Question: although the first part seems to be quite true (though there are complexities in its actual execution…so to speak), I’m not clear if the 2nd part (“tolerance”) is Author’s joke or is it something the Sultan actually said?
And FYI, according to my understanding of Shar’ia, there must be four Muslim witnesses for adultery (etc) to be prosecuted. As one report puts it, “This is a way for the sultan to look religious but make sure that none of these punishments will actually be carried out.” I suspect this was the Prophet’s original intention — that is, make the proof so burdensome that casual accusations and revenge accusations are discouraged — but I’m open to other scholarly opinions.
The prophets original intention was to murder as many political opponents as was possible, using his invisible friend as an excuse to propose a book full of bullshit to vindicate his barbarity…
Under Sharia you don’t need four witnesses if the perpetrator confesses. In a state like Brunei getting a confession is child’s play – you either torture it out of them or fake it, no bother.
Religion can be found defined under ‘Superstition’, the sub-heading to look for is ‘Institutionalised’.
friends, it is up to us all to ridicule the ridiculous, it is in no way a matter of “intolerance”. it is time those people of reason and logic stand up and be heard !
It should be noted that the goal is not merely to kill the gay man. That can be done painlessly. Stoning is a particularly painful and brutal way to die. It also engages the people doing the stoning, requiring negative emotion to do the job properly. It inflicts great pain and requires and elicits great cruelty.
If a god, as described, existed, it would be our duty to resist it.
I think someone well-known and brilliant said that, but I can’t remember who it was.
Well, sultan, as I have often done before, I shall quote the final lines of Ferlinghetti’s “Salute”:
.
.
.
I raise my middle finger
in the only proper salute
Of course if two muslim men swear on the Qur’an that you are guilty then guilt is assured and a bunch of nutters get the satisfaction of stoning you to death. Seventh century ignorance, barbarity and religious nuttery has no need of anything but a kangaroo court…
So … the sultan of Brunei is asking for tolerance, understanding, and respect for actions he takes which demonstrate an utter dearth of tolerance, understanding, or respect.
Imho, we all need to curb our fossil fuel consumption. Not only because of climate change, nor only because oil etc are finite resources with other uses besides burning… but also because a lot of oil producing countries seem to be run by arseholes. Brunei isn’t even the worst, by a long stretch – take a look at Saudi Arabia, for starters.
A lower oil price would mean less money and less international clout for them. Bring it on and find ways to use less fossil fuel.
Paddy: Your wishes will come true quite soon – a few more years and some new technology will make it unnecessary to burn fossil fuels for energy. Generation of electricity, at capital cost below $100 per kW, will make even wind turbines and solar panels uneconomic. Huge transformation world wide, just around the corner. Cheap power for the masses including remote villages in Africa and Asia…..
Perhaps two more years before the above becomes obvious and accepted.
Regarding religion, I wonder if Muslims really believe in God? They seem to have no faith in His ability to punish wrongdoers by sending them to Hell for millennia and longer! Surely it is rather arrogant to think that you know God’s mind better than He does? (God = Allah or whatever name you prefer.)
My own conviction is that it is all nonsense and we ought to grow up.
It is the large scale and storage of electrical energy that is the critical technology required. Once you can store enought electrical energy to run cities for years you have the solution to mankinds energy requirements….oh…religion nonsense? Even a non brainwashed 10 year old could tell you that…
I’m sure that large solar arrays pumping energy into new quantum energy solutions will be commonplace inside 30 years…coz 30 years ago, if you told me you could store terabtyes of info in a box the size of a matchbox, I would have laughed in your face…
It’s foolish to *rely* on some currently undeveloped technology to work, rather than work with currently working technology & then if something better comes along say ‘Great, lets add that to our toolbox’.
Yes do the R&D on anything that looks promising, but ‘quantum energy storage?’ Where is there anything to even research there?
Im not an expert in chemistry, but from what I have read, the electron configuration of certain materials can be used to store electrical energy. This can be reversed to use the stored energy. I think a lot of chemical engineers think that the technology is viable through mathematical models. But turning that model into a working technology is difficult…but I think it will be the future…
Fifty years ago I was reading science fiction which made naive projections based on the massive technological advances of the previous fifty years and had us traveling to the stars by now. Didn’t happen though.
