Islamic Shariah law at work - Iran: Executing minors for being raped

[choose]

In my above comment I wrote:

[quote]When in much of the world it is illegal to drive or be a passenger in a car because the statistics demonstrate clearly the cost in human life of not taking a basic safety precaution on what grounds can the church claim an exception to basic reasoning here and demand that basic safety precautions should not be taken during sexual relations when all of the evidence demonstrates that the cost of avoiding such precautions is quite frankly staggering?[/quote]

I made a mistake and omitted some important words that provide the meaning. The sentence should have read:

When in much of the world it is illegal to drive or be a passenger in a car [b]without wearing a seat belt[/b] because the statistics demonstrate clearly the cost in human life of not taking a basic safety precaution on what grounds can the church claim an exception to basic reasoning here and demand that basic safety precautions should not be taken during sexual relations when all of the evidence demonstrates that the cost of avoiding such precautions is quite frankly staggering?

[Lounge Daddy]

[quote name='tomasio127' post='1052874' date='Aug 29 2006, 02:47 PM']
Shariah law seems largely evil.
[/quote]
ya... I would say ALL EVIL

[Lounge Daddy]

[quote name='choose' post='1053020' date='Aug 29 2006, 05:56 PM']
Anyway, thanks for posting the link to the video on my blog. All objectors to brutality are welcome. We'll work on your reasons one small step at a time.
[/quote]

no no, thank you - I've been digging your blog from a while now. Despite one very obvious disagreement, I honestly enjoy reading your posts, your viewpoint, thoughts, etc.
It's cool stuff

So ...I'm suprised to see you here :
Awesome! I should also say "welcome to Phatmass" ba-rother

[peep]

[size=2][b]If I find out more information about the 13-year-old girl who got a life in prison sentence, I will to meet with community leaders. We will hold a conference on how the girl can be freed and brought to the united states to receive an education. If anyone has information on the name, the location or ANYTHING about this girl your help is much appreciated. May God bless you. This is not a joke or a fantasy, this is for real...I am determined to help this poor human being!![/b][/size]

[choose]

[quote name='peep' post='1054706' date='Sep 1 2006, 12:22 AM']
[size=2][b]If I find out more information about the 13-year-old girl who got a life in prison sentence, I will to meet with community leaders. We will hold a conference on how the girl can be freed and brought to the united states to receive an education. If anyone has information on the name, the location or ANYTHING about this girl your help is much appreciated. May God bless you. This is not a joke or a fantasy, this is for real...I am determined to help this poor human being!![/b][/size]
[/quote]

I'm not aware of this girl. Where does this information come from?

[peep]

post # 9

[Socrates]

[quote name='choose' post='1054258' date='Aug 31 2006, 04:38 AM']
Actually you are missing my argument, although the one you say is flawed is quite valid. My argument is that you excuse your faith of its consequences yet do not do the same for others. I ask you to produce a reason why your faith should be specially excused, in this case, excused for literally millions of avoidable deaths that it contributes to. If you would prefer, you can provide a reasons why Islam should not be excused. I can provide them very easily. I wonder if you can do the same since any argument you use against the faith of Islam, other than theist nonsense about “my faith is the true faith”, will also be applicable to your own faith.[/quote]
You are continuing your ludicrous false equivocation here.
The Catholic Church does not encourage people to murder people as radical Islam does. You don't see too many Catholic suicide bombers out there, for instance.
Your spiel about the Church contributing to "literally millions of avoidable deaths" is pure nonsense. If your serious about this charge, you might want to explain what millions of death you are talking about, and give proof that the Church was responsible.

[quote]But I will answer you assertion that attacking faith based on the atrocities it leads to is a flawed or fallacious argument. Faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. So we are discussing the validity of making decisions, some of them very far reaching decisions that have no requirement to demonstrate a compatibility with or basis within observable reality. It is obvious that decision making not based on reality may lead to extremes of behaviour and that such behaviour cannot be rationalised without resorting to faith and that since faith cannot be defined as rational that there is no requirement for faith based behaviour to be rational. In essence, faith based decision making is excused the constraints of demonstrable reason or demonstrable consequence. There would be no Islamic suicide bombers without faith and there would not condom banning Catholics without faith. The reality of dead children in both events is sufficient evidence to provide constraint against the causal decisions once the unconstrained reason of faith is removed. [/quote]
Nice rant, but you've really said little here beyond "I don't like religious faith," a fact which you have already made clear.
You have chosen to define all religious faith as irrational, but the truth is that we Catholics do not see it that way at all. I would counter that it is rather atheism that is irrational. The Catholic Faith is not contrary to reason, but compliments human reason, which supports the Faith. The Catholic sees Faith and Reason as allies, not enemies.
Obviously, there is not room to give a complete apologetics course, answering all the objections and counter-objections, but feel free to start a debate on a specific point on the debate table.

