Are we moving backwards?

Sadly they are stuck in the Dark ages and women will never ever be equal in their eyes. It’s heartbreaking but this has always been the case.

oh dear! man, ie. men and women, have evil amongst them
imo they use whatever they can to further their evil..

here , we seem to be criticising the USA of withdrawing, didn`t, we, the UK, also withdraw? just asking

I am in utter despair of the way of the world, the evil that appears to be taking hold..

what can we do?

My husband has said many times that if the moon was the worlds God and the Sun the worlds devil there would not be all these madcap religions around the world wanting to kill each other because they believe in different gods. With Afghanistan it just goes to show the loss of lives and thousands of injured soldiers the U.K. and USA suffered never solved or achieved anything at all. As things stand now the refugees will all want to flee to safety and the Taliban run riot or the U.K. and USA go back and do the job right and wipe the Taliban out.

Whitewavemark2

Since 2000 there have been many human rights violations that do suggest we are at the very least standing still if not going backwards. I’ve been trawling the net and it makes for very sober reading.

1. Uganda - as many as 20000 children are trained as slave soldiers (boys) or sex slaves (girls)

2. Australia still has in law that underaged disabled girls can be sterilised without consent.

3. Afghanistan - amongst other atrocities such as stoning to death, whipping and violence against women, their human rights to move freely, education and socialise with the opposite sex is completely removed. Forced vaginal examinations take place if their “morality” is under question.

4.Uganda - life in prison for homosexual men.

5. Modern sex trafficking is an enormous problem throughout the world, further enabled by the gender inequality seen as acceptable in many countries and cultures.

6. Taliban in Afghanistan - have run vast concentration camps, enslave women, extermination of the Hazara minority. Will introduce Sharia law once again when they have completely retaken Afghanistan.

7. Chinese repression of over 1000000 Uyghurs. Forced “re-education” in camps.

The list goes on and on.

So yes I do think that the world is certainly not progressing and in many cases going backwards.

number 4 is not necessarily the human rights issue you portray it as....I could tell a few stories from my NHS work but I will focus on one.
In my student years. I did clinical placement at a daycare centre for adults with very serious learning disability. They were hard for their parents to care for, definitely lacking in capacity, not able to understand the concept of contraception or pregnancy and they liked sex. A lot of sex. Even worse, local men would kerb crawl outside the building and get the girls (mainly) to go off with them. the "better" men would at least drop them back at the centre. This was years before implants (which don't suit everybody) and the morning after pill. Terminations were common. You can imagine how difficult it was managing periods and PMS with young fit women who can be violent. For some of these men and women, sterilisation can massively improve their lives. No more periods to deal with. They can be allowed to be sexually active within their social groups which is some protection from predator men. In this one case, I don't think you (or anyone) should judge unless you have seen what I saw.

The Stoning of Soraya M. g.co/kgs/vZgcLA

If you have the stomach for it, then watch this film and learn the actual horror of a stoning.

I wanted to turn it off but somehow felt that wouldn’t acknowledge the atrocity

It’s heart wrenching

Well that was weird.

(Not Danma's post, of course)

I believe the main problem in Afghanistan is the ‘tribal’ influences. I can remember when I was a child there always being ‘trouble’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. It is a situation that nobody will be able to solve, and it’s a tragedy that so many innocent lives have been, and will be, lost due to this evil regime.
As for the anti-vaccine campaign in the southern states, it just makes me so cross that they cannot, or will not, know that millions of lives have been lost to coronavirus and more will be too if they don’t admit that vaccines save lives,

Well said ‘Green Lady’. At the large hospitals for the learning disabled men would park up to do the same. Biden just brought an end to what Trump and Bush had turned a blind eye to, that Afghanistan had so much money and defence poured in and what it propped up was fueling more and more corruption. We Brits have fought wars in Afghanistan (have a look at the Forbury Monument Readin), Russia, USA/combined. I worry that after the Taliban have crushed their own populace that attacks on our soil will start again, there will be many more isolated Muslim girls etc like infamous Begum to swell their ranks.

Unfortunately, horrors like that in Afghanistan have been going on throughout history. The difference is that we now know much more about what is happening due to modern technology. Even if the USA and UK went back and bombed/obliterated the Taliban, innocent civilians would get killed and a new generation of Taliban or equivalent would grow up to take revenge and the cycle would continue. It's awful.

My husband spent time in Afghanistan in the 1970s and says even then it was a very alien culture with an extremely male dominated society. He was looked down upon as being foreign and says he never saw any women as then too they were kept inside. It is very frightening as girls have been educated but now it is being taken away from them and they will be forced into marriages post puberty.
The rich westernised men are moving out as happened years ago with the Shar of Iran

I guess, the greed of the few is making the many feel left behind, and sadly, the less educated are seeking their path to feeling valued in extremism

As a historian of religion I think the trouble with the various fundamentalistic Muslim and Christians groups that have quite obviously managed to find fruitful mission fields in the last twenty years or so are caused in part by two factors.

