Underseer
Contributor
I recently ran across a claim on social media about a Bible passage that indicates Isaac married Rebecca when she was 3 or 4 years old.
I looked it up and sure enough, the cited Bible passage said no such thing.
Digging a little further, I found this:
http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=5091
Apparently many (possibly most) Jews think that Rebecca was a toddler when she was married, but the actual scriptures are pretty fucking vague such that no one really knows anything (even if we assume that the scriptures are telling the truth).
So it sounds like this is part of an attempted tu quoque fallacy by Muslims. If they can show that the Bible promotes child marriage, then that must mean Mohammed was justified in his child marriage and that the Quran is justified in promoting child marriage. Surely, I don't have to explain to anyone here what a tu quoque fallacy is, nor should I have to explain to anyone that someone else being wrong doesn't make you right.
But of course, this all points to a deeper problem. The way certain Christians are arguing about child marriage. I don't have a problem with criticizing Muslims for child marriage. If you care about the issue, there are Muslim groups fighting child marriage within Islam. Go support them or something. My problem is that many seem to pretend that child marriage is a problem that is somehow exclusive to Muslims. And that's where I start to have a problem.
Child Marriage In America
Child marriage is allowed in a shocking number of American states for a variety of reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States
It wasn't until 2018 that child marriage became illegal in all cases in one state.
In pretty much every case, child marriage is allowed in order to appease certain specific Christian sects.
Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated average 16,700 children get married every year.
And yes, this includes quite a few marriages exactly like the kinds of marriages decried by most of these "Islam = child marriage" arguments you hear.
If you're an American and you routinely make those "Islam = child marriage" arguments, and you say Muslims are bad because they aren't doing enough to prevent child marriage in their own countries, what the actual fuck have you done to prevent child marriage in your country? If Muslims are bad for failing to stop child marriage in their own countries, doesn't that same argument apply to us?
We all know that the usual suspects are going to swoop in here and give us a special pleading argument in which they say that it is wrong when Muslims because more than X per captia children get married in this or that Muslim country, but less than X per capita children get married in America, but they won't specify what value they want for X, nor will they even try to explain why there should be a cutoff value at all. Why can't it always be wrong? How many 10 year olds per capita need to get trapped in marriages before they're ready before the population can be expected to step in and prevent child marriage from happening? We know the special pleading excuses are coming, but I expect they will be as absurd as they usually are.
Child Marriage In India
If you are going to be a screaming hypocrite and say we must judge all Muslims because they fail to stop child marriage in their countries, but Americans aren't bad for failing to stop child marriage in our country, then why are you exclusively complaining about Muslims?
Even if we ignore the outrageous special pleading going on here and decide we're only going to criticize foreigners for this and do nothing about child marriage in our own country, why exclude Hindus from this discussion? Hindus have a fuck-ton more child marriages than Muslims do.
https://thewire.in/uncategorised/of-12-million-married-children-under-age-ten-84-are-hindus
Those statistics are simply heartbreaking. No one should be OK with this. If we're going to complain about child marriage among foreigners, we should be criticizing both Hindus and Muslims.
Why Complain About Muslims Exclusively?
Anyway, if we're going to bitch about foreigners and child marriage, why only Muslims? Why not say something about the much larger number of child marriages among Hindus in rural India?
Because this was never about the children. The people making these arguments don't actually give a flying fuck about the suffering of underage girls trapped in marriages they're not ready for.
It seems obvious to me that many of the arguments about Muslims and child marriage in Islam exist largely for the purpose of dehumanizing Muslims as a group.
Frankly, it sounds like Christian propaganda to me. Any atheists participating in this for the (witting or unwitting) benefit of Christianity should feel like a dupe. You're just a convenient idiot that other people can easily manipulate to their own ends, and you are allowing yourselves to be manipulated by your own hate.
While I agree that child marriage is wrong and should be opposed, I'm as guilty as everyone else of not fighting hard enough to end it in my own country. There are Muslims who fight against child marriage and they should be praised. Many more Muslims fail to fight it and should be condemned, and I am no better than those who don't.
