The Seventh Commandment

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You shall not commit adultery

First of all we need to be clear about what adultery is. You might think that is easy, but the commandments were written about three thousand years ago and things didn’t mean the same then.

People today tend define it as any act of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or, perhaps a bit more narrowly, any act of sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.

The ancient Hebrews had a different understanding and limited it to just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who was married or betrothed. The marital status of the man was irrelevant. A married man was not guilty of “adultery” for having sex with an unmarried woman.

This is because at that time women were little more than property — a slightly higher status than slaves but not full citizens like men. Because women were like property, having sex with a married or betrothed woman was regarded as misuse of someone else’s property. A married man having sex with an unmarried woman was not guilty of such a crime and thus was not committing adultery. If she also wasn’t a virgin, then the man wasn’t guilty of any crime. A man could have sex with slaves any time he liked.

Because adultery was about married or betrothed women, gay sex didn’t count. It was against other laws of Moses, but not the commandments.

Christians now tend to define adultery much more broadly, and as a consequence almost all extramarital sex acts are treated as violations of the Seventh Commandment. Many claim that adultery should include lustful thoughts, lustful words, polygamy, etc. This is justified by the words of Jesus: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, You shall not commit adultery: But I say to you, That whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.“ (Matthew 5:27-28). That makes life tough for a bloke and makes it fairly certain that nearly half the human race breaks the rules most days of their life.

Some Abrahamic religions still accept polygamy, so many Moslem men can have up to four wives. Much less need to commit adultery in that situation. Some parts of Shia Islam have the even more convenient concept of mutah or temporary marriage.  The temporary marriage contract is as follows: The woman says: ” I marry myself to you for the specified dowry (mention the amount) and for the specified time period (mention the time period)”. Then the man says: “I accept”.” That’ll be fifty bucks for your half hour luv. OK thanks.

BBC Thought for the Day used to create religious tension

There was a shocking ‘Thought for the Day’ on the Today programme a few minutes ago. The muslim speaker effectively condemned the Americans for not having buried Bin Laden correctly and talked about radicals re-naming the Arabian Sea as the martyrs sea. He was effectively inciting extremists to claim that their religion had been offended and to create a shrine for a mass murderer. Thought for the day must be ended now. Our taxes cannot be used to whip up religious divisions and discontent.

Koran Burners, Cranks & Criminals

A BNP candidate for the Welsh Assembly, Sion Owens, was arrested and charged with a public order offence after police viewed a video of a man apparently burning a copy of the koran. It was alleged that Owens burned the book in his back garden.

When he appeared in court, the Crown Prosecution Service withdrew the charge, but said that investigations into his actions were continuing and that “almost certainly other proceedings will ensue.”

Earlier this month Terry Jones a publicity hungry American stepped out of his usual role of running his own weird church and appointed himself a judge to put the koran on trial. Surprise, surprise he found the book guilty and sentenced it to burning. When news of this event reached Afghanistan some more people with weird religious ideas whipped up a riot in which several people were murdered.

Last year, after Jones had first announced his plans to burn korans and backed off from it, the repulsive Westboro Baptist Church decided this was too good publicity to miss so they put an American flag with a koran and burned both.

So who are the criminals, who are not and what should everybody else do?

Whackos like Westboro and Terry Jones should be endured and largely ignored as part of the price of freedom. Publicity seeking people with crazy ideas are only a problem when sensationalist and circulation hungry media want to use them for their own ends. It would obviously be better if we had more responsible information providers, but we don’t and that too is is a necessary part of free expression.

The sadistic butchers who use koran burning, or any other supposed affront, as an excuse for killing people and imposing their deranged dominance over others are criminals. These people are a genuine danger to society and they need to be brought to justice for their crimes.

In contrast to the freedom guaranteed to American cranks by the US constitution, in the UK our equivalent loon, Sion Owens, gets charged with a public order offence for something he is supposed to have done in his own back garden. When that absurdity collapses the CPS bureaucrats do a tactical withdrawal with a warning that they will go away and think up another crime that they can nail him with.

Owens is probably just as much an inadequate as many other people who swallow the nasty and ridiculous policies of the BNP, but that doesn’t make him a criminal. The right response to Owens and his like is to not vote for them and leave them to the obscurity they have earned.

Our judicial system needs to grow up and allow citizens the ability to make their own adult decisions.

Rowan Williams and sharia – Stupid, Wrong and Dangerous

 

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has today gone from just being a rather silly man to being a dangerous one.

 

In an interview with the BBC he says that it now seems inevitable that Britain should allow parts of Islamic Sharia law to be incorporated into British law if social cohesion is to be maintained.

 

He says that he is thinking in terms of certain aspects of financial and marriage law being given the support of legal enforcement rather than the hideous punishments of sharia being introduced to the UK.

 

Williams points out that orthodox Jews have their own courts that have some forms of recognition and he goes on to waffle about Catholic attitudes to abortion needing, and getting, some form of recognition by doctors being able to exempt themselves from involvement in abortion.

 

What he is doing is deliberately confusing the right of some professionals to decline to take part in certain practices on the basis of conscience with the introduction of a different system of law for part of the population. That is dangerous, divisive and, to me at least, abhorrent.

 

Muslims can already conduct their financial affairs according to their preferences. Basically that means avoiding deposits and loans involving interest. Provided they have entered a contract, they will have the protection of civil law to enforce those contracts. They do not need, and should not have, any special or different treatment in law.

 

When it comes to marriage, divorce, custody and other relationship matters, it is utterly unacceptable that sharia should have any recognition at all. All sharia courts are male dominated and the culture in Islamic societies generally is discriminatory. If there were a choice of using British law or sharia courts in Britain, muslim women would come under irresistible pressure to use the sharia system. As a result they would lose custody of their children when they should not, they would suffer disadvantage in divorce and in financial settlements.

 

Above all, the objection to incorporation of sharia into British law is that we live in a democracy. That requires that our chosen government is the only law making body in the country and the same law must apply to everybody without exception.

 

One of the failings of our system is that it includes bishops like Williams to have a place in the House of Lords where they are able to speak and vote on legislation despite being accountable to nobody. In this recent statement Williams has shown himself unfit to be a part of the legislature.

 

All religious involvement in our legislature should be abolished. We now need an end to the established church and we must have the abolition of blasphemy laws, tax exemption for religious schools and all other preferential treatment for religion by the state. People are entitled to hold religious beliefs, but the church has no entitlement to influence law, undermine democracy or to be subsidised by taxpayers.

Aum Shinrikyo and Shoko Ashahara Cult Mass Murder

Ashahara was yet another of the cult leaders who claimed that he communicated with God. In 1995 Ashahara sent some of his members to plant the deadly nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo underground train system. Fifteen people were killed and about a thousand injured. Ahsahara expressed his disappointment with the low death rate.

This was not the first murders by Aum Shinrikyo. They had earlier tried to kill the residents of an exclusive estate, including three judges, with sarin. At least five died and five hundred were injured. Before that they carried out many test attacks with biological and chemical weapons that they produced themselves in factories disguised as shrines.

Aum Shinrikyo is a syncretiesd cult with its teachings drawn from several of the world’s major religions plus the armageddon style final battle theories of Ashahara. According to him everybody would be destroyed except members of the cult, and Ashahara himself would then rule.

 Many Aum members were, and some still are, very intelligent and well qualified people. People duped into doing terrible things to themselves and others by religious cults are not stupid. They are people who succumb to charismatic manipulators. Ashahara is under sentence of death, but his followers could yet kill again.

Miracles Don’t Happen and Never Did

None of the miracles attributed to saints happened in the way that is claimed to justify their canonisation.