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General News    H2'ed 9/24/22

Iranian Woman's Death While in Custody of Islamic Morality Police Leads to Widespread Demonstrations

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Mahsa Amini, victim of Islamic Misogyny
Mahsa Amini, victim of Islamic Misogyny
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Mahsa Amini (pictured above) was a vibrant 22-year-old woman living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. On Tuesday, September 13 she was with her brother in Tehran visiting family. The Islamic morality police, a.k.a. Guidance Patrol, arrested her near a metro station because they believed she was not wearing her hijab/head covering correctly. According to morality police, while she was in their custody, Masha collapsed. She was taken to a hospital where she died. The morality police claim she had heart failure, but her family strongly disagrees, pointing out that she never had a heart condition or any health problems. Witnesses said Mahsa's face and head looked like she had been beaten. The Islamic morality police deny this.

Mahsa's arrest and death have sparked massive street demonstrations against the Islamic morality police, who most people see as the ones who beat and killed Mahsa. The NGO Iran Human Rights estimates that so far 50 demonstrators have been killed and many more arrested and injured. This past Wednesday, Joe Biden pledged solidarity with Iranian women.

Iran's Islamic morality police are not the root cause of Mahsa's death. The root cause is Islam and the "holy" book of Islam, the Quran. In all probability, the morality police did physically beat Mahsa. Why would they commit such an ungodly, cruel and cowardly act? Because the Quran commanded them to. In the Quran at 4:34 it teaches and commands:

"Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great."

This Quranic command for men who fear a woman may become rebellious towards the allegedly superior man to scourge/beat such a woman is giving approval to what the Islamic morality police probably did to Mahsa. Not only is it giving approval for the beating of women, including the beating of all the thousands of women who are currently demonstrating against the killing of Mahsa, it has the highest authority anything can have - God as its author! In the minds of the Islamic morality policemen, not following this command, which, as devout Muslims, they believe is from God, would be the wrong thing to do.

To believe that The Supreme Intelligence/God endorses and actually commands men to commit violence against women shows what a cruel and ungodly image of God Islam has and promotes. As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition, "Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man."

The blatant misogyny promoted in this harmful religious teaching/command from the Quran, that men "excel" over women and that women need to be obedient to the superior men and the women who are not obedient need to be scourged, not only physically, mentally and spiritually hurts women, it can only hold back women, which in turn holds back all of society which desperately needs the keen intellect that many women possess.

If Joe Biden, or anyone else, sincerely wants to stand in solidarity with the women in Iran, and put an end to the violence against women in Iran and in other Muslim nations, he needs to openly address the Quranic source of that violence. Likewise, Muslim women need to be honest with themselves and realize it is ungodly, wrong and it is dangerous to remain in Islam and continue to act is if the Quran was the Word of God. Deists can offer these women, and all people, the true alternative to the false "holy" books which are erroneously advertised as being the Word of God by sharing with them this profound and inspiring observation made by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason:

"I believe it is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaks a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God."

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Bob Johnson is a paralegal and a freelance writer in Florida. He was raised Roman Catholic, but after reading Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, he became a Deist. In 1993 he founded the World Union of Deists and in 1996 he launched the first web (more...)
 
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