The broad accusations you've made here prove about as much as if I were to simply say, "atheism is wrong because it is irrational, stupid, and immoral."

[quote]There are two very simple reasons why this does not excuse your faith. The first is that the Catholic faith has been guilty of innumerable atrocities throughout its history. It is a very simple matter to use example of catholic brutality and Christian brutality but then of course your defence would be that these acts occurred in the past. There are several reasons why using the “all in the past” defence are invalid. The first is that most historians consider that the reformation of the Church was due to the growth of secularism and secularism was not an objective championed by the church. In effect, the church was pacified by a reduction in its power. The second and equally valid reason is that the consequences of your faith are still as awful today as they ever were despite the reduction in actual violence. I have already given a fine example of this with aids in Africa, but you believe this can be disputed so let’s look at your argument for that and then highlight why you are wrong.[/quote]
I've dealt with these accusations in the past, and I'll say that much of the accusations of Catholic "atrocities" in history are not accurate, and tainted by anti-Catholic prejudice and propoganda. And, yes, sometimes Catholics do shameful things, but the sins of individuals do not prove the Catholic Faith false. Atrocities commited by Catholics are examples of Catholics going against the teachings of their Faith, not following it.
As C.S. Lewis said, "the problem with Christianity is not that it has failed, but that it hasn't been tried."
If you would like to argue about something specific in history, feel free to start a debate thread on it. (But you might want to run a search first - most of this has already been discussed.)

[quote]Comparing consequence with consequence is entirely valid and when we do so we see that the Catholic church actually comes away with more recent blood upon its hands. It is absurd to consider that you are absolved of responsibility for the consequences of your faith simply because you do not directly pick up a gun or a bomb and kill someone. It is akin to saying that a company that pollutes a water supply and thus kills many is not as guilty as a company that actually sends one of its employees off to inject a person directly with the same toxin. Both are guilty. Both are responsible for the consequences of the behaviour they promote. You are aware of the consequences yet you still support the cause. This is blatant hypocrisy and failure to accept responsibility for contributing to death and suffering on a massive scale.
The issue here is that the Church has an opinion based on absolutely nothing at all except religious fantasy. There are two million deaths each year in Africa that are evidence to the fact that the churches opinion is the least beneficial to society and yet without one single shred of evidence or statistical data demonstrating that the churches policy is anything other than an encouragement of mass suicide the church still continues to place its baseless rules of faith above the interests of living human beings. This is absurd. When in much of the world it is illegal to drive or be a passenger in a car because the statistics demonstrate clearly the cost in human life of not taking a basic safety precaution on what grounds can the church claim an exception to basic reasoning here and demand that basic safety precautions should not be taken during sexual relations when all of the evidence demonstrates that the cost of avoiding such precautions is quite frankly staggering? But of course you excuse one madness with another by expecting the entire world to follow your again utterly baseless assumption that sex outside of marriage is somehow an incredible offence (worthy of death and hell, even for the babies) to your completely baseless god. If we were in court god would be excused of all of these crimes because of simple it is to demonstrate a reasonable doubt that it even exists. Who does that leave as the guilty party? Of course, it is the Catholics themselves and your motive is nothing more than your own faith.
And the babies born HIV+ are of course guilty of these sins? Or the women or men who had no knowledge of their partners previous encounters? Condoms are not failsafe, but they are a great deal safer than no condoms at all. By refusing their use as a valid preventative measure you are directly at odds with all the evidence and the vast majority of expert opinion on the planet and without one single fact to back your assumptions up. And to top it all off you think that it’s not your fault because everyone should be chaste or monogamous. Wonderful! Follow our rules or die (but it’s not our fault). Nice people. Of course, in this particular case it is also a case of follow our rules and still die.[/quote]
That is just more baseless ranting and rhetoric.
The facts are that AIDS and other STDs flourish, not where Catholic sexual morality is taken seriously and practiced, but where it is ignored.
AIDS becomes epidemic among those who live lives contrary to Catholic morality: among homosexuals, among drug abusers, and among the sexually promiscuous.
Obviously, not every person afflicted with AIDS is guilty of some sin, but AIDS would be seriously curtailed if people would start actually following Catholic morality and lived chaste, monogamous lives. (Much as I'm sure that you would ridicule that idea).

