Bah, I give up. This is all Paul Vincenti’s fault. Him and that bunch of fundamentalist Christian cretins.

Christianity is dead, but not yet buried in Europe, so you cannot compare Christianity with Islam.

The church in Malta is still digging its own grave. Islam is flourishing not fading away like Christianity. Who goes to church in Europe? Have you been to a church on Sunday? What is the average age group of church goers? In the 1970s churches used to be full of young people but nowadays you see mainly middle aged and elderly people.

Given the chance, Egyptians, who are very religious, would elect the Muslim brotherhood, who would probably introduce sharia law.

Like monogamy, Pat. Hell, even the whole legal framework of not killing or maiming or hurting anyone is a Christian construct.

[Daphne – Ho hum. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ predates Christianity by…..how many thousands of years, exactly? Those 10 commandments which underpin Judaism, Christianity and – you’ve got it – Islam have little or nothing to do with religion as such. They were devised to ensure that small social groups could pull together cohesively and survive in even the most adverse conditions. Why do you think it’s ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’ rather than ‘thou shalt not covet thy nieghbour’s spouse’, even though it has since been taken as a general veto on adultery? It’s because one man eying up another man’s wife would result in some serious trouble, possibly involving clubs and daggers and trouble for the village, but a woman eying up another woman’s husband would result in perhaps a few smashed clay pots and some hair-pulling. And because Moses knew that his squalling, maiming, fornicating, killing, false-god worshipping tribe would never take him seriously enough, he told them that he had received his orders from the highest authority of all. And the rest is not so much history as three major world religions.]

And then you have practices from other cultures which create huge problems in a “secular” country (such as women patients refusing to be visited by a male doctor, or Sikh soldiers refusing to cut their hair and beards and the army having to design a special helmet for them, or women taking passport photos wearing a burqa.) None of which bears any relation to human rights, and so you cannot make them illegal.

Daphne is fond of saying that some of us “fail to make the distinction”. You fail to make the distinction between the Christian religion and Christian culture. You’re called Pat, and you consider the weekend to be Saturday and Sunday. Like or or not, you live in a Christian cultural framework. Which some people find galling, but there you are.

This minaret business isn’t the result of a fear of the Muslim faith, or of private Islamic rituals, but of fear of the establishment of a parallel cultural sphere. Now you may scoff at this, because as we all know, no one has come up with the optimum, ideal way of having different cultures living side by side in a continent filled to the brim with Christian symbology. But the problem exists, and it would be extremely disingenuous to deny it.

That’s him. You gotta admire his spirit though . . . Or not!? . . . And his understanding of the concept of human rights and freedom of expression.

Still, I believe he’s got it in for you.

–How many women have been killed by their lovers/husbands in Malta, in defiance of the law?–

That’s what I was thinking recently regarding those honor killings we have to deal with in Germany amongst mostly Turkish families: domestic dramas (sp?) have a similar dynamic and go across all cultures and religions but they are called family tragedies or crimes of passion here.

http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=98774

[Daphne – Isn’t this the same man I wrote about recently?]

“Even in secular states, the law tends to be constructed around Christian practices”

Like what? You have to differ between practices commonly found amongst Christians and actual Christian practices.

Ah ok then. I didn’t know you were referring to state-sponsored stoning etc etc. In that case, you’d be hard-pressed to find any examples, except for, say, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Gulf States. But your reasoning is as fatuous as my example.

I swore I wouldn’t touch this one with a bargepole, but here we go:

Q: When was the last time somebody was stoned to death for adultery in Tunisia or Morocco, for example?

A: Ghofrane Haddaoui, Tunisian, 23 years old, stoned to death in none other than Marseille, on the 17th October 2004.

[Daphne – A fatuous comparison. You fail to make the distinction between state-sponsored stoning and illegal stoning, i.e. murder. France does not permit stoning for adultery. There is nothing the state can do to prevent murder unless it is by putting deterrents in place. All the state can do is act to prosecute once the crime is committed. How many women have been killed by their lovers/husbands in Malta, in defiance of the law?]

Islam obviously is not just about minarets. If we take the argument “to its logical extreme”, polygamy is not an extremist interpretation of Islam. And yet it is against secular law in all European countries. Shall we recognise such a marriage? France, for one, does not.

[Daphne – Obviously not, because the law is there for all. If bigamy is against the law, then it is against the law for everyone, regardless of religion.]

Killing a sheep in the street is illegal because of hgyiene laws. But killing a sheep in your own home is illegal too. So there’s your answer. It’s not just a question of allowing everyone to practise their religion as long as it respects human rights. Even in secular states, the law tends to be constructed around Christian practices, quite simply because laws developed over time, and are not made in a vacuum.

Please don’t mention Paul Vincenti’s posse. I hate them as much as you do.

Islam makes no distinction between religion and state. They are integral not separate.

[Daphne – No, Paul. All religions recognise only their own law. A Catholic who lives where abortion is legal cannot have an abortion and remain in favour with her church, arguing that the state allows it. Adultery is no longer illegal, but Catholicism deems it abominable – a mortal sin, ranked with murder. Catholics living in Malta can commit adultery not because Catholicism is more tolerant than Islam – it certainly is not – but because Malta is a democracy in which human rights are respected. Tunisia is secular, but the population is Muslim, for instance. In Malta, one of the last bastions of extreme Catholicism, we find ourselves with a situation in which the Catholic Church is trying to create a state within a state, retaining jurisdiction over marriages contracted in a Catholic Church but registered by the state and refusing to hand over paedophile priests to the police, insisting that the matter will be handled ‘internally’.]

In Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt etc, there are ruthless dictators who would not tolerate extremism, that is why we don’t witness stoning to death in these northern African countries.

[Daphne – Precisely: they have a political system which guards against religious extremism. So do we. They are at the extreme ends of political philosophy – democracy and dictatorship – but they achieve the same purpose of keeping religious zealots at bay.]

There are many Muslims in Europe, including the imam in Malta who would love to see the introduction of Sharia law worldwide. It has already been introduced in parts of Nigeria.

[Daphne – How would sharia law be introduced in Malta, pray?]