[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Skybird

All that does not matter. It is an 11 year old child we talk about. And if you ever would have dealt with little children, you would know that children do not feel well about being raped at that age. We call it pedophilia, and we have penalties for it. Right so!

Most people do not feel well about being "raped" at any age.

As for the minimum age of marriage, a worldwide view will say that it varies - from 9 in Yemen. 12 is in Brazil, 13 in New Hampshire (by now we are talking the US here now), 14 in Paraguay, Russia, and several US states like New York, 15 is in Hawaii and Georgia... 11's young but taken a worldwide and historical view, it just isn't a black veil of evil.

Becasue he was raised according to these traditions, and never learned to imagine different ways.

Entirely agree. But that's my point. Why is it assumed the man, because he is raised according to the traditions, will "never learn to imagine different ways" and thus feel no remorse, while the girl, equally raised according to the same traditions (and being a girl in such a society will have even fewer external references to work with) will somehow know it is wrong?

The question here is the ability to perceive Western (or modern) moral norms without the appropriate external references.

Becasue you can have a fate you imagine not to be able to ever chnage - and still see it is not right, and the man is not the victim, while the child is.

You are imposing on the girl that she might actually feel like wanting to change rather than being so set in the ways that she never even considered the possibility that someone would disagree, let alone it being wrong, or herself being a victim.

The point is not so much about whether it is right or wrong rather than the author's arrogance that the wrongness is so self-evident (even as he calls humans savages whose advancement to the present might as well be a small miracle) that he can presume the girl actually feels it is wrong (of course, men would never see it).

By the way, even her dislike of the issue is entirely separate from the concept that she feels it is wrong. Take the crude example of a pig going to the butchers. It almost certainly is not thrilled about being sliced apart, but that's far from it feeling it is wrong. Similarly, we do many things in our lives that we don't like, but that's a whole separate issue from us feeling it is right or wrong - we do many things that we are aware is wrong because we like to, and vice versa.

See the context. For muhammedan teaching, human rights as well as "love" for the satanic creature that a woman is is very much just a word from the decadent West indeed.

Having read the Old Testament, I can say that if you take Biblical stuff literally, the Bible is roughly there. Oh well.

BTW, you can have arranged marriages (bad enough) - and still deal with adults only. It still means that offsprings are rgarded as property of their parents, and often they try to make a profit from arranging marriages that does not focus on the man's and woman's interests and desires, but those of the parents. but this is not the focus of that essay.

Frankly, there are two parts of the whole business that are wrong: the age and the coercion (though I must say the latter actually bugs me more). IMO, the wrongness of coercion is far closer to a universal standard since the beginning of civilization than the question of marrigeable age.

Not by Western standards - but by human standards.

Human standards ... hmm, the arrogance in calling what is in fact a horribly recent phenomena and presuming it is the norm for all of human history. One can of course say that the world will be better off following modern Western standards, and the West should make greater efforts to spread it (I'll agree with that). But that's a different lemon from saying the modern Western standards are the human standards. Sadly, it is not.