Politically incorrect as this fact is, the reason AIDS has become such a huge problem in much of Africa is that the people there are living lives of extreme sexual promiscuity.
Yes, the innocent too suffer because of this, but it is not Catholic morality that has caused and spread this scourge, but its opposite.

Blaming the Church for all the AIDS deaths is absurd. The Church opposes not just contraception, but also extra-marital sex, sodomy, and drug abuse. Sit back and think about it for a second. Do you honestly think people are thinking, "Hey, I'm going to go out and screw every woman (or man) I can find - but wait - I won't wear a rubber because the Catholic Church says that's a sin!"
Get real, dude.

I can tell you from experience that among people that actually take Catholic morality seriously, STDs are pretty much unheard of, and families are large and healthy.
(Yes, such people do exist, even in today's world, believe it or not!)
Orthodox, moral, Catholic families are living and flourishing, while it is those who follow the secularist culture of death that are killing themselves off.

If you are really serious about understanding why Church teaches what it does with regards to sexual ethics, you might try looking up some of John Paul II's Theology of the Body, rather than just spouting off about what you know nothing about.

[quote]As I said, obey the church or die. See, not a lot has changed really despite secularism.
But catholic moral teaching is from your book that contains a vast number of contradictions, a good share of vicious brutality, and is nothing more than the writings of ancient people that didn’t even know the real reason why there is night and day. Applying its so called wisdom as blanket rules on a society that has radically changed, including having new diseases, is absolutely absurd and it is extremely clear that this has terrible consequences and a direct cost in human life. And there is not one shred of evidence to suggest that the book has any relationship to reality at all. You cannot defend your faith with your faith. You cannot suggest that the answer to the ills of your faith is the absolute adoption by all of your faith. That is a totalitarian view that demands the submission of all to your baseless faith and if people do not then there is no compassion for those that suffer outside of your faith and no consideration of responsibility when only some of your dogma is accepted as rule. That is rather similar to Islam.[/quote]
More rhetoric and vague accusations. Again, run a search on phatmass, or start a thread if you want to deal with specifics.

And your last point is contradictory nonsense. You accuse the Church of being wrong for teaching morality because many people don't follow it. If people choose not to listen to the Church's moral teachings, how is the Church to blame for teaching what people don't follow? If people don't follow the Church's moral teachings in the first place, what makes you think what the Church says about condoms makes any difference for them? Most people simply ignore what the Church says on moral matters altogether. Why should the Church's teachings on condom use have any effect on those who already reject or ignore the Church's moral teaching?
As for Catholics "having no compassion for those who suffer outside their faith," you are obviously completely unfamiliar with people involved in Catholic charities. I know a number who have dedicated years of their lives caring specifically for AIDS victims in Africa. And have you heard of someone called Mr. Theresa by any chance?
(Well, you seem to change your tune a bit in your next sentence.)

[quote]Now, we all know that Christians are often very helpful and try to help people that suffer, the Tsunami being a good example, so what can possibly be the justification for washing your hands of the responsibility to end suffering when you are faced with an even greater death toll - one which you contribute to by insisting upon an idiot rule in the face of the all the evidence that your rule does a great deal more harm than good.