In fact it’s been observed that someone whose memory spanned the years 1900 to 1950 would have seen people’s lives changed by technology in truly major ways, while the years 1950 to 2000 brought mostly incremental improvements, with the only big advance being computers and the Internet.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. We may not have a Theory Of Everything yet, but we have a pretty solid grasp now of how the universe operates in the low energy realm where we spend our lives, and it’s entirely possible that there are no more fundamental breakthroughs to be made there. We can’t count on technology saving us.
Sure, it’s foolish to just suppose that technology will come to the rescue and bail us out of whatever disaster we’re digging ourselves into – but a very little web search will turn up a couple of developing battery technologies relating to quantum physics, so that’s more an emerging technology than speculative fiction.
From a casual survey, there’s nano-capacitors and there’s quantum entanglement. Neither of them seem to have a lot to offer in terms of storage density, and in fact the latter may really be of interest only for very small devices, but the nano-capacitor “battery” could apparently be at least practical for vehicles etc., and its big advantage is that because the storage is simply electric and not chemical as in a battery, they can be charged really fast. So you could drive into the “filling station” and be out of there faster than the dinosaur burners, where today a battery charge can take a rather long time.
This way of burlesque mature social values claims that quaint islamic laws should be translated too. If homosexuality and sodomy can be punished by stoning to death according religious laws there, assholery should be punish by impalement according secular laws elsewhere.
Too sad, it violates more fundamental principles and values here.
Until recently some simple minded Europeans were prompt to concentrate and exterminate their neighbour. But that’s history.
So currish some could have been.
Sixth century tards: I’m guessing English is not your first language. I think you have composed your comment in your own first language and then passed it through Google Translate or some similar computer system. Not a good idea!
And why not? I’ve been taken to task by self-described feminists who have told me, with straight faces, that the only reason that people oppose FGM and the Burkha is racism. I’ve given up arguing with them and now just shake them violently until their teeth rattle in their otherwise empty heads (because that’s my religion).
SOG. I am merely speculating on the possibility of a breakthrough in quantum energy storage. I cannot foretell the future no more than your average religious nutter seems to know the mind of their fictitious friends…However, Technology is the ONLY way forwards to prevent homo sapiens from becoming extinct. If we dont expand into the galaxy, sooner or later this planet will be rid of us…
HH — You might be interested in this excellent article by the linguist John McWhorter: Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion. McWhorter makes a convincing case that antiracism has morphed from a simple moral stance into what is effectively a new religion, with its own doctrine and clergy. Others have made the same argument, but I think McWhorter makes it particularly effectively. (It shouldn’t matter, but it doesn’t hurt that McWhorter happens to be black).
McWhorter is an interesting guy even when he isn’t talking about politics. Here’s an article which is mainly about the “singular they”, but which along the way explains why, despite what we have all been taught, there is really nothing wrong with saying “Billy and me went to the store” (rather than “Billy and I…”).
hm. In his “they” article, I got more of what felt like sophistry than insight. He’s certainly right about the misguided application of rules from Latin, which if I remember right leads to things like “… up with which, I shall not put!” But the question he’s addressing is not whether we need to conform to Latin rules. It’s whether English has any basic rules of its own, or it’s just a matter shaping it however we please at any point in time. I believe “thou” went away during a period of cataclysmic change in English under the influence of Norman French, not just a whimsical fad.
As for the Antiracism article – I didn’t read that at the linked site, because I encountered some software aggression there about my abstinence from Adobe Flash, and had to kill my browser, but I did find a similar article on the Atlantic. Similar feeling about his premise there, but it’s a much bigger conundrum. It’s too true, about the moral compulsion that afflicts the white and well to do. We find in my city that it has potential to be exploited for gain – there’s a powerful deregulatory element behind local land use politics, and they’ve learned to tie loosening of land use regulations to social justice, in a thoroughly bogus way but one that is extremely effective with the well to do voting public eager to expiate their inherited crimes. But religion? I don’t know, maybe I have to read it again to get that. I think it would worthwhile here to consider the difference between morality and ethics; while morality is obviously tied to religion, it doesn’t depend on it, and possibly some insight into the basis for morality would shine some light on this problem.
