Alcyone, I agree with you that traditions and historical coincidences are all-important when it comes to determining what kind of societies that different religions will give rise to. However, when it comes to polygamy, it
is true that the Koran permits men to have up to four wives, at least under certain circumstances. It is also true that there is nothing in the New Testament that actually
supports polygamy. That makes it more likely that Muslim societies will accept polygamy than that Christian societies will do so.
But as I said in the thread that was started by Pam, if you could turn back time and let the last two thousand years unfold all over again, it is almost certain that you would have ended up with other societies than the ones we now take for granted. There is nothing predetermined about either Christian or Muslim societies, so that they have to look like the Christian or Muslim societies that we know today. And speaking about the Bible and the Koran, there are indeed a lot of similarities between them.
Stepnachia, thanks for your kind and appreciative words!
I will comment on a few things that you said. I think that separation between church and state is all-important, because if it isn't there, then the breaking of religious tenets becomes a crime against the state, and needs to be punished by the state (or the federation). For example, in the 1980s I read about a man in the United States who sued his wife for having been unfaithful to him, and if I remember it correctly, he demanded that she should be jailed for it. The man argued that because his wife had promised before God that she would be faithful to him, the American legal system ought to punish her for breaking that promise to him. This is exactly the kind of thing that I don't want to see in our Western societies, and it
is exactly the kind of thing that you see in many Muslim countries. Men accuse women of adultery, and the legal systems of those countries punish the women. And in some Muslim countries, it may not be enough to jail a woman for committing adultery; she may, indeed, be executed for it.
That sort of thing happened all the time in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sexual "crimes" led to the execution of women. It was seen as particularly serious if a woman was unfaithful to her husband, more serious than if a man was unfaithful to hiw wife, and the woman's adultery was also easier to prove. It was enough that she had become pregnant when her husband was away on a journey. (And if an
unmarried woman became pregnant, her pregnancy in itself was enough to prove that she had committed a serious crime against her religion, and she was sure to be punished by the legal system of her country for it.) What if she had become raped? Well, if she couldn't
prove that she had been raped, the religious courts may well rule that she had just been adulterous, and then they might easily sentence her to death. That sort of thing happened often in 16th and 17th century Europe, and it happens in Muslim countries today.
We should perhaps remember that in the Old Testament, a woman was her husband's
property, but he was not her property at all. He owned her, but she didn't own him. That is why he was allowed to marry more than one woman, and that is also why he was allowed to divorce any wife that he didn't like. So what, then, did "adultery" mean? Obviously it had to mean that a man was robbed of his right to own his wife. So if a woman was unfaithful to her husband, she was "stealing herself away" from him, and she had to be put to death for it. And if a man had sex with a woman who was already married, then he was stealing that woman away from her rightful owner, her husband, and if he could be caught he deserved to be put to death for stealing from the other man. Similarly, if a man had sex with a young woman who was still living with her father, her father could demand that the man should be put to death for stealing away the father's right to control the life of his daughter. But if a man had sex with a prostitute or a widow or an orphan, then he wasn't stealing that woman from any other man, and he wasn't committing adultery and couldn't be punished for it. And it didn't matter one bit if he was married to a woman, because he wasn't obliged to be faithful to her. At least that is the way it is in the Old Testament. Jesus spoke sharply against that kind of male behaviour, and he demanded that men must be faithful
to their wives, which was a new concept to most Jews of his time.
Anyway, the Bible consists of both the Old and the New Testament, and Christianity has often been a sort of compromise between the two. Therefore, in the case of adultery, a woman's unfaithfulness was always seen as more serious than a man's in 16th and 17th century Europe, and it was punished more severely.
My point is that if we don't keep church and state separate, we may end up like many Muslim countries, where the law requires that women be put to death for sexual "crimes". According to a Professor at the Institution of Theology at the University of Lund that I spoke to, Islam regards a woman's unfaithfulness to her husband as a crime against God himself and therefore unforgivable, whereas a murder, for example, is a crime against another person and therefore forgivable, if the murdered person's relatives are willing to forgive. That is why honor killings of women so often go unpunished in Muslim societies: the murderers are the dead woman's own family - indeed, they themselves are the murderers - and they forgive themselves, of course.
We have traditionally never had that sort of honor killings at least in northern Europe, but we have certainly had the kind of cruelly fundamentalist society that uses the Bible to justify sentencing women to death for sexual crimes. I know for sure that I want no such religiously motivated executions of women in the society where I live.
I'll come back later and say something more about how I look at Jesus and Paul.
Ann
