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Saudi Justice: 10 Years and 2,000 Lashes For Internet Video of Naked Dancing
An anonymous reader writes with a link to The Huffington Post, which reports "that a Saudi man was sentenced to 2,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for dancing naked on the roof of a car and posting the video online, according to multiple reports. Three other men were also sentenced to three to seven years in jail and hundreds of lashes each for the incident, Agence France-Presse reported, citing Arabic-language paper Al-Sharq. The four men were hit with a number of charges, including "encouraging vice" and violating public morality, according to the report. The prosecutor in the case, which was heard by a judge in Saudi Arabia's conservative Al-Qassem province, reportedly objected to the sentences for being "too lenient," Gulf News notes. The video was reportedly circulated widely on the Internet, but could not be found by The Huffington Post."
I get that they have oil, but come on already. This sort of crap should simply not be tolerated by the west. We should not sell them arms or have diplomatic relations with these kinds of states. They abuse women, have a cave man's idea of a criminal justice system, are a theocracy and fund terrorism. What else do they need to do before we decide to stop tolerating their shit?
In the US you can be murdered just for having the wrong sexual identity or of the wrong race. Until you clean up your act, your media needs to shut their damn mouth and learn some respect.
10 years for growing the wrong plant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
10 years and 2000 lashes for dancing naked on film...
8 years and 600 lashes for torturing and killing one's own daughter...
It could have been a woman with her face uncovered. Or a woman, period, driving the car naked. The sentence would be death by stoning and/or beheading.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
There's a small difference between random citizens breaking the law in doing that, and the system of justice doing it itself. You should shut your own mouth.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You've got enough brain-dead biggots in your country to make it as bad any backwards theocracy.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Extremism is extremism, no matter how large or small.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm more afraid of the Christians enacting shit like this.
Technoli
Even extreme atheism?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Eh, it's still an extreme comparison. This is a person who is having their life ruined, suffering literal torture, and all for the sake of one interpretation of one book.
I don't think Christianity is an accurate understanding of the universe, and I don't think it's even close to an ideal approach to morality, but comparing people who are afraid of learning something to those who torture and imprison others on the basis of their religion isn't fair.
Human rights are not judged according to cultural relativism. Sharia law is a violation of human rights, regardless of the religion of the victim.
I think it's entirely fair. The only difference between these two groups is the book they've chosen. It took a lot of work and loss of life to chill the Christians down to a point where they are almost tolerable, but they have everything they need to become (again) what the Muslims are today.
I think it's entirely fair. The only difference between these two groups is the book they've chosen.
Nope, the difference, as can be seen throughout the world, is poverty. Cultures with a lot of poverty take an extreme approach to enforcing morality. Christians still execute gay people in Uganda. Turkey is a mostly Muslim country without these kinds of extreme civil rights abuses.
It took a lot of work and loss of life to chill the Christians down to a point where they are almost tolerable, but they have everything they need to become (again) what the Muslims are today.
And this is a brash and unsupported argument.
Book: Acts. Chapter 5. Ananias converted to Christianity and was told to sell all his posessions and give all the money to the commune. Instead, he gave only half the money, and kept the other half.
A priest asked him about this, and he lied and said "I gave all the money." In punishment, God instantly killed him then and there. The same thing happened to his wife shortly thereafter.
What happened to all the forgiveness and compassion?
This is a major problem with the Bible: it presents a very inconsistent image of God. Sometimes he is over-the-top forgiving, and other times he is over-the-top brutal in punishment. There is a distinct lack of consistency, leaving his followers to wonder when their best efforts at pleasing Him will just make Him go irate again.
"Mysterious ways" does not capture it. "Sociopathic ways" is more accurate. I really, really hope the Bible is not accurate in its description of God.
Oh for fucks sake please stop engaging in such false equivalencies. I know you appended the smiley in an effort to make a joke of this, and this isn't aimed at you personally. Far too many people really think it isn't that bad, and we shouldn't say anything because we're not perfect either, and your post (meant in jest or not) feeds into that notion.
The United States may have put an inexperienced African-American in office ahead of a vastly more qualified female, but our gender (and other issues) are miniscule compared to how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other places.
* Women are routinely murdered for stepping out of line, in despicable, dishonorable acts referred to by their perpetrators as "honor killings."
* Women who offend the sensibilities of the men of their family are often locked up for life in a room with no light, no sound, and no outside contact beyond a tray of food being shoved under a door, a practice that makes solitary confinement in the US and other western states look like a picnic in comparison. The result is almost universal madness on the part of the victim, usually within a relatively short time. This practice is so common and entrenched that there is a term for this facility, the "woman's room" (not to be confused with a restroom or loo)
* victims of rape are routinely charged and convicted of fornication, adultery, etc. for having the audacity of being a victim, and imprisoned or worse (see above). Worse, they are convicted merely on the word of a few men, while female testimony is dismissed (by law) and not considered as a counterweight. In many places, they are stoned to death.
