http://www.poe-news.com/stories.php?poeurlid=44429
I just don’t know how anyone can justify this kind of shit. Religion does so much harm to the world, it’s hard to remember that there are actually religious people that do good as well.
It’s the culture, not the religion. that sounds like an honor killing, where the head of the household feels that death is the only way to wipe a stain of honor from the family. Kind of like feudal Japan, where if you shamed your family, you had to kill yourself to remove the stain.
It’s a culture steeped in a certain form of a religion. You can’t really seperate them like that.
Honour killings are common across the Middle East and South Asia, regardless of religion. They are rare in the most populous Muslim country on the planet, Indonesia, and yet common in Hindu India, as are forced marriages and other forms of female subjugation. Like much of what is put on the plate of “evil” Islam, it is an issue of poverty and developmental backwardness that causes much of what is wrong in the Islamic world. I’m not a fan of organised religion, but things like this are as much an issue with religion as a Jehova’s Witness who beats their wayward child to death.
Religion is used as a justification in cases like this. Even honor killings have a base in morality (i.e. the sin of pre or extramarital sex) which is based on some religion usually. I am not saying that religion causes these things, but that people use religion as a reason to justify their actions. In places where the religion is extreme the actions are extreme. Of course people don’t need religion to justify their actions (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/LAW/01/14/daughter.killed.ap/), but it seems to help.
The muslims of Indonesia and Nigeria are pretty extreme, and yet honour killings are virtually non-existant there. In Turkey, a relatively moderate Muslim state, honour killings are rampant. Such honour killings have even persisted in some parts of Christian society on the edge of that region, such as in isolated hill communities of the Balkans. There are actually many negative societal issue in the Islamic world that you can directly pin on the religion, such as Sharia law and the stoning of adulterers, but honour killings isn’t one of them.
A Kuwaiti man has reportedly confessed to killing his 14-year-old daughter because he believed she was having sex.
He only confessed because he later found out she was actually just working out. Just some butterfly curls.
First hand account of an attempted honor killing - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/04/26/ftburn26.xml&pos=portal_puff3&_requestid=25966
Pretty scary shit and yes I still maintain that fundamentalist bullshit is the justification for these acts. Much like people that bomb abortion clinics or kill abortion doctors over here.