As for expanding into the galaxy … that really may never happen. I don’t think we’ve ever managed to overcome the laws of physics to such a convincing extent, that it would make me optimistic about the stars. Our term on the planet will be short, for sure. I happened to read recently that Paraceratherium, a very large extinct rhinocerous-like critter that is of no other present interest, survived for 11 million years before environmental conditions took it out. Speculatively, part of those conditions may have been gomphotheres (elephants) arriving on the scene and eradicating tree cover. We’ll never make it to 11 million years, that seems like a safe bet.
“As for expanding into the galaxy … that really may never happen.”
For a contrary view, without assuming any new physics that makes Faster Than Light travel possible: See the YouTube videos of Isaac Arthur.
Jim. Relativity. A spaceship travelling at near lightspeed would be able to reach the Andromida Galaxy in 50 years. But whole families would have to travel because time dialation would mean that everybody back home would have long since died….
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
September 24, 2008
Religious freedom: The right to harass, bully, harm or kill anyone you think is displeasing to God.
Religious persecution: Being criticised for indulging in religious freedom.
I truly believe that all dictionaries should have Religion as a ‘see also’ subheading for the definition of Psychosis.
^ an absolute truth and yes the truth WILL set you free…
Question: although the first part seems to be quite true (though there are complexities in its actual execution…so to speak), I’m not clear if the 2nd part (“tolerance”) is Author’s joke or is it something the Sultan actually said?
And FYI, according to my understanding of Shar’ia, there must be four Muslim witnesses for adultery (etc) to be prosecuted. As one report puts it, “This is a way for the sultan to look religious but make sure that none of these punishments will actually be carried out.” I suspect this was the Prophet’s original intention — that is, make the proof so burdensome that casual accusations and revenge accusations are discouraged — but I’m open to other scholarly opinions.
The prophets original intention was to murder as many political opponents as was possible, using his invisible friend as an excuse to propose a book full of bullshit to vindicate his barbarity…
jveeds: How very tolerant, respectful and understanding you are towards your interpretation of the Prophet’s original intention.
Would that it were as you interpret.
Did not some geezer say “By their fruits ye shall know them”, or some such?
Under Sharia you don’t need four witnesses if the perpetrator confesses. In a state like Brunei getting a confession is child’s play – you either torture it out of them or fake it, no bother.
Religion can be found defined under ‘Superstition’, the sub-heading to look for is ‘Institutionalised’.
Here’s a report of the call for respect and understanding, by the way: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-23/brunei-defends-death-by-stoning-for-gay-sex/11038554
LOL… wonder why it doesn’t extend to lesbians? somebody needs to do a history search on the bum from Brunei’s browser…
friends, it is up to us all to ridicule the ridiculous, it is in no way a matter of “intolerance”. it is time those people of reason and logic stand up and be heard !
It should be noted that the goal is not merely to kill the gay man. That can be done painlessly. Stoning is a particularly painful and brutal way to die. It also engages the people doing the stoning, requiring negative emotion to do the job properly. It inflicts great pain and requires and elicits great cruelty.
If a god, as described, existed, it would be our duty to resist it.
I think someone well-known and brilliant said that, but I can’t remember who it was.
Something like that may have been said by Wittgenstein.
Well, sultan, as I have often done before, I shall quote the final lines of Ferlinghetti’s “Salute”:
.
.
.
I raise my middle finger
in the only proper salute
Of course if two muslim men swear on the Qur’an that you are guilty then guilt is assured and a bunch of nutters get the satisfaction of stoning you to death. Seventh century ignorance, barbarity and religious nuttery has no need of anything but a kangaroo court…
So … the sultan of Brunei is asking for tolerance, understanding, and respect for actions he takes which demonstrate an utter dearth of tolerance, understanding, or respect.