Child Marriage and Moral Relativism
I almost didn't include this point because it's kind of tangential, but one thing I find funny about all the debates around Muhammed's child bride is that most people miss what all of this says about moral absolutism vs relativism.
Muslims insist that morality is absolute and what the Quran says was moral in the past is moral now and will remain moral forever.
Muhammed's child bride makes that whole claim about moral absolutism complete and utter bullshit. It's obvious that different cultures have different attitudes about what is an appropriate age for girls to marry and start making babies. The notion that girls should finish high school before getting married is a relatively new concept (started in the 1800s? Someone more familiar with history correct me).
It wasn't that long ago that girls got married off pretty much as soon as they started menstruating.
It wasn't that long ago when being 16 and unmarried was enough to cause people to whisper rumors about whether something was wrong with a girl and whether or not she would ever get married at all due to whatever horrifying personal flaw left her single at the ripe old age of 16. I've heard interviews from older women from modern industrialized nations in which people said such things about them when they were younger, so we're talking about a phenomenon and attitudes that are still within living memory even in the West.
Thus, it is not hard at all to imagine that in the time and place of Mohammed, people didn't think there was anything weird about an adult marrying a 9 year old.
The fact that the age of Mohammed's bride is an issue at all is evidence of changing societal morals. The shift to 18 as the acceptable age for marriage for a girl happened slowly over the course of the last couple of centuries. The idea of an adult man marrying a 9 year old is far more horrifying today than it would have been to people from various cultures from various points in history.
This is an emotionally-charged topic precisely because the morals that govern society changes with time and place, exactly the thing that both Christians and Muslims insist doesn't happen. They will insist that whatever their holy books declared to be moral was moral then and will remain moral forever because to claim otherwise is to admit that their magic books might contain errors, which in turn implies that the books were written by humans rather than magical sky fairies.
I looked it up and sure enough, the cited Bible passage said no such thing.
Digging a little further, I found this:
http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=5091
Apparently many (possibly most) Jews think that Rebecca was a toddler when she was married, but the actual scriptures are pretty fucking vague such that no one really knows anything (even if we assume that the scriptures are telling the truth).
So it sounds like this is part of an attempted tu quoque fallacy by Muslims. If they can show that the Bible promotes child marriage, then that must mean Mohammed was justified in his child marriage and that the Quran is justified in promoting child marriage. Surely, I don't have to explain to anyone here what a tu quoque fallacy is, nor should I have to explain to anyone that someone else being wrong doesn't make you right.
But of course, this all points to a deeper problem. The way certain Christians are arguing about child marriage. I don't have a problem with criticizing Muslims for child marriage. If you care about the issue, there are Muslim groups fighting child marriage within Islam. Go support them or something. My problem is that many seem to pretend that child marriage is a problem that is somehow exclusive to Muslims. And that's where I start to have a problem.
Child Marriage In America
Child marriage is allowed in a shocking number of American states for a variety of reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States
It wasn't until 2018 that child marriage became illegal in all cases in one state.
In pretty much every case, child marriage is allowed in order to appease certain specific Christian sects.
Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated average 16,700 children get married every year.
And yes, this includes quite a few marriages exactly like the kinds of marriages decried by most of these "Islam = child marriage" arguments you hear.
If you're an American and you routinely make those "Islam = child marriage" arguments, and you say Muslims are bad because they aren't doing enough to prevent child marriage in their own countries, what the actual fuck have you done to prevent child marriage in your country? If Muslims are bad for failing to stop child marriage in their own countries, doesn't that same argument apply to us?
We all know that the usual suspects are going to swoop in here and give us a special pleading argument in which they say that it is wrong when Muslims because more than X per captia children get married in this or that Muslim country, but less than X per capita children get married in America, but they won't specify what value they want for X, nor will they even try to explain why there should be a cutoff value at all. Why can't it always be wrong? How many 10 year olds per capita need to get trapped in marriages before they're ready before the population can be expected to step in and prevent child marriage from happening? We know the special pleading excuses are coming, but I expect they will be as absurd as they usually are.
