"Kristin A. Ruhle" wrote:
> Mm, well Islam grows because it is macho based. Women are kept in the
> house, made to wear fullbody cover ups if t hey go outside or get stoned
> to death as a whore, so they stay home and have babies. Rape is *always*
> the woman's fault and she can be killed for "family honor," yet men are
> encouraged to act on their impulses. HOrribly dangerous to the
> future....No wonder some ecofeministr writers like Sheri Tepper blame
> macho for destroying the planet. THey breed and breed and use women as
> broodmares.
It's not so much that the religion is "macho based", but that there is a
culture that happens to have an extreme macho basis and also happens to have
Islam as a religion. Correlation does not equal causation and all that.
I don't know very much about Islam, but from what I do know, there are a
number of violations of the Koran happening regularly in those cultures.
For instance, what I know about disciplining your wife is, you may beat her,
but you may not hit her in the face or head, and you may not hit her hard
enough to leave a mark. Hitting one's wife and giving a black eye is not
unheard of, and if all those men supposedly adhering to Islam were really
obeying everything in the Koran, there would be no wives given black eyes by
their husband. Islam as outlined in the Koran is less harmful to women than
some cultures where Islam is the official religion.
Some of what I know about Islam is what my sister (who had at least one
course on Islam in college, probably had more than one) has told me; most of
the rest of what I know about Islam and some of the cultural problems for
women such as what you cite came from _Unveiled_ by Cherry Mosteshar
(amazon.com URL
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312962886/qid=996959797/sr=1-57/ref=sc_b_57/002-8002517-3446415
if you want to order it and read it or something like that).
And remember, just because there's a culture where everyone, or almost
everyone, follows Religion X, and that culture has Problem Y, that does NOT
necessarily mean that Religion X causes Problem Y.
Julia