Makes perfect sense [/sarcasm]
Imho, we all need to curb our fossil fuel consumption. Not only because of climate change, nor only because oil etc are finite resources with other uses besides burning… but also because a lot of oil producing countries seem to be run by arseholes. Brunei isn’t even the worst, by a long stretch – take a look at Saudi Arabia, for starters.
A lower oil price would mean less money and less international clout for them. Bring it on and find ways to use less fossil fuel.
Paddy: Your wishes will come true quite soon – a few more years and some new technology will make it unnecessary to burn fossil fuels for energy. Generation of electricity, at capital cost below $100 per kW, will make even wind turbines and solar panels uneconomic. Huge transformation world wide, just around the corner. Cheap power for the masses including remote villages in Africa and Asia…..
Perhaps two more years before the above becomes obvious and accepted.
Regarding religion, I wonder if Muslims really believe in God? They seem to have no faith in His ability to punish wrongdoers by sending them to Hell for millennia and longer! Surely it is rather arrogant to think that you know God’s mind better than He does? (God = Allah or whatever name you prefer.)
My own conviction is that it is all nonsense and we ought to grow up.
Peter W.: “Cheap power for the masses including remote villages in Africa and Asia…..” etc etc.
What makes you think that? “some new technology”?
It looks as though wishful thinking is not confined to religion!
I have no quarrel with your remarks about belief in God/Allah etc.
It is the large scale and storage of electrical energy that is the critical technology required. Once you can store enought electrical energy to run cities for years you have the solution to mankinds energy requirements….oh…religion nonsense? Even a non brainwashed 10 year old could tell you that…
M27Holts: Why do you expect large scale energy storage to soon become practical?
I recommend reading
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Beyond_Fossil_Fuels.pdf
See in particular the section
“Examination of secondary energy storage technologies”
in the second link, & consider whether there is anything which might over come the problems mentioned there.
Also see “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air”
http://www.withouthotair.com/
For a detailed discussion of the merits & limitation of many energy technologies.
I’m sure that large solar arrays pumping energy into new quantum energy solutions will be commonplace inside 30 years…coz 30 years ago, if you told me you could store terabtyes of info in a box the size of a matchbox, I would have laughed in your face…
It’s foolish to *rely* on some currently undeveloped technology to work, rather than work with currently working technology & then if something better comes along say ‘Great, lets add that to our toolbox’.
Yes do the R&D on anything that looks promising, but ‘quantum energy storage?’ Where is there anything to even research there?
Im not an expert in chemistry, but from what I have read, the electron configuration of certain materials can be used to store electrical energy. This can be reversed to use the stored energy. I think a lot of chemical engineers think that the technology is viable through mathematical models. But turning that model into a working technology is difficult…but I think it will be the future…
M27Holts: More wishful thinking?
Fifty years ago I was reading science fiction which made naive projections based on the massive technological advances of the previous fifty years and had us traveling to the stars by now. Didn’t happen though.
In fact it’s been observed that someone whose memory spanned the years 1900 to 1950 would have seen people’s lives changed by technology in truly major ways, while the years 1950 to 2000 brought mostly incremental improvements, with the only big advance being computers and the Internet.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. We may not have a Theory Of Everything yet, but we have a pretty solid grasp now of how the universe operates in the low energy realm where we spend our lives, and it’s entirely possible that there are no more fundamental breakthroughs to be made there. We can’t count on technology saving us.
Sure, it’s foolish to just suppose that technology will come to the rescue and bail us out of whatever disaster we’re digging ourselves into – but a very little web search will turn up a couple of developing battery technologies relating to quantum physics, so that’s more an emerging technology than speculative fiction.
From a casual survey, there’s nano-capacitors and there’s quantum entanglement. Neither of them seem to have a lot to offer in terms of storage density, and in fact the latter may really be of interest only for very small devices, but the nano-capacitor “battery” could apparently be at least practical for vehicles etc., and its big advantage is that because the storage is simply electric and not chemical as in a battery, they can be charged really fast. So you could drive into the “filling station” and be out of there faster than the dinosaur burners, where today a battery charge can take a rather long time.