Promiscuous behaviour is not irresponsible if responsible precautions are taken. It is only immoral by your standard and your standard has not once provided any evidence of its validity. This is just an attempt to force your faith based take on morality onto all. There are many, such as myself, who do not view your morality as acceptable and there is a mountain load of evidence that your morality contributes to massive death and suffering on the single issue alone of contraceptive use.
The Catholic Church does not counter the natural desire of humans to have sex. It cannot. The basic desire in most humans is often far greater than the force of your faith. This is even observed amongst your own ranks, even to the degree of your most faithful and theologically educated, your priests, being overcome with passion for young boys. I am not asserting that all priests are peadophiles, I am simply pointing out that even within your own ranks abstenance has proven to somewhat unreliable. Sex is inevitable, even though you consider much of it to be sin. So since you have failed to stamp out sin can you give me one good reason why other preventative measures against disease should not be taken? As an analogy, but not a straw man, it is akin to leaving people inside a burning house to burn because according to your faith the house shouldn’t be on fire anyway. How is that for absurd?[/quote]
Those priests who abused boys were committing a terrible and shameful sin, and should all be defrocked, and punished severely.
Again, they were acting [b]contrary[/b] to the Catholic Faith, not following it.
The sins of individuals do not prove the Faith false.
The problem is not the discipline of priestly celibacy, but of homosexuals entering seminaries, and becoming priests.
Homosexuality is considered a very grave sin by the Catholic Church.
If you believe that the kind of "sexuality" that gratifies itself by abusing teenage boys is good and natural, you have no rational basis for objecting to such activity.
As Catholics, we do.
And contrary to what propaganda you may have heard, the vast majority of priests do not engage in such heinous activities.

[quote]Correct, no god is necessary for the committing of atrocities, but you are confused if you are thinking that atheism was the cause of the communist killings. It was not. The cause was a transformational ideology that placed an imaginary superior world above the interests of existing lives – rather like your own faith. This is also an irrational faith and it is the same madness that I argue against. Provide evidence and proof. Define clearly cause and consequence along with the evidence that supports a conclusion. Then decisions become a matter of analysing benefit and loss. People will often get their calculations wrong and fail to take into account all factors, but it is just pure lunacy to suggest that a lack of belief in god results in irrational action. On the other side of the fence, your side, it is absolutely clear that the possession of a faith does result in irrational action – action that cannot be in anyway attributed to analysis of the evidence. So whilst faith is not the only cause of atrocities that does not mean that it is not a cause of atrocities. History demonstrates clearly that it is. And so does the present.

I do not argue that my atheism is different to that of Stalin. A lack of an unfounded belief is a lack of an unfounded belief and so I would assume it likely that my atheism is no different to that of Stalin, although not having known him and discussed the matter I cannot be sure. I am however certain that there are many other ideological understandings we do not share. But Islam and Christianity do share a common thread. Both are faiths that place unproven and totally unsupported “ultimate truths” above the interests of living individuals. Both support the idea that there is no need to explain a decision above pointing to their respective books that are internally contradictory and make extraordinary claims without one single shred of evidence. Would you drive your car by faith or would you prefer to open your eyes? Why is it acceptable to attempt to steer the human race by faith if you cannot even trust yourself to pilot your car by the power and perfection of your faith? This is what Christianity and Islam share. The irrational double standard that far reaching decisions that affect the entirety of humanity should be commanded by an ancient and frankly absurd book whilst the simplest actions in your life should still be based upon reason. If you really believe then what need would you have to think, plan or act at all? So why excuse yourself of responsibility when the stakes are higher than just your own life?[/quote]
Gotta love the double standard here!
The atheism of the Communists is in no way responsible for the attrocities they commited, but religious belief is responsible for any attrocity commited by a religious believer?!

And your first premise seems particularly dubious, given the fact that much of Communist oppression and brutality was specifically directed towards Christians and those of other religious faiths. Marxist ideology sees religion as a great enemy of "socialist man," and something to be stamped out (or until that is possible, to be rigidly controlled and subordinated to the state).
Brutal persecution of religion by Communist governments has been quite well documented, and continues even today in countries such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam.
So you really think the atheism of the Communist ideology plays no role in any of this?

It seems that you and the Communist dictators share a common thread in your hatred and contempt for religious (particularly Christian) faith.

[quote]I have not used any inappropriate language on this site and I will not. However censoring the link to my blog is excessive. Prior to posting on this thread I had posted only one time before. That post also included a link to a site and that site contained not one profanity, yet still the link was removed. I had posted to ask for counter arguments to an assertion on the site I linked to that Jesus never existed. This would appear to me to be a very valid area of debate and an opportunity for you to set the record straight. Yet, the post was censored thus removing the possibility of a discussion. I find that very heavy handed, as do I find the censorship of the link to my blog. Surely it would be sufficient to simply provide a warning that my blog contains some profanities and then leave it up to the individual to decide for themselves if they have the moral fibre to withstand such words?
That is why I would prefer to debate on my blog. On my blog I am assured that no comment, neither mine nor yours, would be tampered with in anyway. It ensures that we are both able to link to supporting references and fully explore the topic without the heavy handed intrusion of a biased moderator selectively deciding what references are and are not suitable.[/quote]
I'm not an adminstrator on this site - take it up with them.

