS IN A CHURCH for disrespecting Mohamed... I think I have been trolled. Or you're a brainwashed ignoramus. It can go either way.
No good deed goes unpunished...