Progressives' Favorite Religion Has a New Best Seller on It's Hands

[LiveLaughLove]

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/23/book-tells-muslim-men-how-to-beat-and-control-their-wives

What the Religion of Peace has been missing is a good instructional book on how to properly beat and control your wife according to Sharia Law.

Thank goodness we now have one, and it can't stay on store shelves, so it seems to be very popular with the whole barbaric misogyny crowd. Oh did I mention the store is in....Canada, not in the middle east.

Can someone please tell me why American progressives support these people like they do?

Where are the women's rights groups?

[SanJoaquinSooner]

Progressive. Another perfectly fine word now rendered useless.

But, in any case, the folks you're looking for may be in D.C. for that big atheists convention. I doubt they're at Mecca.


http://atheists.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/national-convention.png

[LiveLaughLove]

Ah yes, the Reason Rally. Heard about it. Here's the second billing guy to Dawkins.


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/bring-your-kids-atheist-performer-drops-75-f-bombs-on-stage-at-reason-rally-warning-explicit-video/#ooid=RyZGQ5NDoXDXgFu68EwvSVdAuMo_90v5

Not sure of that video link will work. He's a very "reason" able guy.

I really wasn't asking about atheists per say, but progressives/liberals (unless you are implying that all progressives/liberals are atheists) and their support of muslims.

[yermom]

so a book by one Muslim means that all Muslims back the book and believe everything it says

does the same apply to Christians? white people? Americans?

[LiveLaughLove]

so a book by one Muslim means that all Muslims back the book and believe everything it says

does the same apply to Christians? white people? Americans?

Always the moral equivalency. I guess the part that says it is sold out at that bookstore in Canada escaped you. It isn't "one" Muslim.

But of course, Christians are just as bad. We behead innocent people and film it, blow up buildings with innocent people, kill our female family members for honor, and kill Jewish children and film it as in France this week.

Yeah, we're just as bad. Sheesh.

[ictsooner7]

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/23/book-tells-muslim-men-how-to-beat-and-control-their-wives

What the Religion of Peace has been missing is a good instructional book on how to properly beat and control your wife according to Sharia Law.

Thank goodness we now have one, and it can't stay on store shelves, so it seems to be very popular with the whole barbaric misogyny crowd. Oh did I mention the store is in....Canada, not in the middle east.

Can someone please tell me why American progressives support these people like they do?

Where are the women's rights groups?

Since when is it Progressives' Favorite Religion?

I was raised a Southen Batist and now a Presbyterian.

[ictsooner7]

Three kids have died when their parents followed "christain" book To Train Up a Child.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/us/deaths-put-focus-on-pastors-advocacy-of-spanking.html?pagewanted=all#h[]

Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate

Josh Anderson for The New York Times

Michael Pearl, a pastor in Pleasantville, Tenn., says physical discipline of children is necessary. More Photos »

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: November 6, 2011

PLEASANTVILLE, Tenn. — After services at the Church at Cane Creek on a recent Sunday, a few dozen families held a potluck picnic and giggling children played pin the tail on the donkey.

Deaths Put Focus on Pastor’s Advocacy of Spanking

The white-bearded preacher, Michael Pearl, who delivered his sermon in stained work pants, and his wife, Debi, mixed warmly with the families drawn to their evangelical ministry, including some of their own grandchildren.

The pastoral mood in the hills of Tennessee offered a stark contrast to the storm raging around the country over the Pearls’ teachings on child discipline, which advocate systematic use of “the rod” to teach toddlers to submit to authority. The methods, seen as common sense by some grateful parents and as horrific by others, are modeled, Mr. Pearl is fond of saying, on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

Debate over the Pearls’ teachings, first seen on Christian Web sites, gained new intensity after the death of a third child, all allegedly at the hands of parents who kept the Pearls’ book, “To Train Up a Child,” in their homes. On Sept. 29, the parents were charged with homicide by abuse.