This way of burlesque mature social values claims that quaint islamic laws should be translated too. If homosexuality and sodomy can be punished by stoning to death according religious laws there, assholery should be punish by impalement according secular laws elsewhere.
Too sad, it violates more fundamental principles and values here.
Until recently some simple minded Europeans were prompt to concentrate and exterminate their neighbour. But that’s history.
So currish some could have been.
Sixth century tards: I’m guessing English is not your first language. I think you have composed your comment in your own first language and then passed it through Google Translate or some similar computer system. Not a good idea!
And why not? I’ve been taken to task by self-described feminists who have told me, with straight faces, that the only reason that people oppose FGM and the Burkha is racism. I’ve given up arguing with them and now just shake them violently until their teeth rattle in their otherwise empty heads (because that’s my religion).
SOG. I am merely speculating on the possibility of a breakthrough in quantum energy storage. I cannot foretell the future no more than your average religious nutter seems to know the mind of their fictitious friends…However, Technology is the ONLY way forwards to prevent homo sapiens from becoming extinct. If we dont expand into the galaxy, sooner or later this planet will be rid of us…
HH — You might be interested in this excellent article by the linguist John McWhorter: Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion. McWhorter makes a convincing case that antiracism has morphed from a simple moral stance into what is effectively a new religion, with its own doctrine and clergy. Others have made the same argument, but I think McWhorter makes it particularly effectively. (It shouldn’t matter, but it doesn’t hurt that McWhorter happens to be black).
McWhorter is an interesting guy even when he isn’t talking about politics. Here’s an article which is mainly about the “singular they”, but which along the way explains why, despite what we have all been taught, there is really nothing wrong with saying “Billy and me went to the store” (rather than “Billy and I…”).
hm. In his “they” article, I got more of what felt like sophistry than insight. He’s certainly right about the misguided application of rules from Latin, which if I remember right leads to things like “… up with which, I shall not put!” But the question he’s addressing is not whether we need to conform to Latin rules. It’s whether English has any basic rules of its own, or it’s just a matter shaping it however we please at any point in time. I believe “thou” went away during a period of cataclysmic change in English under the influence of Norman French, not just a whimsical fad.
As for the Antiracism article – I didn’t read that at the linked site, because I encountered some software aggression there about my abstinence from Adobe Flash, and had to kill my browser, but I did find a similar article on the Atlantic. Similar feeling about his premise there, but it’s a much bigger conundrum. It’s too true, about the moral compulsion that afflicts the white and well to do. We find in my city that it has potential to be exploited for gain – there’s a powerful deregulatory element behind local land use politics, and they’ve learned to tie loosening of land use regulations to social justice, in a thoroughly bogus way but one that is extremely effective with the well to do voting public eager to expiate their inherited crimes. But religion? I don’t know, maybe I have to read it again to get that. I think it would worthwhile here to consider the difference between morality and ethics; while morality is obviously tied to religion, it doesn’t depend on it, and possibly some insight into the basis for morality would shine some light on this problem.
As for expanding into the galaxy … that really may never happen. I don’t think we’ve ever managed to overcome the laws of physics to such a convincing extent, that it would make me optimistic about the stars. Our term on the planet will be short, for sure. I happened to read recently that Paraceratherium, a very large extinct rhinocerous-like critter that is of no other present interest, survived for 11 million years before environmental conditions took it out. Speculatively, part of those conditions may have been gomphotheres (elephants) arriving on the scene and eradicating tree cover. We’ll never make it to 11 million years, that seems like a safe bet.
Oh yeah, as for “Sixth century tards” … I’m betting Google translate has never touched that text.
“As for expanding into the galaxy … that really may never happen.”
For a contrary view, without assuming any new physics that makes Faster Than Light travel possible: See the YouTube videos of Isaac Arthur.
Jim. Relativity. A spaceship travelling at near lightspeed would be able to reach the Andromida Galaxy in 50 years. But whole families would have to travel because time dialation would mean that everybody back home would have long since died….