Child Marriage In India
If you are going to be a screaming hypocrite and say we must judge all Muslims because they fail to stop child marriage in their countries, but Americans aren't bad for failing to stop child marriage in our country, then why are you exclusively complaining about Muslims?
Even if we ignore the outrageous special pleading going on here and decide we're only going to criticize foreigners for this and do nothing about child marriage in our own country, why exclude Hindus from this discussion? Hindus have a fuck-ton more child marriages than Muslims do.
https://thewire.in/uncategorised/of-12-million-married-children-under-age-ten-84-are-hindus
Those statistics are simply heartbreaking. No one should be OK with this. If we're going to complain about child marriage among foreigners, we should be criticizing both Hindus and Muslims.
On a side note
Once again, we see that educating children (including girls) has a large positive effect on populations. If you ever bitched about the cost of education because you personally don't have children, the benefit of public education isn't your personal children, it's society. Whether or not you have children, you are part of society. Having fewer stupid neighbors benefits you directly.
Once again, we see that educating children (including girls) has a large positive effect on populations. If you ever bitched about the cost of education because you personally don't have children, the benefit of public education isn't your personal children, it's society. Whether or not you have children, you are part of society. Having fewer stupid neighbors benefits you directly.
Why Complain About Muslims Exclusively?
Anyway, if we're going to bitch about foreigners and child marriage, why only Muslims? Why not say something about the much larger number of child marriages among Hindus in rural India?
Because this was never about the children. The people making these arguments don't actually give a flying fuck about the suffering of underage girls trapped in marriages they're not ready for.
It seems obvious to me that many of the arguments about Muslims and child marriage in Islam exist largely for the purpose of dehumanizing Muslims as a group.
Frankly, it sounds like Christian propaganda to me. Any atheists participating in this for the (witting or unwitting) benefit of Christianity should feel like a dupe. You're just a convenient idiot that other people can easily manipulate to their own ends, and you are allowing yourselves to be manipulated by your own hate.
While I agree that child marriage is wrong and should be opposed, I'm as guilty as everyone else of not fighting hard enough to end it in my own country. There are Muslims who fight against child marriage and they should be praised. Many more Muslims fail to fight it and should be condemned, and I am no better than those who don't.
Child Marriage and Moral Relativism
I almost didn't include this point because it's kind of tangential, but one thing I find funny about all the debates around Muhammed's child bride is that most people miss what all of this says about moral absolutism vs relativism.
Muslims insist that morality is absolute and what the Quran says was moral in the past is moral now and will remain moral forever.
Muhammed's child bride makes that whole claim about moral absolutism complete and utter bullshit. It's obvious that different cultures have different attitudes about what is an appropriate age for girls to marry and start making babies. The notion that girls should finish high school before getting married is a relatively new concept (started in the 1800s? Someone more familiar with history correct me).
It wasn't that long ago that girls got married off pretty much as soon as they started menstruating.
It wasn't that long ago when being 16 and unmarried was enough to cause people to whisper rumors about whether something was wrong with a girl and whether or not she would ever get married at all due to whatever horrifying personal flaw left her single at the ripe old age of 16. I've heard interviews from older women from modern industrialized nations in which people said such things about them when they were younger, so we're talking about a phenomenon and attitudes that are still within living memory even in the West.
Thus, it is not hard at all to imagine that in the time and place of Mohammed, people didn't think there was anything weird about an adult marrying a 9 year old.
The fact that the age of Mohammed's bride is an issue at all is evidence of changing societal morals. The shift to 18 as the acceptable age for marriage for a girl happened slowly over the course of the last couple of centuries. The idea of an adult man marrying a 9 year old is far more horrifying today than it would have been to people from various cultures from various points in history.
This is an emotionally-charged topic precisely because the morals that govern society changes with time and place, exactly the thing that both Christians and Muslims insist doesn't happen. They will insist that whatever their holy books declared to be moral was moral then and will remain moral forever because to claim otherwise is to admit that their magic books might contain errors, which in turn implies that the books were written by humans rather than magical sky fairies.