of course, to some extent this is moderately operative today as well in the USA. but since so many women live single lives they aren’t as out of the norm and so one can’t assume or presume that they’re “fair game” in some way.

Sajidah Khan, observing strict rules of separation between the sexes, was relegated to listening from the next room.

Because interaction between the sexes is forbidden under Islam until marriage, girls and boys are not allowed to be in the same classroom or have outside contact.

Until that day, Khan said, she could count the social contacts she had had with males on one hand.

“In our culture, we don’t even let girls sit with their male cousins, and this guy is a teacher. Why is this man, who has said we are not even allowed to chat with a boy, doing this?” she said.

When girls are taught by male teachers, they must listen in another room.

[sentences extracted out a much longer piece]

methodist - 7%
mormon - 4%
baptist - 2%
lutheran - 7%
united church of christ - 13%
catholic - 5%
episcopalian - 9%
buddhist - 20%
muslim - 9%
no religion - 18%
all american adults - 6%

source. i’m struck that muslims seem a “bimodal” community. episcopalians have the same numbers of “doubters,” but for agree somewhat category they have 14%, and agree strongly 59%. for muslims the numbers are 14% and 72%.

hypothesis: there isn’t a uniform distribution of religious intensity among american muslims, rather, the data suggest a compound of two principle components, religious and sociocultural identity. this explains the relatively high number of atheists among american muslims (5%).

as a practical matter of public policy we have to reject extreme subjectivism and simply accept central tendencies as the “true” religions. but on a deep ontological level i don’t really think that religious interpretations we treat as “true” are actually trurer than those we must treat as not true; it’s a pragmatic, not principled.

i recommend jumping to the survey data on page 100. n = 632 for muslim students. you can read these data as glass half-full or half-empty depending on your normative framework.

“What should happen to a person who decides to leave Islam?”

They should be punished in accordance with Shari’ah Law 6%
They should be encouraged to rethink their decision by Muslim elders and people that care about them 45%
Nothing should happen to them – it’s their own choice 36%
Not sure 12%

Of the 6% of total respondents who advocated punishing apostates in accordance with Sharia, half (50%) said that they understood this to mean apostates should be killed, a third (34%) said this was not their understanding and 16% were unsure. 3% of Muslim students polled, therefore, felt that apostasy is punishable by death.

if 1 out of 33 british muslim students believe i should killed shouldn’t it be expected that i feel a bit of islamophobia (quite literally?)???

H/T rod dreher.

* Rabbi Tsvi Weinreb, executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
* Bishop Charles E. Blake, presiding prelate of the Church of God in Christ
* Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America
* Roman Catholic nun Helen Prejean, who was featured in the award-winning movie Dead Man Walking[4]

Additional clergy will include:[5]

* Rabbi Marc Schneier, founding director of the Jewish-Muslim Foundation for Ethnic Understanding
* Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, a Reform rabbi from Virginia.

Local clergy will include:[4]

* Imam Abdur-Rahim Ali of the Northeast Denver Islamic Center
* Rabbi Steven Foster from Congregation Emmanuel
* Human rights leader Reverend Lucia Guzman
* Buddhist participant Kathryn Ida.

lucia guzman is the only mainline protestant on this list. most def. getting their jew-on.

primarily i was mocking militant atheists who revel in their bigotry toward white christians, especially lower class ones. i don’t use the word bigotry to cast extreme aspersions, i actually think that discrimination is pretty natural, and we have likes and dislikes, and they’re normal. granted, there are lines (e.g., violence) that shouldn’t be crossed, and civility that must be maintained (e.g., i assume most “public” individuals should hold back their contempt for inbred rednecks for the sake of decorum). rather, a particular type of atheist truly glories in their ability to accuse lower class conservative christians of being basically subhuman.

i’m not really opposed to this prima facie; i’ve never made bones about my low opinion of the unintelligent (those who i term ‘tards’). but, i do think that this sort of contempt and bigotry is best appreciated when evenhandedly applied. the reality that is that cousin marriage rates even among lower class appalachian whites is far lower than among british pakistanis, who claim that the practice is part and parcel of their religion. this of course makes them a great test case for linkage studies on deleterious recessive diseases! if one accepts the rule of thumb that you can remove 5 IQ points from expectation for first cousin marriages, it is also quite literally turn them into tards through pedigree collapse (no worry about a british muslims becoming the majority if they go samaritan).

as it is, atheists of the dawkinsian variety tend to hold their most extreme fire from muslims and other non-christians. the main reason is that they’re colored by and large (or, if jews, obviously there are other valences at work). white people have a bad history of accusing non-whites of being subhuman, so even if the rationale is aracial, it “looks bad.” this is one reason i like to point out that black americans are far more religious than white americans; syllogistic logic would imply that if the religious are more subhuman, black americans are more subhuman than white americans. this is not a logical inference that many militant atheists are quite excited about shouting from the rooftops. if so, i would perhaps wonder if a little reflection might be warranted in regards to their militancy toward religion qua religion and their dismissal of the humanity of the religious.

secondarily, i was poking some fun at some western educated muslim activists who i am rather sure are quite consciously using the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house. e.g., CAIR activists who are peddling the discourse of mckinnon and dworkin in other contexts.

I am one of those rare creatures whose belief in the supernatural is due to empirical considerations. My mysticism is entirely scientific. Alas, the second step in the experiment, when the miracle occurs, cannot be reproduced before the eyes of skeptics.

first, this is a nation which is 80% christian. both candidates are avowed christians. so i think it’s not that weird that they’d be questioned by a christian minister on religious questions. i’m opposed to candidates using their position to push forward their own religious sect, though this often happens. but, i am pretty sure that it is impossible to disentangle people’s views on a host of issues from their religious viewpoints and what not.

second, i’m no longer much of a “naked public square” person. religion is important to people. in fact, anti-religion is important to people. many irreligious people talk about how religion should be a hobby, like knitting. well, that’s never gonna happen. in fact, most “irreligious” people have their own passions which are in many ways rather religious in form, though they might not have a god or supernaturalism tacked on to them.

as someone with a very thin/spare metaphysical and supernatural set of beliefs i’m among 2.5% of americans, and a tiny minority in the world. i’m enough of a communitarian now that i just believe religion has to be treated differently because most people conceive of it differently. i treat religion as another material/phenomenological condition of existence. nothing more, nothing less.

if i was god things would be different of course….