* Even women who manage to escape all of this and are considered "upstanding" by the psychotic standards of the culture can, at best, expect to be buried in the desert with no record of their passing (no marker, no death record, nothing). This after a life in servitude and bondage.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to leave the house without the company of a man, even if the man is a boy-child.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, on pain of severe punushment.
and the list goes on. Women drowned in front of their entire families in the family swimming pool. Women disfigured by acid for refusing the advances of a suiter, and so on and so on, ad nauseum.
People should read the book "Princess" by Jean Sasson, about the nightmare of being a Saudi Princess, arguably the most privileged and sheltered position a woman can occupy in that society. There are also several excellent, Iranian-made movies that depict, describe, and criticize the epidemic of female-stonings in that society, often with little or no evidence beyond the word of a husband keen to ditch his wife for a prettier woman, e.g. The Stoning of Soraya M.
It's appalling, and we in the west have betrayed everything we purport to stand for, year after year and decade after decade, by cozying up to such regimes and abusive societies.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
[1]: The main reason the US's murder rate is so high is the availability of firearms.
Switzerland has just as many guns and far less murders. Mexico has less and far more murders.
Realistically the US's murder rate is heavily influenced by many cultural factors and has a lot to do with gang and drug related violence. When you take those out the US isn't all that different. Plus while actual murders are higher in the US if you look at other violent crime (rape, muggings, etc) the US is ahead of many European countries.
Overall this issue is far more complex than the simple minded "Guns are bad, mmmkay." response.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
destroying this wealth and peace
Describing 20th century Europe as peaceful is, um well, peculiar.
There is no such thing as "extreme Atheism."
Level of belief has a floor - and that is zero.
What you refer to is leader worship and/or state worship. Usually some sort of Fascism though often with the label Socialism. These can indeed be as ugly as any religion, but they are very much like religion. Such totalitarian states have claimed Atheism simply as a way to shut down competing religions. i.e., worship Stalin/Mao/etc., not God.
No, Atheists do not believe that there is a God. Or, to be more precise still, they do not find any convincing evidence that there is a God, any more than there is convincing evidence of pink unicorns. Their default state of belief for the infinity of possible assertions that are unsupported by sound evidence is "lack", not "faith". They don't have faith that there is no God -- that would require positive evidence of a negative statement, as they say in the inference business, lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. Humans in the West had little evidence that black swans existed (and hence didn't much believe in them) until they did and then they did. Black swans existed just fine without humans having "faith" that they did, and people who didn't believe in them when nobody they knew or heard of had ever seen one didn't have "faith" that they did NOT exist, they just had no reason to think that they did.
Atheists do have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in the mish-mosh of hearsay from the dark ages that passes for conclusive evidence in the minds of the religious, just like good scientists have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in weak evidence from poorly done studies in many other contexts. Scientists don't "have faith that the magnetic monopole doesn't exist" just because nobody has (yet) credibly seen one, any more than they had faith that the Higgs boson didn't exist before someone allegedly saw a few at the LHC. They just weren't convinced by the evidence and arguments so far that they do exist.
So actually, many Atheists are both rational and faithless and are neither ignorant nor idiots. Since they would consider the word "agnostic" to mean "lacking knowledge of" (because that's what it means, and their not idiots or ignorant) they could probably care less if you called them "agnostic about God", except for the weak connotation of agnostic that suggests that the proposition involved is somehow reasonable. I'm agnostic about monopoles because I find them reasonable, but don't believe in them (yet) due to a lack of evidence. I'm not exactly agnostic about pink unicorns that love to lay their heads in the laps of virgins and can cure disease with their horns -- yes, there's a lack of evidence but the proposition isn't particularly reasonable -- it is inconsistent with a lot of things I believe more strongly because there is a lot of evidence.
An atheist might well not consider themselves to be an agnostic because they think that at the very least, most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent, often logically contradictory, sometimes ethically contradictory, and arguments about evidence concerning God are an excellent opportunity to play "Logical Fallacy Bingo". So they often, but not always, are not the sort of thing one can properly be said to feel "agnostic" about. But at the end of the day, show me a pink unicorn healing virgin amputees with a touch of its horn, and after I've taken a dose or two of anti-psychotic medication (just in case somebody slipped me some LSD in my coffee) I will reluctantly increase my degree of belief in them.
In the meantime, perhaps you might avoid making sweeping, incorrect statements about atheism, which is lack of belief in god, not active belief that no god exists, and certainly does not involve faith in any of the many reasonable meanings of the word.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.