[quote]Finally, let’s be honest. Hitler and the Nazis are not strictly relevant to our discussion and we should probably agree to trim this particular branch before it detracts from the actual point of contention, which is that faith is responsible for avoidable human suffering and death. But Hitler was a theist and described himself as a catholic. But don’t take my word for it, take his:

“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" [Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]

(Hitler had already outlawed atheism in 1933 incidentally)

You may also find these quotes interesting:

"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work." [Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 46]

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator." [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 125]

“The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.” (Hitler 1943, 383)

“What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, . . . so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.” (Hitler 1943)

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labour, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.” [Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 1922, published in My New Order

“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.” [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.152]

“And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.” [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.174]

“Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.” [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 171]

“The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.” [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

There are really many more quotes with reference, yet I think the point is made.[/quote]

I agree that Hitler is not really directly relevent to this discussion.
But we must also keep in mind that Hitler was a politician and a liar.

Sure, to gain power, he would use some Christian rhetoric to gain favor with the Christian populace, but this is just the Bible-thumping BS engaged in by most politicians.

(And that garbage about the Aryan race being God's chosen people, etc. certainly did not come from the Church or the Bible!)

In private, Hitler was contemptuous of Christianity.
He is recorded making the following statements:

"It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood."

"Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics."

"Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."

(from the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan, originally prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg)

But perhaps we should pay more attention to what Hitler did than what he said.
Hitler may have been baptized Catholic, but he was not a religious, church-going man by anyone's account.

The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church, particularly in Poland, and hundreds of Catholic priests were put to death, as well as other Christian clergy.

Hitler was not a devout Catholic Christian, but used or persecuted religion as he saw fit for his own purposes.

Edited September 1, 2006 by Socrates

[Socrates]

*Hint* Mods - you might want to move this to the debate table.

[avemaria40]

The thing about the 13 year old girl who got life in prison was mentioned at the end of the documentary (as well as a 17 year old who got the same sentence) and the narrator had said that even though there is proof that these girls have been raped, many still are being executed.

[peep]

Thankyou avemaria very much for your help!! I believe her name is Jilla, and she was sentenced in 2004, and I am contacting Unicef to give me more information on her location so I can begin my project.

[avemaria40]

God bless you in your work! I hope you are successful:)

[peep]

thankyou for blessing me.


Dear God,

Please bless Jila Idazi and keep her safe! I will be coming to help her. That I promise you, Lord. Please help me help her. And keep her safe. Offer her mental peace, Lord.

Sincerely,
peep

Bless Jila! Bless Jila! Bless Jila!! I got an update from Women's Forum agianst Fundementalism in Iran.

[prose]

That shakes me to the core.

I am angry that this thread is being sidetracked from what it began as.

I am fearful for those poor women.

I am frustrated that I have no idea how to help.

Lord Jesus, please help this world and all that it has become!!

[choose]

[quote]You are continuing your ludicrous false equivocation here.
The Catholic Church does not encourage people to murder people as radical Islam does. You don't see too many Catholic suicide bombers out there, for instance.
Your spiel about the Church contributing to "literally millions of avoidable deaths" is pure nonsense. If your serious about this charge, you might want to explain what millions of death you are talking about, and give proof that the Church was responsible.[/quote]

[quote]
Actually the Catholic Church has been involved in very wide scale murder during its existence. It is only more recently and thanks to secularism that the church has been pacified. That pacification is also due to a less fundamentalist attitude being adopted (as a result of secularism). The books still say some pretty murderous stuff such as Luke 19 – I did mention that they’ve not been revised right?
Regardless of whether the Catholic Church still continues to murder by violence or not is irrelevant to my point, and thus so is your refutation. The point is that your faith is implicit in a great deal of death and suffering and your only excuse for the promotion of that death and suffering over a basic safety precaution is your totally baseless faith. Please try to explain to me the difference between you supporting the consequences of your faith against Muslims supporting the consequences of theirs? The simple difference that your church gave up murder a few years back has no bearing at all on the fact that your faith, like theirs, still results in the direct consequence of death and suffering.

