Afghan man faces execution for conversion. Freeper heads explode.

[eallen]

This post is a two-fer. First, here is a dismaying article about an Afghan man arrested for converting from Islam to Christianity, and facing possible execution because of that:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-03-18-voa7.cfm

Second, here is the discussion thread about this article over in Red Koolaid land:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1598772/posts

Enjoy the cognitive dissonance.

:hippie:

[Mythsaje]

1. I like this...

"Guess you would have preferred we just left the Taliban and Osama in charge."

And if there's no apparent difference, what, if anything, have we accomplished?

God these people are pinheads.

[Redstone]

2. This one must be a DU mole; no freeper is capable of irony:

"Thank God we brought Democracy to that part of the world!!"

BWAhahaha!

Redstone

[Maestro]

4. I agree. It has to be a DU mole.

They do not recognize higher order thinking skills like this.

[Burning Water]

6. Few FReepers

care about democracy in that part of the world. They just want to keep America "safe".

[Maestro]

3. I haven't attempted to read what those dolts over at

Freak Repukkklic are saying but as for me, this is going to be a test. If we "helped" in forming a democratic governmnet over there then Karzai should grant a stay of execution and release the man. This is yet another case where religion in government just mucks everything up. The man has committed no crime.

[eallen]

5. The test already has been failed.

A nation that arrests and prosecutes people for apostasy, when they abjure its official religion, or for blasphemy, when they publish views against it, is not a democracy. The fact that its president commutes execution for these crimes, in order to appease a watching world, does not turn it into a democracy. The sad fact is that we did not reconstruct Afghanistan as a democracy. We watched its rebirth as an Islamic republic. "Meet the new mullahs, not much different from the old mullahs."

[Burning Water]

7. Uh uh

nation that arrests and prosecutes people for apostasy, when they abjure its official religion, or for blasphemy, when they publish views against it, is not a democracy.

Actually, it is a democracy, if that's what the vast majority of the people want. But it is not a civilized one, I will agree.

[eallen]

8. Without arguing semantics, I would put some things prerequisite to voting.

In my view, voting is not that meaningful if there is not freedom of belief and speech and association, so that people can discuss and advocate alternatives. Many of the worst dictatorships in recent memory had elections of some sort. Consider the old Soviet Union.

Of course, you can define "democracy" however you want. In my view, it's not just the holding of elections. As to what the majority want, they might not want democracy. Many tyrants have come to power on a wave of popularity.

[Burning Water]

9. Yes, well

I suggest you consult a good dictionary. Words mean what they mean, not what you would like them to mean. Democracy is rule by a majority of the people. To be a good government, however, it must be constrained by the rule of the law, which limits the power of the people, somewhat. Which isn't happening in the Muslim world right now. Probably another case of "One man, one vote, one time", which has plagued so much of the third world.

[eallen]

10. So let's see what Merriam-Webster says...

Here's one definition:

1b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

That definition refers not just to elections, but to free elections. Are elections free when people can be locked up for opposing the state's official ideology? You could look up the meaning of "free," and that would result in a multitude of alternatives to plug into the definition above. In the sense of democracy I think important, free elections require freedom of belief, speech, and association. Here's another definition:

5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

But what if the vast majority of people, being Muslim, want a legal distinction between those who remain faithful to Islam, and those who leave it? Then, democracy in one sense ("rule of the majority") conflicts with democracy in another sense ("absence of arbitrary class distinctions").

That's not a linguistic mistake. That happens often with words. Because definitions are nothing more than how we use words, and because the purpose of a dictionary is to document that usage, it would be the height of stupidity to argue over which definition is "right." The word "democracy" has a range of meaning. As long as they keep context in mind, people are perfectly able to make sense of sentences such as this one: "The will of the people expressed through a democratic mechanism produced a non-democratic result."

All of the definitions for democracy above came from here:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/democracy