freediver wrote on Feb 28
th, 2014 at 7:56pm:
Nearly every Muslim on this board has attempted to justify pedophilia in some way Karnal, including Gandalf. It was not an entirely hypothetical question.
Then allow me to do the same. It’s not paedophilia when the average age of your population is 30. People in agrarian societies marry young. Australia was unique in the world in the early 20th century for having a minimum.age for marriage.
A minimum.age of 12.
This is not paedophilia. In lifespan terms, it’s called making hay while the sun shines. In pre-modern Australia, marrying girls young was believed to save them from predatory males and sex - and childbirth - outside marriage.
Queen Victoria famously stated that the purpose of civilization is to protect the chastity of girls. You find exactly the same arguments in traditional societies and Islam itself. After all, what other purpose does the burqa serve?
Paedophilia is a modern phenomenon. It was unheard of in pre-modern societies, simply because child marriage was the norm. You don’t justify paedophilia by denying its existence, but paedophilia certainly did not exist - as a philia - prior to the late 19th century. It certainly didn’t exist in the paranoid, tabloid sense it does today in the English-speaking world until the 1980s.
This isn’t justifying "paedophilia", it’s putting sex and reproduction in the pre-modern world into perspective. I read some of Abu’s responses to the Muhammed-as-paedophile tag, and this is exactly what he was getting at. He wasn’t "justifying paedophilia" at all. He was placing child marriage into its historic perspective.
It seems that you’ll say or do anything to point the ugly stick at Islam, FD, but try to do it with a little style. It doesn’t help your case when you come across like a little old lady calling up Alan.