[quote]“Nice rant, but you've really said little here beyond "I don't like religious faith," a fact which you have already made clear.
You have chosen to define all religious faith as irrational, but the truth is that we Catholics do not see it that way at all. I would counter that it is rather atheism that is irrational. The Catholic Faith is not contrary to reason, but compliments human reason, which supports the Faith. The Catholic sees Faith and Reason as allies, not enemies.
Obviously, there is not room to give a complete apologetics course, answering all the objections and counter-objections, but feel free to start a debate on a specific point on the debate table.

The broad accusations you've made here prove about as much as if I were to simply say, "atheism is wrong because it is irrational, stupid, and immoral."”[/quote]

No, what I’ve said is that opposition to the use of condoms is in direct contradiction to what ALL of the EVIDENCE says would actually be beneficial to the people and would directly result in a reduction in death and suffering. The assertion that your faith compliments human reason also bares no relation to demonstrable truth. A more accurate statement would be that your faith overrides human reason, which is exactly my point.

I have started a debate on how you justify opposition to condom use in aids ridden Africa and on how you justify that in the face of the evidence, the vast body of professional medical opinion and how you differentiate the consequences of your faith from the consequence of Islam which you so obviously detest, as do I. This seems quite specific to me. So I ask for reasons and you don’t have any whatsoever because your opinion is not based on reason, it is based only on your faith. As such you are incapable of providing an answer or disputing effectively the validity of my assertion that the Catholic stance against condom use is wrong.

“I've dealt with these accusations in the past, and I'll say that much of the accusations of Catholic "atrocities" in history are not accurate, and tainted by anti-Catholic prejudice and propoganda. And, yes, sometimes Catholics do shameful things, but the sins of individuals do not prove the Catholic Faith false. Atrocities commited by Catholics are examples of Catholics going against the teachings of their Faith, not following it.
As C.S. Lewis said, "the problem with Christianity is not that it has failed, but that it hasn't been tried."
If you would like to argue about something specific in history, feel free to start a debate thread on it. (But you might want to run a search first - most of this has already been discussed.)”[/quote]

I would like to discuss everything in fact. I think a good place to start would be the recorded views of Tomas Aquinas’ or St Augustine’s on heretics for example and how their views are not just derived from their religious belief but actually taken literally from the bible. I would say that if you have dealt with these accusations in the past please deal with them again – educate me. Unfortunately my education in history and religion does not at this time allow me to have the slightest clue how you could have “dealt” with recorded historical truth, especially since some of that record was written by important Catholics and in their own words and it consists of some rather extreme attitudes. You might also want to take into account that you will also have to argue against the prejudice and propaganda of your very own bible.

[quote]“That is just more baseless ranting and rhetoric.
The facts are that AIDS and other STDs flourish, not where Catholic sexual morality is taken seriously and practiced, but where it is ignored.
AIDS becomes epidemic among those who live lives contrary to Catholic morality: among homosexuals, among drug abusers, and among the sexually promiscuous.”[/quote]

How is it baseless? How is rhetoric? I think you’ll find that aids and other STDs flourish where basic safety precautions are not taken seriously. The WHO and every other health body on the planet will back me up on that, as will absolutely all of their research and statistics. Perhaps that is why Japan is not overrun by aids and STDs, or are they all secretly Catholic? Simple fact for you – when condom use goes up, rates of infection go down but when condom use goes down rates of infection go up.

Your morality is based on your books, your books are based on absolutely nothing at all that you have any supporting evidence for and they make the most incredible claims. Frankly your opinion is intellectually vacuous and devoid of any rational thought.

[quote]“Obviously, not every person afflicted with AIDS is guilty of some sin, but AIDS would be seriously curtailed if people would start actually following Catholic morality and lived chaste, monogamous lives. (Much as I'm sure that you would ridicule that idea).”[/quote]

It is only sin according to your faith. Without demonstrating your reasons, which of course you cannot, you have no genuine reason to promote your morality. The use of condoms provides very significant benefit in reducing infection rates and thus reducing immense suffering and wide spread death, not to mention reducing the economically crippling costs of the disease on those developing nations. Your morality here is evil. Rather like the Catholic ideas of inequality for women and oppression of homosexuals. To you it is morality because you are content to accept blanket rules from an ancient compendium of baseless fables. Other people decide their morality based on reason.

