Peterson Pace - "Those who can, do ....."

[_Bond James Bond]

Turkey.
Constantinople.

??? Armenian Genocide I"m assuming? I hope you've read the part of the story where the Armenians killed a few hundred thousand Muslims during the same general period.

[_Dr. Shades]

Daniel Peterson wrote (emphasis added):

Since, as I quoted earlier in the thread, there are plain statements from the Prophet Muhammad (hadith, as they're called) that call for the education of women -- and I could have multiplied them several times -- it seems to me that it would be very difficult to claim that, as a whole, Muslim women who have gained educations have done so as a departure from Islamic teachings.

I responded with:

In that case, where did the Taliban (and, I imagine, other such extremist groups) get its justification for denying women an education?

DCP replied (emphasis added):

I would have to read much more extensively than I have in the writings of the Taliban to know precisely where they got their notions about the education of women. But they're clearly out of the Islamic mainstream. So much so, in fact, that even the Islamic Republic of Iran denounced their treatment of women some years back, pronouncing the Taliban tyranny in Aghanistan "the shame of Islam."

With that, I consider my question answered.

Thank you for your time.

[_Daniel Peterson]

No DCP I was talking about current Mormon practice, today..in polygamous communities. They are following true Mormonism as J. Smith set up and B.Young continued.

Hardly. Neither Nauvoo nor Salt Lake City nor St. George nor any other Mormon settlement under polygamy could ever plausibly be termed a "compound." Nor do the schismatic polygamous communities send missionaries out all over the world, as Nauvoo and nineteenth-century Utah did in large numbers. And therein lies a fundamental difference between Mormon Utah and the schismatic communities you reference.

And they are the followers of true Mormonism the one J. Smith envisioned.

You can repeat that all you want, but merely repeating it several times isn't going to make it any more persuasive.

You really ought to read something about the history and sociology of nineteenth-century Mormonism before you continue with this laughable train of thought. Two excellent studies of Mormon plural marriage in Utah are Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

For the majority of women in polygamy and I'm not going back to 19 century, no need to, I'm talking currently they are treated as chattel, to serve the men, receive little education and skills to enable leaving the system and are indoctrinated into this lifestyle often from a young age, many traded between polygamous communites to be wives at young ages often 14, 15, & 16.

I realize that you've raised refusal to know anything about what you're talking about to an art form but, if you really insist on knowing nothing about nineteenth-century Mormon plural marriage, your insistence that today's polygamous sects are just like nineteenth-century Mormonism is likely to be neither well grounded nor very convincing.

Looking into Martha Hughes Cannon, briefly I learned she certainly was not the average woman, nor the typical female raised in a polygamous family. One reason is she didn't come from a polygamous family. So she was educated and not indoctrinated to be subservient to men and a baby maker.

None of the women who entered plural marriage during Joseph Smith's lifetime had been raised in polygamous families. Moreover, a significant proportion of the women who entered polygamous marriages between 1840 and 1890, or between 1852 and 1890, if not an absolute majority of them, were converts. (Most Church members in general were converts, certainly toward the beginning of that period, and possibly still toward the end.)

As to my mention of Martha Hughes Cannon, you declare that that was

rather deceitful on your part, you know better.

and that

For DCP to bring her up as an example of women in polygamy is despicable.

LOL. It appears that failure to agree with certain people on this board is, in itself, definitive proof of fatal moral defect.

[_marg]

LOL. It appears that failure to agree with certain people on this board is, in itself, definitive proof of fatal moral defect.

No you are the only one exhibiting moral defect on this board, when you bring a woman up as an example to illustrate 'nothing wrong with polygamy'. A person, who is nothing like the typical polygamous woman. She didn't come from a polygamous family. She was well educated, financially independent, a physcian before she was married, 27yrs when she chose to get married to someone she obviously worked with and it was likely a better arrangement for her than a monogamous relationship because she could maintain her independence.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Then you come back with THIS gem:

Please try to remember that the government in Kabul, which you yourself say wants to educate women, is just as Muslim as rural Afghanistan is.

Muslim... no differentiation between Taliban Muslim and regular Joe kind of Muslim. YOU said "the government in Kabul, which you yourself say wants to educate women, is just as Muslim as rural Afghanistan is." . . .

I'm quoting you, Daniel:

Please try to remember that the government in Kabul, which you yourself say wants to educate women, is just as Muslim as rural Afghanistan is.

You make no differentiation between Muslim and Taliban brand Muslim, so neither did I. You, after all, are the expert on Islam on this board, right? So when I quote you, follow your lead, I can be sure I'm giving accurate information, right?

The distinction between the government in Kabul and the Taliban ought to be clear enough from the fact that they're trying to kill one another. They're locked in a brutal war with each other. It hardly seems necessary to point out, in that light, that their visions of the future of Afghanistan differ somewhat.

That there is a difference between the two styles of Islam ought to be transparently obvious from the fact that the Taliban hosted ‘Usama b. Ladin, providing him a base for his ostensibly Islamic attacks on America; the current government in Kabul, by contrast, hosts coalition troops, led by the United States, that seek to kill ‘Usama b. Ladin and to destroy al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban.

The difference ought also to have been clear when I pointed out that, while the Muslim Taliban oppose the education of women, the Muslim government in Kabul is trying to educate women. And the fact that I make a distinction between the Taliban and the Muslims of Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Indonesia, and etc., should have been clear from the way I contrasted them -- over and over and over again. It should have been obvious, too, from the fact, which I mentioned several times, that even the Islamic Republic of Iran denounced the treatment of women under the Taliban.

