Simcha Fisher on the Odious Pewsitter Site
July 15, 2014 By Mark Shea http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/07/simcha-fisher-on-the-odious-pewsitter-site.html
In parts of the Islamic world, women can get horsewhipped and killed for the “crime” of getting raped. That’s because, in certain barbarous parts of the world, all that matters is that the female organism underwent the act of coitus, forced or consensual, to incur ritual guilt with very real penalties. It’s a mindset that comes from the Stone Age. Even by the time of the Patriarchs (particularly Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar) some dim sense that the male in the relationship might have some teensy weensy bit of responsibility to bear in the maltreatment of women.
I am, of course, very far from recommending this Muslim mindset.
Or this part-of-the-Muslims' mindset.
However, the attack on stone age as responsible for it is really unwarranted. Part of the stone age peoples are famous and rightly so, for good paintings. Part of them are famous or rather infamous for having cracked open bones of other men and sucked their marrow. Neither exploit is very likely to be repeated soon by Muslims. Ask anyone in France about Cro-Magnon and Néanderthal.
None of their either recorded (none, perhaps,) or even reconstructed histories suggests that they stoned women for adultery. Some of their reconstructed histories claim their women lived in permanent adultery, so it was not a stoning offense. Otherwise, stones would not exactly have lacked, particularly flint stones. However, so far no stone age woman has been found covered in stones or surrounded from stones from waist upward on skeleton.
And, as the stone age theory about this mindset of some Muslims is wrong, I suppose some other explanation is right.
For instance this one:
- Sharia Rule : a woman getting raped is stoned.
- Because she is supposed to have learned from very early fights with her brother how to resist.
- Because Muslim men have been taught not to rape when woman resists.
- Because therefore a woman having been raped is supposed not to have properly resisted. A bit like in Old Testament rape victims not crying out when in the city were stoned for being culpable for adultery or for playing the harlot in her father's house.
- Sharia Misrule per se : this rule is applied where reasons for it very clearly do not apply:
- When the woman has not been taught how to defend herself,
- When she tried to defend herself but her strength was inadequate.
- When the rapist did not show the usual Muslim upbringing of desisting from rape if resisted. Including, but not limited to the case when rapists were many.
- Their defense of Sharia Misrule (as I can reconstruct it):
- A Raped Woman has no honour : why believe a dishonoured person about anything, including what is supposed to be their defense - or especially what is supposed to be their defense?
- Sharia Rules are divine, even when there are human reasons for them not applying (what an idea of God is this?)
- Rules must follow the most common case, not the exception (the most common case being, in their experience, that a woman who really does not want to be raped is not raped).
- Judges must follow the rule and the facts, they are there to judge the guilt according to the law, not to judge the law (even, apparently, when it is inadequate, or there is a case not foreseen in it).
That is the kind of real explanation for some Muslims stoning raped women that I can find, but the "Stone Age mentality surviving" is, I regret to observe, totally spurious.
And the "Stone Age mentality regrettably surviving" explanation helps to demonise Muslims as "the other", while taking any kind of analysis of this other explanation which is obviously more complex and which I suppose to be more real, would perhaps lead a few of their critics to want to rid Western administration of the kind of tares that I here attribute to some Muslims, but on many points not at all exclusively to Muslims. Some of the items can be found in Kant, and as the Kantian Hannah Arendt was shocked to find out, Eichmann was a Kantian. Some of the things found in Kant go further back than that in Prussia. And some of that might even go back to Crusaders coming from Holy Land, having had contact with Muslims, and meeting Prussians (in the original sense of the word). You know the Teutonic Order that beat the Prussians and tried to beat already Christian Poles, and already partly Christian Lithuanians, and who failed in Tannenberg, Grunwald, Žalgiris.*
So far I have not read what Simcha Fisher has had to say about the matter. But since Mark Shea had read him and could come up with the Stone Age theory, I do suspect Simcha Fisher was not far from the Stone Age theory either. As said, it is spurious.
With all this in mind, this kind of Muslim attitude really does harm, it really is opposed to the Gospel of Christ, and when some Muslims claim the Gospel had been forged, they would point to the forgiven adulteress.
Of course, they are very wrong.
I think Christ writing on the sand was the third time God wrote the commandments on rock. The divine finger on more solid rock, twice in the time of Moses, the human finger in sand, same text, 1500 years later. Some exegetes have said that Christ wrote the sins of those about to stone her. I think that even the mention of the commandments - where "thou shalt not commit adultery" is not first - one after another, as well as the words about him "who is without sin," were enough to make quite a few of the accusers realise themselves they could not stone her, and the rest to get away after seeing their more respected elders had not dared.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Our Lady of Mount Carmel
16-VII-2014
* Yesterday was 604 anniversary of that battle:
Lietuviška Vikipedija : Žalgirio mūšis
http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDalgirio_m%C5%AB%C5%A1is
Polska Wikipedia : Bitwa pod Grunwaldem
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwa_pod_Grunwaldem
Deutsche Wikipädie : Erste Schlacht bei Tannenberg
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlacht_bei_Tannenberg_(1410)
English Wikipædia : Battle of Grunwald
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grunwald
And that is when Mark Shea's article is from.
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