Heres the rest.

Btw: it’s this school gets money under the GI bill. Your tax dollars go to this nonsense.

A song I wrote about my parents.

I am not a professional musician, I am a broken human being.

Here's the verse in English (Sahih International translation):

"Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband's] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand."

Link (You can also read the Arabic version here): https://quran.com/4/34

This verse is fairly self-explanatory. It instructs muslims on how women should be treated. The verse states that men are in charge of women and how they spend their wealth, good women are those who obey, and if a woman disobeys then her husband can warn her, forsake her, and finally, beat her.

Don't believe I have the right interpretation? Fine, here's an islamic website that the echos the same meaning (I'll get to the justifications they use later).

But first, let me explain why this verse just reeks of misogyny. This verse clearly demonstrates that women are inferiors in multiple ways. The first is that men are in charge of them and their wealth, this sets a hierarchy among the genders where men are placed above women. The verse reinforces this hierarchy by going on to say that women are to be subservient to their husbands. The verse portrays this obedience as being virtuous, however the verse contradicts itself by having the obedience be forced. Virtue is achieved through choice. If I choose to feed the homeless, than that is me taking action on my own behalf to demonstrate moral excellence. However, if I was forced to feed the homeless against my will, then how can it still be a virtue? You're forced to do something, therefore you're longer performing a certain action out of choice, but out of fear. In this case, it is the fear of being punished, specifically, getting beat by your husband. When someone is forced to do something against their will and is forced to obey, then it stops being about virtue and simply becomes slavery. This verse instructs the oppression of women.

This verse is repulsive and vile, and doesn't receive nearly as much criticism as it should.

In my experience, there are generally three common non-islamic defenses for this verse, and all are weak since they are disingenuous and rely on logical fallacies:

1 - The first defense has to do with the word "اضربوهن" (adrabohen). It is translated as "strike them" in the translation. People who try to use this defense state that the word has multiple meanings, and the meaning cannot be accurately translated into other languages or that you misunderstood the actual meaning. However, this defense is very fallacious because it sets up a No True Scotsman.

If you concede even a little (especially if you don't speak Arabic), then no matter what you say you will always will be met something like "but that's not the REAL meaning". However, the very premise of this argument stems disingenuous misinformation. Now, it is true that the word has multiple meanings (I'm an Arabic speaker), the word can both mean to hit/beat or to multiply. However, the context is crystal clear that it's not talking about multiplication, but about wives. The word can literally be translated to "to hit/beat them (females)", it's important to note that Arabic is a gendered language and the "هن" is the plural feminine version of the "them". Therefore, the word, when the context is taken into account, does in fact mean to hit/beat wives.

2 - The second defense tries to justify the wife beating by saying it doesn't mean to beat your wives, but to "lightly" discipline them. They say that islam has a rules about how to beat your wife, and that it doesn't allow super hard wife beatings.... This argument is clearly trying to downplay the wife beating, and it fails at it because you can never ever justify wife beating.

Another common version of this defense tries to justify wife beating by saying it's only allowed "in the most extreme cases". However, that's simply not true. By just using this very verse, you can easily figure out what the necessary conditions are to permit beating your wife. All that is required is for the wife to simply disobey you more than two times.

Considering a woman daring to disobey her husband to be an "extreme" case that warrants wife beating is simply anti-women. No matter how disobedient the wife is or how many times she disobeys, that doesn't give anyone the right to beat her, or anyone really. Domestic violence can never be tolerated, yet both of these examples are used in the website that I used earlier to justify it.

3 - Finally, the third common defense is the good ol' Tu Quoque fallacy, also known as, whataboutism. It is when they try to appeal to hypocrisy by bringing up other religions (especially Christianity) and saying "why are criticizing islam when these other religions have it too". However, just because wife beating is present in other religions doesn't mean that it's justified in islam. This defense is just a poor attempt at derailing the conversation, and doesn't negate anything.

At the the end of the day, this verse is indefensible. You can't justify oppression and wife beating. This verse is sexist and misogynistic, and it could very well be argued that this verse is a direct influence on the misogyny present in islamic culture to this very day.

Note: I'm thinking of doing a series on islam where I create posts like this where I go through various verses, hadiths, and religious traditions and critique them directly on their own merits to the best of my abilities. However, I'll only do it if there's interest from the community so please let me know if you would like to see more.

It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.

There’s a reason conservative Christians prefer quoting solitary Bible verses out of context: Not only does this allow them to twist the meaning for their own personal or political ends, but it also makes it much easier to avoid the critical thinking that engaging with longer passages can provoke. On my YouTube show “Standing Room Only,” the scholar and former evangelical Brad Onishi pointed to 2 Chronicles 7:20, a passage Christian nationalists often deploy to argue that America is meant to be a Christian nation by relying on the verse’s violent implications of God promising to “pluck” the unbelievers “up by the roots out of my land.” The larger context reveals that this story is about the ancient king Solomon, and it has nothing to do with the modern nation-state, much less one on a continent unknown to the writers of the Bible.

