Showing posts with label yezedi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yezedi. Show all posts

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Stoning in the Torah and in Reality

The rabbis hardly ever allowed executions. This stuff doesn't apply any more. I understand that. What I can't understand is how people can worship a Being they believe wrote, dictated, or inspired the following verses:

דברים פרק כב
כג כי יהיה נער בתולה, מארשה לאיש; ומצאה איש בעיר, ושכב עמה. כד והוצאתם את-שניהם אל-שער העיר ההוא, וסקלתם אתם באבנים ומתו--את-הנער על-דבר אשר לא-צעקה בעיר, ואת-האיש על-דבר אשר-ענה את-אשת רעהו; ובערת הרע, מקרבך


Deuteronomy 22:23-24. If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.


The moment a teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy

A 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion.

As a horrifying video of the stoning went out on the Internet, the British arm of Amnesty International condemned the death of Du’a Khalil Aswad as "an abhorrent murder" and demanded that her killers be brought to justice.

Reports from Iraq said a local security force witnessed the incident, but did nothing to try to stop it. Now her boyfriend is in hiding in fear for his life.

Miss Aswad, a member of a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, was condemned to death as an "honour killing" by other men in her family and hardline religious leaders because of her relationship with the Sunni Muslim boy.


I watched the video. (You can find it in this thread if you want.) It's horrible. The poor girl is cowering on the ground stripped to her underwear and a bloodthirsty mob is screaming (I assume) for her death as she is brutally murdered.

Maybe you think God didn't mean these verses literally or that they don't apply now. But how can you worship him if he even wrote them? How can you believe that they weren't written by people much like today's Muslim (and Yezidi?) extremists when their actions fit in so closely with the Torah's words?

It's to the rabbis' credit that this sort of "justice" was never common among the Jewish people, at least since Talmudic times. Still, they shouldn't have had to "reinterpret" the text or explain why it no longer applies. It should never have applied and it should never have been written.