[quote]“Politically incorrect as this fact is, the reason AIDS has become such a huge problem in much of Africa is that the people there are living lives of extreme sexual promiscuity.
Yes, the innocent too suffer because of this, but it is not Catholic morality that has caused and spread this scourge, but its opposite.”[/quote]

That would be true if the Catholic Church had just decided to stay out of the issue instead of become part of the problem. In many villages the only information these people receive about condom use is from the Catholic representatives the Catholic Church has sent there. People are being told “Condoms are evil”, “Using condoms is a mortal sin”. You are not excused here. Your church is part of the problem, a major contributor to it in fact, undermining the work done by other groups to promote safe sex as a method of curtailing viciously high and spiralling infection rates. Your church is working for death and if you don’t see the connection or would rather just say “they should follow Catholic morality” (which even plenty of Catholics in the rest of the world fail to follow) then you are guilty of exactly what I have said you are guilty of – placing unreasoned faith above actual evidence at the cost of human life and suffering on a massive scale.

[quote]“Blaming the Church for all the AIDS deaths is absurd. The Church opposes not just contraception, but also extra-marital sex, sodomy, and drug abuse. Sit back and think about it for a second. Do you honestly think people are thinking, "Hey, I'm going to go out and screw every woman (or man) I can find - but wait - I won't wear a rubber because the Catholic Church says that's a sin!"
Get real, dude.”[/quote]

Actually I think that sex happens. You guys call it temptation. I call it pleasure. And as many of your own priests can testify sexual desire can be pretty strong. The fear inherent in the faith does not provide a reliable control when sexual desire is high. Sadly it provided the control earlier when anindividual otherwise would have “sinned” by equipping themselves with condoms and the intention to use them if they had the chance.

You are also totally overlooking instances such as someone’s partner being infected by a method that is non-sexual and entirely innocent of your ridiculous sin concept, such as an accident or a transfusion. But this really is beside the point because the facts are clear that encouraging condom use would have a dramatic affect in reducing infection rates, regardless of other behaviours.

Whilst the Catholic Church invests its resources in scaring Africans away from using condoms it is investing in causing the death and suffering of others in contradiction to every medical study, statistic and expert opinion on the planet based on absolutely no supporting evidence at all. You need to start to be more pragmatic than dogmatic.

[quote]“Those priests who abused boys were committing a terrible and shameful sin, and should all be defrocked, and punished severely.
Again, they were acting contrary to the Catholic Faith, not following it.”[/quote]

Agreed absolutely, but it does rather make the point that the faith, as you have said about condoms, is not 100% reliable and thus neither is the morality it supports.

[quote]“The sins of individuals do not prove the Faith false.”[/quote]

It proves the ineffectiveness of the faith as a sole solution for an epidemic.

[quote]“The problem is not the discipline of priestly celibacy, but of homosexuals entering seminaries, and becoming priests.
Homosexuality is considered a very grave sin by the Catholic Church.”[/quote]

Homosexuality and paedophilia are not one and the same. The catholic objection to homosexuality is not something I agree with and the Catholic Church has also failed to raise a single credible argument against homosexuality that does not rely solely on its undemonstrated doctrine.

[quote]“If you believe that the kind of "sexuality" that gratifies itself by abusing teenage boys is good and natural, you have no rational basis for objecting to such activity.”[/quote]

I believe absolutely everything is natural. That something is natural does not make it beneficial to society or individuals as a behaviour to adopt. My objections to some behaviours and beliefs are entirely rational.

[quote]“And contrary to what propaganda you may have heard, the vast majority of priests do not engage in such heinous activities.”[/quote]

I read a lot and some of what I read is propaganda, often in support of Catholics or other faiths. But I do not equate all Catholic priests to paedophiles any more than I equate all theists to idiots. I strongly disagree with your faith, some of your morality and virtually all of your reasoning (or lack of), but I consider most of you to be average people. Average people are usually well intentioned and deserve to have their individuality, but not their beliefs, respected. Let’s not be too jovial about this though, at the same time I believe it should be made clear that whilst I do not consider theists to be idiots, I do consider theism to be idiotic.

By mentioning the priests I am simply pointing out that your faith, even if others adopted it, does not provide a reliable solution. This alone is reason to champion basic safety precautions in conjunction with the rest of your faith or at the very least to stop working against something which will save many lives.

Before we drop Hitler I think it might be worth you checking out the following link:

[url="http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm"]http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm[/url]

[cmotherofpirl]

This thread is about minors executed for being raped, take the hijack elsewhere.
Start your own thread.