More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”

The furor in part reflects societal disagreements over corporal punishment, which conservative Christians say is called for in the Bible and which many Americans consider reasonable up to a point, even as many parents and pediatricians reject it. The issue flared recently when a video was posted online of a Texas judge whipping his daughter.

Mr. Pearl, 66, and Mrs. Pearl, 60, say that blaming their book for extreme abuse by a few unstable parents is preposterous and that they explicitly counsel against acting in anger or causing a bruise. They say that their methods, properly used, yield peace and happy teenagers.

“If you find a 12-step book in an alcoholic’s house, you wouldn’t blame the book,” Mr. Pearl said in an interview.

But he acknowledged that the methods are not right for out-of-control or severely overburdened parents.

In the latest case, Larry and Carri Williams of Sedro-Woolley, Wash., were home-schooling their six children when they adopted a girl and a boy, ages 11 and 7, from Ethiopia in 2008. The two were seen by their new parents as rebellious, according to friends.

Late one night in May this year, the adopted girl, Hana, was found face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard; her death was caused by hypothermia and malnutrition, officials determined. According to the sheriff’s report, the parents had deprived her of food for days at a time and had made her sleep in a cold barn or a closet and shower outside with a hose. And they often whipped her, leaving marks on her legs. The mother had praised the Pearls’ book and given a copy to a friend, the sheriff’s report said. Hana had been beaten the day of her death, the report said, with the 15-inch plastic tube recommended by Mr. Pearl.

“It’s a good spanking instrument,” Mr. Pearl said in the interview. “It’s too light to cause damage to the muscle or the bone.”

Some of the Williamses’ other tactics also seemed to involve Pearl advice taken to extremes; the Pearls say that “a little fasting is good training,” for example, and suggest hosing off a child who has potty-training lapses. The Williamses have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

The Skagit County prosecutor said that he was not charging the Pearls and that the case for homicide did not depend on the Williamses’ readings or religion.

But Dr. Frances Chalmers, a pediatrician who examined Hana’s death for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, said of the Pearl methods: “My fear is that this book, while perhaps well intended, could easily be misinterpreted and could lead to what I consider significant abuse.”

The same kind of plumbing tube was reported to have been used to beat Lydia Schatz, 7, who was adopted at age 4 from Liberia and died in Paradise, Calif., in 2010. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, had the Pearl book but ignored its admonition against extended lashing or harm; they whipped Lydia for hours, with pauses for prayer. She died from severe tissue damage, and her older sister had to be hospitalized, officials said.

The Schatzes, who were home-schooling nine children, three of them adopted, are both serving long prison terms after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and torture and she to voluntary manslaughter and unlawful corporal punishment. The Butte County district attorney, Mike Ramsey, criticized the Pearls’ book as a dangerous influence.

The Pearls’ teachings also came up in the trial of Lynn Paddock of Johnston County, N.C., who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Sean Paddock, 4, in 2006. The Paddocks had adopted six American children, some with emotional problems, and turned to the Internet and found the Pearls’ Web site, Mrs. Paddock said. Sean suffocated after being wrapped tightly in a blanket. His siblings testified that they were beaten daily with the same plumbing tube. Mr. Paddock was not charged.

Some conservative Christian parents reject the Pearls’ teachings and have started a petition drive asking sellers like Amazon not to stock their books.

Crystal Lutton, who runs Grace-Based Discipline, one of several Christian blogs that oppose corporal punishment, said the danger with the Pearls’ methods is that “if you don’t get results, the only thing to do is to punish harder and harder.”

Parents at Mr. Pearl’s church said they largely followed the couple’s approach and were puzzled by the controversy. The Pearls’ children, too, say the attacks on their parents are misguided.

“I had a wonderful childhood,” said their daughter Shoshanna Easling, 28, who is training her two children the same way. “My parents never spoke to me in anger, and I can only remember being spanked a couple of times.”

Mr. Pearl said that Shoshanna was spanked probably 50 times as a toddler but that it soon became unnecessary.