The Republican-controlled board voted Friday to adopt the curriculum changes, which are scheduled to take effect in 2030. The new requirements establish mandatory reading lists for K-12 English and literature classes and require students to read selected works “in their entirety.” The lists include traditional literary works alongside biblical stories and passages.

What's more, the video is horribly incorrect compared to the actual story as recorded in the Air Force Times. You would think that a Christian propaganda meal would at least try to get their military history right.

I was raised secularly in a highly traumatizing childhood. Wasn't given therapy after my mom died, and my father hurt me in many ways in the storm of the aftermath. I spent a lot of time playing video games, and in the magickal thinking of my early adolescence, I drifted in a fantasy world of my own creation, using the characters I played on screen with to fill in the gaps of my understanding of reality. While even into college, where I first adopted the label "militant atheist," in stark contrast the the southern culture I entered, originally hailing from New York, I still believed many things no one else did. This helped contribute to my college breakdown, and would ultimately lead me to my current schizoaffective diagnosis.

This is a worst case scenario. And yet, because of my devotion to truth over bullshit, while I spiraled for a few years as I descended into drug use and general unscrupulousness, I never stopped trying to figure out "why?" This led into my robust love for philosophy, which would lead me to Wittgenstein, whose later work opened me to a possibility I had not considered; the language that defines this n that spiritual doctrine or dharma or what-have-you could be being used differently than I was originally assuming.

Y'know, given the "bless your heart" cockamamie I was forced to endure being traumatized, unsocialized, and maladapted in Christian society, I had grow to strawman something like "God" to mean "magick sky wizard," which even in the present day, the sorts of idoltarers that have such a simple explanation of reality and use it to justify hate and more pisses me off just as much as it always has.

But, in the sort of fantastical thinking one has being neurodivergent, I found it very easy to stretch this. I could understand if there was an advanced alien species, or higher dimensional beings, or perhaps a whole other metaphor I did not know. Yet, because of my ire and disdain for Christianity at the time, I went east to investigate Buddhism. It started with Alan Watts, and I would this sutra n that poem here n there, but at the same time, the weird druggie in me also simultaneously started investigating Terence McKenna and others of that ilk.

And I can say I let my mind free a little bit, to discover acid and mushrooms being an idiot on dating sites and Reddit, which changed my world view enough to figure out that learning to juggle would fix all my problems, and it has! It allowed me to get out there and give myself exposure therapy to heal myself and meet people to network with, which likewise healed me. Then much happened. It's complex to describe and would make me sound crazy, but that IS the medicine; a lil bit of madness.

If you believe you're trapped in a room, even if there's a hidden door to easily escape, you won't try to find a way out. We get trapped in our patterns of behavior and our perspectives and biases and delusions and cognitive dissonance. We're human, and it is one of the most human things, being limited by our incredibly complex meatsponge in our heads. And yet, it offers ways to break out of habit and limitations, as there are alternate cognitive states and features that I was wholly ignorant to in my youth.

For instance, there's Joint Synchronized Attention, which if you that incredible article from my friend, will highlight that perhaps not all those things people have called magick over the years were hogwash. There's another state I was in for six years following a particular fateful acid trip, which that same friend named the Synchronicity Slip Stream.

A synchronicity is a feature of the human cognition. This is what a burning bush is in the Bible, and what white rabbit was to Neo in the movie steeped in symbolism of Judeo-Christian mysticism; the "whispers of God." It's not a hallucination. In Bruce Almighty, when Bruce asks God for a sign while driving, and then the truck full of signs pulls in front of him, that's a synchronicity. Carl Jung describes this phenomena as when the inner and outer world align in some way, and I can tell you it depends on at least two factors in the brain: free association and what's in the short-term memory.

The Synchronicity Slip Stream, definitively caused by the psychedelics of that night, changed the narrative I believed to be true. This changed how I freely associated stimuli in my environment to be as if God was parting the Red Sea and leading me on a cosmic mission. My cup was full, and by that I mean I had infinite motivation to bust my ass to do whatever seemed like the right thing to do at the time for my mission, with the idea of getting famous and helping the world with the educational art project I now do here on Lemmy World.

Likewise, I tried all sorts of new things. This led to some temporary set-backs that I would have foreseen coming but went through with anyways because my faith in the magick of my ever-changing narrative. Y'know, some days I thought the CIA was training me. Others, I was joining the Illuminati. But I was always communicated with by a nebulous "They," I felt. You can see all this in my autobiographical character I go in and out of playing on here and previously on Reddit. But, those bumps in the road all were temporary.

What I gained was permanent. I am more kind, more moral, more skillful, more knowledgeable, more compassionate, and more socialized now from all the reconditioning work I did for myself. Younger me would have never recognized me as I am now. There's a depth to reality that there wasn't before. I'm happier than I've ever been, and I've learned so much and my journey has led to me now developing a theory of how to define polyplexic axiomatic systems via topological matrix and expand on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And that's all I have to say.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47941635