When I say that the Taliban and the government in Kabul are equally Muslim, you're supposed to have been able to understand that this means that Islam is not a single undifferentiated monolith. When I say that Afghanistan and Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Indonesia, and etc. are all Muslim countries, you're supposed to be able to see that this means that Islam is not one single uniform thing. For one thing, Iran is overwhelmingly Shi‘ite, while the rest of these countries are largely, if not entirely, Sunni. But the most obvious and relevant issue here was the difference in literacy rates, which I highlighted at least four or five times in the course of this deeply and needlessly unpleasant discussion.

Methodists and Quakers are equally Christian, as are the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholics. But that doesn't mean that they're all the same. And it surely doesn't mean that you can generalize from Roman Catholic masses to Quaker masses, or from Roman Catholic priests to Quaker priests, or from the Catholic papacy to a Greek orthodox papacy.

[_asbestosman]

when you bring a woman up as an example to illustrate 'nothing wrong with polygamy'.

When did he try to illustrate that? I thought he was trying to illustrate the difference between 19th century Mormon polygamy and the Afghan Taliban. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what he stated. I don't think he stated that polygamy didn't have problems nor even that it only had the same problems monogamous marriage did. I never saw him write such a thing. Can you point me to where he did?

[_Daniel Peterson]

LOL. It appears that failure to agree with certain people on this board is, in itself, definitive proof of fatal moral defect.

No you are the only one exhibiting moral defect on this board,

Natch!

QED.

LOL.

when you bring a woman up as an example to illustrate 'nothing wrong with polygamy'.

I said absolutely nothing about there being "nothing wrong with polygamy" -- neither for it nor against it.

I simply brought Martha Hughes Cannon up as an obvious illustration of several things that would have been utterly impossible under the Taliban. I also brought up early women's suffrage in Utah Territory, fully five decades before women won the right to vote nationally. (I notice that you've had nothing to say on that point.)

Thus, any suggestion that nineteenth-century Utah resembled Taliban-style Islam -- and that was, of course, the context of the conversation -- is simply ignorant and risible.

Incidentally, you haven't acknowledged your misrepresentation of that older conversation in the CK -- the one in which you falsely portray me as having no sympathy for the suffering of Muslim women by means of falsely portraying me as approving of the Afghan burka.

Has Harmony somehow passed the baton to you? Are you taking over the role of delivering wrathful moral condemnations on the basis of transparent misreadings and complete irrelevancies?

[_ludwigm]

...
Methodists and Quakers are equally Christian, as are the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholics.
...

You have left out one .. ehm .. group, which is more christian than all of the listed above.
Deliberately or by mere chance.

[_Kevin Graham]

Dan is right. There is nothing in Islam to deny women education. What we see happening in some parts of the world is a product of various cultural factors that have been around for centuries.

[_marg]

No you are the only one exhibiting moral defect on this board,

Natch!

QED.

LOL.

You misquote. My sentence which you chopped off included..this part which you addressed separately

"when you bring a woman up as an example to illustrate 'nothing wrong with polygamy'."

I said absolutely nothing about there being "nothing wrong with polygamy" -- neither for it nor against it.

I simply brought Martha Hughes Cannon up as an obvious illustration of several things that would have been utterly impossible under the Taliban. I also brought up early women's suffrage in Utah Territory, fully five decades before women won the right to vote nationally. (I notice that you've had nothing to say on that point.)

Well this is the note I wrote and it had nothing to do with the Taliban.

I have a few questions for you Harmony. If you think Islam is a significant reason for illiteracy of women, and you mentioned that women from Turkey who are educated isn't surprising to you, I'll add that Turkey is a democracy and has separation of state and religion...what do you see as the causal difference between Mormonism and Islam in women's literacy? What do you see as significant factors which differentiate Islam from Mormonism and how women are viewed?

Where I'm coming from is that my impression is that Islam and Mormonism are very similar and were it not for separation of state and religion, and if we lived in countries headed by Mormon men, that women would be illiterate, living in polygynous marriages. At least under Islam men are supposed to only take up to 4 wives, that's better than Mormon leaders promoted and still practice under the truer version of J. Smith's religion.

So my point was that if it wasn't for separation of state and religion, and if it wasn't for the Mormon church to be forced to renounce polygamy that today women would be mistreated and abused by the Mormon church.

Your example of Martha Cannon basically was a counter to the notion that there is something wrong with polygamy. So you most certainly were defending polygamy, you were saying someting for it.

Thus, any suggestion that nineteenth-century Utah resembled Taliban-style Islam -- and that was, of course, the context of the conversation -- is simply ignorant and risible.

I said nothing about the Taliban. I only commented on what the current state of affairs might be for women today under a situation in which polygamy was encouraged. Let's face it, in Mormonism the more women a man married the better. It wasn't just a matter of choice, it was a requirement to get into the Celestial heaven.

Incidentally, you haven't acknowledged your misrepresentation of that older conversation in the CK -- the one in which you falsely portray me as having no sympathy for the suffering of Muslim women by means of falsely portraying me as approving of the Afghan burka.

Look right after T.D. make it perfectly clear she was talking about a burka you added your 2 cents that you know women who happily choose to wear traditional muslim garb. I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to correct the impression and let others know you don't agree with women wearing having to wear burka's. So you should thank me.

Has Harmony somehow passed the baton to you? Are you taking over the role of delivering wrathful moral condemnations on the basis of transparent misreadings and complete irrelevancies?

Well now, I have the impression you see nothing wrong with polygamy. So you can correct that if you wish.