One Young Girl. One Powerful Lesson.

Posted by ScuzzBuster

November 21, 2008

A few weeks ago, a 13-year-old girl was dragged into a stadium in Kismayo, Somalia and buried up to her neck in the dirt in front of 1000 spectators.
As she was buried, she was uttering “Don’t Kill Me, Don’t Kill me.”
Frightened and pleading for her life, after she was buried, over 50 men approached her and threw stones at her head until she was dead.
What was her crime?

Initially, the Islamic Sharia court reported that she had been charged and convicted of adultery.
The young girl had been walking by herself on the way to a family member’s home when she was ambushed and raped by three men.
After telling her father of the rape, her family went to authorities to report the crime. Somehow, the report of rape lead to accusation of adultery that under Islamic Sharia law mandated her execution.

Scared, crying, begging for her life, a girl who had reached out for help after being raped was stoned to death. It’s difficult to express a coherent feeling about this. I think the average person would immediately use this as proof of the evil of Muslim tradition, but I guess I just don’t see it that way. This is nothing more than an example of how dogmatic religious belief is not only dangerous, but the root of a vast amount of the evil in this world.
When you strip them back to their roots, there’s very little real difference between the base morality of the Old Testament or the Qur’an.

“If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones”

A good deal of misguided people like to espouse that human morality comes from the teachings of the Bible. However, if we were to follow the directives of the Bible as law, what we end up with a society that looks more like the Sharia Law driven Islamic states of the middle east than the United States of the 21st century.

Good Christians like to believe that Islam is the religion of intolerance and violence, but I guess the real difference is that at least in Islamic Law driven states they are actually living by the law of their sacred texts.
Can we imagine for a moment if majority Christian societies based their justice system on the laws of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc…

No, we like to pick and choose what seems to sound good to us. People like to hold up the Bible as indisputable word of God when it comes to a “man laying with another man.” Obviously, we can’t let something like Proposition 8 in California go by without action by banning same sex marriage when it’s clearly the indisputable word of God. Of course, no one seems to wants to add ballot measures to allow the public to vote about whether we should stone to death any man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath.

When I was casting my ballot earlier this month I must have overlooked any reaffirmation of my right to take my children in to town to be stoned to death for being “stubborn and rebellious.” And I’m pretty damned sure that the “indisputable word of God” gives me that right.

Every time I read stories like the one of the young girl in Somalia (and unfortunately, these reports are not uncommon), I don’t think of the twisted evils of Islam. In fact, at their heart, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and countless other major religions have pretty much the same messages. I think nations that function under strict Sharia Law practices are secretly the envy of the darkest traditionalist Christians who long for a country that is based on the teachings of the Bible.

To get a sneak preview of how that kind of society works out we need to look no further than Kismayo, Somalia, and what happened to a frightened, crying 13 year-old girl on October 27th, 2008.

Dogma kills.

bookmark Technorati Del.icio.us StumbleUpon Digg Facebook Mixx Reddit