The one is the fact that the scientific or more properly academic approach to religions as such that made such advances from about the 1860s was just that - an academic discipline that certainly attracted followers at the level of congregations and their ministers, priests, rabbis or imams, but equally made no impact on a vast number of followers of the various religions.

The other fact is that two world wars resulted in many of the generations who lived through them either totally losing faith in God or in organized religion as they had been accustomed to practise it. This gave rise to the feeling that religion is and should be a person's private affair in a democracy.

This is a valid point of view, which I would never dream of disapproving of, but it has meant that the various religions have become hesitant about carrying on any form of missionary work, either at home or abroad.

There are now two or three generations of people within all denominations who have never encountered the form of faith that is partnered by rational academic thought and they, if they are seeking a faith, tend to be easily attracted to the fundamentalistic groups who do have missionaries.

Unfortunately too, outside Europe, a great many churches are today seen as part and partial of the European attempt to colonize other countries whose inhabitants rightly feel that their own traditions and culture were despised and trodden underfoot by the European colonists.

So a reaction has set in, swinging back to what is seen as a truer and more original form of religion.

Whether the world as such is regressing depends on whether modern societies can demonstrate brands of religion that is both satisfying as faith and as an integral part of a democracy.

I despair of ever seeing equality for women in my lifetime. Unless women have an equal say in running the world, we will always be kept in inferior positions.
Why would the Taliban, for instance, want to give up the power to rape & control women? They are animals, using but distorting Sharia law for their own disgusting desires.
Enough of this - where are the good men standing up for a peaceful world where women can be safe, & free to live on their own terms?

maddyone

For me, there are absolutely no positives with Sharia law. A system that allows a man to beat his wife, allows the death penalty in any form, that allows people’s hands or feet to be cut off, that requires multiple witnesses to a rape; I’m sorry, it’s not real justice. Plus allowing a man to divorce his wife without recourse to the law of the land is primitive. Sharia law is primitive.
People absolutely should have a criminal record if they commit crimes. How would we ensure offenders were not allowed to work with children, or patients, or vulnerable people if no records were kept. Ridiculous.

Besides these aspects of Sharia law, I particularly object to:

- The killing of people who leave Islam (apostates)
- The throwing of people who have gay sex off the tallest building in the area
- The fact that men can have four wives but women can only have one husband
- Women having to be covered up
- The penalty of crucifixion for the rather vague offence of ‘spreading mischief in a Muslim land’, which can be interpreting various ways, including talking about how you left Islam and encouraging others to leave

It sounds a lot worse than other legal systems to me, and I would absolutely hate to live under it.

David Wood has some very good videos about Islam and its teachings on YouTube. They are short, concise, entertaining and very informative. E g, Three Qur’an Verses Every Woman Should Know
youtu.be/5NXtIUv5i2w

*interpreted in various ways

Oh, and I forgot to mention:

- Second-class citizen status for Christians and Jews, who have to pay a special tax (jizya) and “feel themselves subdued”

Throughout history religion has caused wars.

The Taliban has now taken over Afghanistan and have surrounded Kabul. God help the inhabitants there, especially the women and children. Rape, stoning and murders all sanctioned by this new ‘government’ Australians are being evacuated as are other foreigners.

The taliban are medieval they don’t want to move forward only go back, they are like a lot of countries who want to ‘rule’ and surpress. The Catholic Church still has strange ideas. So less said about them the better.
In respect of the churches in some parts of America, that doesn’t surprise me, if you go on one if their channels on the tv you can see how mad they all are.

‘

Bijou

Throughout history religion has caused wars.

This is from a Huffington Post article:

//In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.

History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict.//
www.huffpost.com/entry/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766

You’ve got it right Algeria’s. Medieval barbarians. Tragic for all those little girls and young women.
Pure evil. ?

The opium poppies will no doubt be grown again and heroin sold to the west. The only way the Taliban will be stopped is by Afghan people taking up arms against them. Clearly Western forces have been holding them in check but the solution will have to be found amongst their own people.

In the words of John Lennon -Imagine

My very first post in here, and it’s horribly depressing ?

I’m very much afraid that we are seeing the gradual disintegration of western liberal democracies and the rise of new fascist movements all over the world.

A great deal of the disruptive and divisive material on social media is deliberately disseminated by Russian troll factories with the aim of destroying harmony and cohesion within western democratic cointries.