Through book and video sales and donations, the Pearls’ No Greater Joy Ministries brings in $1.7 million a year, which they say goes back into the cause. They live in a one-room apartment near the church. In his spare time, Mr. Pearl practices an offbeat hobby: he is a champion knife and tomahawk thrower.

Much of their advice is standard: parents should be loving, spend a lot of time with their children, be clear and consistent, and never strike in anger. But, citing Biblical passages like, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” they provide instructions for “switching” defiant children to provide “spiritual cleansing.”

They teach parents to use light taps to train infants not to roll off a blanket. For older children, parents are told to respond to defiance by hitting hard enough to sting with a willow switch, a belt, a wooden spoon or the tube.

Mr. Pearl describes child-rearing as a zero-sum test of wills. If a verbal warning does not work, he said, “you have the seeds of self-destruction.”

That the three known deaths involved adoptees worries Lisa Veleff Day of Portland, Me., who adopted two children from Ethiopia. “These children have been ripped from their home country, extended family, culture and language,” she said. “The last thing they need is to be smacked around.”

[yermom]

it's only crazy if it's a different mythology book than mine

[TUSooner]

***
Can someone please tell me why American progressives support these people like they do?

Where are the women's rights groups?

Why and how do you assume that "progessives" (whatever you mean by that) support this ****? Oh yeah, because you want to, and because it makes your flaming straw-man arguments a lot easier to concoct. You got nuthin.

[Ike]

it's only crazy if it's a different mythology book than mine

"If you don't believe in the talking snake around here, you're the one with the mental disorder" --Steve from Tennessee

[ictsooner7]

"If you don't believe in the talking snake around here, you're the one with the mental disorder" --Steve from Tennessee


FUNNY

[SoonerAtKU]

it's only crazy if it's a different mythology book than mine Yes, it's interesting how both Islam and Christianity have both found a way to use religion to justify familial abuse. More similar than dissimilar, I'd say.

[SoonerAtKU]

You know, for as much grief as ict gets on here, I think he won this thread.

[ictsooner7]

You know, for as much grief as ict gets on here, I think he won this thread.

someone resesitate me

[KantoSooner]

Yes, it's interesting how both Islam and Christianity have both found a way to use religion to justify familial abuse. More similar than dissimilar, I'd say.

Islam can be seen, following Hitchens, as nothing more than a mishmash of Jewdaic and Christian texts with a bit of oral interpretation thrown in.

All three Abrahamic religions as creeds designed by desert herding people. It's no wonder that all three include strict patriarchal systems of authority with women and children no more than chattel. Slightly above slaves and livestock, but not different in kind.

[TUSooner]

You know, for as much grief as ict gets on here, I think he won this thread.
But it was a gimme.

[ictsooner7]

But it was a gimme.

Thanks for bursting my bubble, ruined my day.

[Turd_Ferguson]

Yes, it's interesting how both Islam and Christianity have both found a way to use religion to justify familial abuse. More similar than dissimilar, I'd say.Heh! It's a lib circle jerk!! Trying to compare Islam to Christianity! The Christians abuse there "familial"(I guess thats a fancy word) just like the Islamist do!! Who knew???

[cleller]

Is there a chapter on honor killings? Those seem to be in the news a bunch the last few years.

[SoonerAtKU]

Heh! It's a lib circle jerk!! Trying to compare Islam to Christianity! The Christians abuse there "familial"(I guess thats a fancy word) just like the Islamist do!! Who knew???

I also find it interesting that the Hebraic tradition isn't known for abuse of any kind, really. All three religions come from the same seed, but only Christianity and Islam have vocal proponents of abuse. The "spare the rod" story is in the Old Testament, but not the Torah, so maybe that's a part of it.

Also, it only became a "lib circle jerk" after the initial blast of hateful nonsense from LLL was refuted. Sorry this thread didn't turn into a fundamentalist Christian tugjob. Maybe next time.