His wife needs to slip a little rat poison into his breakfast, and then she can say “I have no husband now, and I prefer to say that I never had one.“

I always thought of religious moderates as those who ignore the parts of their faiths that are incompatible with modern society.

There are going to be those who will use this to argue that going into Iraq was the right thing to do and we should stay there until something like this is considered shocking by the people there.

I can’t argue that.  I just don’t think we can convince these people that girls aren’t property, that honor killings are horrific.

No, I read this, and my visceral reaction is that we should get the hell out of Iraq and let all the crazy Muslims kill each other if they want to.  Sooner or later the US will run out of patience, national will or money and leave, and they will do so.  Go ahead, call me defeatist, but Iraq was as secular and lawful as it was going to get when Saddam was in charge.  You can tell me the Iraqis are finally settling in to obeying their government, and I say they are just waiting for us to leave.

The sooner the better.

hi, been lurking for a while but had to respond to this story..wow..unreal..don’t forget that Iraq is considered one of the more ‘moderate’ Islamic countries..

DaBroad, the wife has left and filed for divorce. She is currently in hiding as the husband and sons have made death threats against her as well:

He said his daughter’s ‘bad genes were passed on from her mother’. Rand’s mother, 41, remains in hiding after divorcing her husband in the immediate aftermath of the killing, living in fear of retribution from his family. She also still bears the scars of the severe beating he inflicted on her, breaking her arm in the process, when she told him she was going. ‘They cannot accept me leaving him. When I first left I went to a cousin’s home, but every day they were delivering notes to my door saying I was a prostitute and deserved the same death as Rand,‘ she said.

‘She was killed by animals. Every night when go to bed I remember the face of Rand calling for help while her father and brothers ended her life,‘ she said, tears streaming down her face.

[...] ‘Even now, I cannot believe my ex-husband was able to kill our daughter. He wasn’t a bad person. During our 24 years of marriage, he was never aggressive. But on that day, he was a different person.‘

The mother is now trying to raise enough money to escape abroad. ‘I miss my two boys,‘ she said. ‘But they have sent a message saying that I am wrong for defending Rand and that I should go back home and live like a blessed Muslim woman,‘ said Leila, who is now volunteering with a local organisation campaigning for better protection for women in Basra.

Sadly this is not an isolated incident.

NeonCat, my initial reaction was the same and I had even typed as much into the original entry, but not every Muslim has allowed their religion to turn them into homicidal maniacs and I thought such a sentiment was unfair to those folks. I still think we should get the hell out, but I feel for some of the people we’d be leaving behind.

What is sad about this whole situation is that that girl will never have any justice. She will rot in a shallow grave while they go about their business, proud of what they did to boot. There is only one happy ending to this story to be had, and it is not the father being arrested. The only way is for his religiously nutty ass to die. I can’t say her brothers and uncles do not deserve that fate as well. It would be icing on the cake if the mother was the one to do it though.

I do not care about being tolerant of other peoples cultures when it comes to things like this. Fuck their culture five ways to Sunday if a thing like this is an acceptable and honorable part of it. Call me a crazy westerner but it seems to me that not killing your daughter (in the name of a magical fairy man living in the sky nonetheless) for talking to a foreigner should be a universal ideal to our species as a whole.

Wait till WBC find out- they will take more than placards to the next funeral…

Part of me thinks that this is yet another case of someone who is mentally ill using his religion as justification. It’s a bit like the African guy who tortured his sons because it said so in the bible, who incidentally got sent down for 9 years last week. He’s appealing - apparently it’s a big conspiracy by the ‘agencies’...

Islam is one of those religions that has me in two minds. On the one hand I know plenty of reasonable and moderate Muslims who wouldn’t dream of harming anyone, infidel or otherwise. And then you get nutjob terrorists and idiots like this.

But then you get Christians like Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson. I suppose it’s just a general thing you get with organised religion.

Apparently it gets quite hot over there.Thats bound to make ya cranky.

Not that Christianity doesn’t have its share of passages in its holy book with similar punishments for perceived crimes, but it sometimes seems as though a majority of Muslims still cling to such barbaric teachings. I suppose they deserve credit for sticking to what their religion teaches, but somehow I’d prefer they’d take the more hypocritical approach of the majority of Christians and just cherry pick the good parts of their religion.

It is not cherry picking or hypocritical. Christians do not follow Mosaic law. This is spelled out in the book of Acts. Jesus himself made it quite clear that Christians are not to go around stoning people. On the contrary, Christians who were violent in history were often the ones who were cherry picking, ignoring the relevant teachings of their religion.

I do not claim to know enough about Islam to say whether or not this person did something that is permissible in the religion. Hence I cannot claim to know whether the religion is at fault, and I will abstain from criticism. A pity that others cannot hold back from criticizing subjects they are not knowledgeable of.

I have this fantasy of building a female strike force, going around killing all men who perform honor killings and other acts of violence against women.  Can you imagine their faces when a “mere woman” suddenly pulls an AK-47 out from under her burkha and lets fly?

Maybe the only way to solve this problem is to arm the women.

Positive, first you say that Christians don’t cherry pick and then you turn around and say that some do, which just reinforces my point. Thanks.

As for not criticizing subjects I’m not knowledgeable of, I’d argue that I probably have a better grasp of the various permutations of Christianity than most Christians do. You may not agree with my viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean I have no knowledge on the subject. Considering that Christians can’t even agree on what it is to be a Christian—there are some 34,000+ sects in the world after all—it seems somewhat ironic that you’d imply I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I call it a perfect storm. All over the Middle East, you have deeply misogynistic cultures that appear stuck in a barbaric age where women are rated lower than chattel. Islam as an invention born from this culture reflects this misogyny and helps to perpetuate it.

The “liberation” of the Iraqis wasn’t worth a single foreign life and a single Dollar. Worse, it has killed off (perhaps literally) any moderates and strengthened the local nutjob fuckwads. I’m willing to modify my position on the invasion, though. Perhaps U.S. troops aren’t killing the most deserving Iraqis.

As far as I’m concerned, the father, brothers, and local cops are worse than rabid pigs.

Christianity has its own share of this bullshit, but at least Western cultures had their enlightenment and women fought for and won significant rights they should have had all along.

Positive- in addition to what Les said, who are you to say that “Christians” do not follow Mosaic law?  Quite a few people who call themselves Christians still consider the Ten Commandments binding.  As you probably know, Jesus said “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.“  What this means is of course hotly debated.

And there’s the rub, or one of them anyway:  what exactly is permissible, and what not, to a Christian, or a Muslim, is not clearcut from Scripture; otherwise, we wouldn’t have all these thousands of sects, fighting (and often killing) over the interpretation of a phrase or a word, would we?

The other rub, of course, is that religions are not the word of God, because there is no God.  And while there may be no passage in the Koran that specifically condones honor killings, both the Koran and the Bible are full of nasty stuff (and a lot of good stuff as well), which has inspired and continues to inspire lots of nasty (and nice) behavior.

Luckily, most of us- Christians, Muslims, atheists, and all, have moved on in the last several centuries, despite Scripture.  Thank God for cherry picking, and thank Darwin for free thinking.

After reading about something like this I find it less likely that staying in Iraq will have any good. How do you change the minds of barbaric people? Which is what this all amounts too. You can’t force culture and government change on people, the people have to want it. It’s all really frustrating and just pisses me off.

I’m off to lunch to read a little more about how the Religious Right is destroying our freedoms. Maybe that will piss me off a little less than this story.

Just recently a couple in Wisconsin refused, based on their religious beliefs, to allow medical treatment for their eleven year old daughter.  She died.  The whole rest of her life just vanished, poof, because of her parents insane, idiotic, evil, and disgusting belief that a fictional character is actually real.

This is christianity in Wisconsin (no heat issues) in 2008.  Take out the brutality and the stories are the same.  Same result, same cause.  Religion is just disgusting.

GeekMom Said: I have this fantasy of building a female strike force, going around killing all men who perform honor killings and other acts of violence against women.

The aspect about this that I find particularly abhorrent is that this isn’t an honor killing.  The father specifically said this was a retaliatory killing for having been shamed by his daughter’s actions.  In this light, we see that his motivation was ultimately a selfish expression of his own greed, and thus, dishonorable by Muslim tradition.  To regain his family’s honor, he should obviously have stamped on, suffocated, and stabbed himself to death rather than heaped murder on his list of sins.  Surely, this father’s entrails shall be stepped upon by ten million unclean monkey feet and his ghost will eternally wander around a lonely strip mine somewhere in rural Mississippi.

Yes, I’m practicing my peaceful Islamic curses.

You say these silly practices that are cleaning up the gene pool are “just disgusting.“ The whack-jobs are doing their own “ethnic cleansing” and saving us the effort and money that would have to be spent in a war or something. The only down side I see is that we can’t make a few more billionaires, like we do when we have a war. Am I missing something here? 

Tailrider, I wrote about the family you mention awhile back. We’ve got a long list of similar morons in the archives.

Leguru, I’d say you’re missing the point that the girl was an innocent whose only crime was teenage infatuation. The assholes who killed her aren’t dead, she is.

Isn’t that what our government refers to as “collateral damage,“ you know, when innocent civilians are creamed? I agree it’s tragic for the girl, but Darwin and the “Military-Industrial Complex” are not known for their compassion.

Perhaps, but the situation isn’t improved when the assholes live on to procreate further.

And leguru- while there’s some evidence that religiosity is partly inborn, it seems obvious that most of the factors leading to this girl’s tragic death are cultural, not genetic.  It’s the meme pool that needs cleansing, not the gene pool.

Oh, and Michael- here’s one of my favorite curses, a Persian one from the Shahnameh:
“Assuredly as thou hast thirsted for blood, Destiny shall also thirst for thine, and the very hairs upon thy body shall become daggers to destroy thee.“

Actually, Positive, Mosaic Law would have pre-dated Jesus and would have been the kind of law that advocated stonings for certain offences. Or you could say Noahide Law, but that’s really just seven of the ten commandments. (Those are the commandments Jews consider every human being to be responsible for.)

I think what you’re going for is the concept of a New Covenant that Jesus was said to have made with the world in God’s name.

But you might notice that the Bible has no writings directly attributable to Jesus. You might also notice that Jesus supposedly said some not-so-savory things to today’s sensibilities as well - and that people these days ignore the parts they don’t agree with. Seems like cherry-picking to me.

One has to cherry pick because of religious beliefs, otherwise there are too many holes in one’s arguments.

Indeed, Webs.  Without cherry picking, there could be no religion.