Is polygamy the cause of Muslim violence?

Human Events ^ | February 18, 2014 | William Tucker

[2ndDivisionVet]

Syria is submerged in civil war. The Sunni and the Shi’ia of Iraq are renewing their 1300-year-old conflict. Libyan rebels have shut down the nation’s oil industry. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has been suppressed and is resorting to terrorism. Pakistan is a cauldron of violence and assassinations. In short, the Muslim world, as usual, is at war with itself.

This is not a contemporary phenomenon. Islam has been attacking its neighbors ever since the Prophet Mohammed received the Koran from the Angel Gabriel in the 7th century. Within 50 years of his death, Muslim armies had conquered the known world from Spain to Afghanistan. The Moguls invaded India, setting off a conflict that persists today. The Ottoman Empire besieged Europe for hundreds of years before its collapse in the 20th century. As historian Samuel Huntington has written, Islam has always had “bloody borders.”

Is there any explanation for this? Is it temperament or history? Is it the inevitable fight over scarce resources? Or, as Muslim cultures would insist, is it because Islam has always been surrounded by hostile neighbors?

In my book, Marriage and Civilization, I offer a novel explanation as to why Islam has always been at war with itself and others. It is because Islam it is the only major religious culture that embraces polygamy.

Polygamy? What does that have to do with anything? Am I suggesting that because some minor sheik outside Baghdad takes two wives, two young Muslim brothers in Massachusetts feel compelled to blow up the Boston Marathon?

Well, yes. In any human society there are approximately the same number of men and women. Under monogamy, which limits each man to one wife, everyone gets a fair chance to marry. When powerful and successful men are allowed to take more than one wife, however, as they are in a polygamous society, this creates a pool of unsuccessful men at the bottom of society who are constantly in conflict with the system.

The history of Islam has been one continuous story of rebel groups off in the desert and deciding that the religion being practiced by the authorities and their harems back in the cities is not the “true Islam.” They come crashing back upon the palaces, overthrowing the leaders (no Ottoman Sultan ever died of natural causes) and establishing a new regime that is just like the old one, where powerful are allowed to take multiple wives.

The Prophet Muhammad had a novel solution to this problem. Go and conquer neighboring societies and requisition their women. If you die in the process, the reward will be even greater – 72 virgins waiting for you in heaven! “Jihad” has been a clever and effective way of redirecting the hostilities of the “bachelor herd” that polygamy inevitably produces.

The fruits of polygamy are visible all over the Middle East. Because women are always in short supply, families can charge a “bride price” to any man who wants to marry their daughter. Because daughters are now worth money, they must be veiled and sequestered so they don’t run off with some callow youth. Older men desperate for wives push down into younger and younger cohorts of the population. Marriages between 35-year-old men and 13-year-old girls become common. (Muhammad’s last wife was age six.)

But the main product of polygamy is a population of angry young men who are ripe recruits for terrorism. The Koran supposedly limits a man to four wives but in countries where there are vast disparities of wealth this is routinely violated. Osama bin Laden’s father, a successful Saudi businessman, had 22 wives and 54 children. The unbalance between unmarried men and the available women in Saudi Arabia is the highest in the world. Is it any wonder that 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudi nationals?

Ann Coulter once suggested that we would cure Muslim violence by converting the Islamic world to Christianity. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Christianity’s long enforcement of monogamous marriage has obviously played a critical role in establishing the more peaceful civilization of the West. The same can be said for China and India, where the vast majority adhere to monogamy. None of these cultures is plagued with the endless internal violence and outward aggression of Islam.

Converting the Muslim world to Christianity may be out of the question, but persuading it to give up polygamy on the grounds that it creates an inherently unstable society is a task that the rest of the world might be willing to undertake.

[Tennessee Nana]

“It is disconcerting when our children alert us to the true facts of this crucial event in Mormon history after watching an episode of South Park. The discovery that the creators of South Park place a higher value on historical authenticity than do the Brethren creates spiritual shock-waves from which some members never recover. And may I state the obvious here? This faith-shaking disparity between what the missionaries are trained to teach, and what the world already knows about our spiritual heritage, can hardly be blamed upon those members who accidentally stumble upon it, or on their children, or on the creators of South Park; the burden of responsibility for the misrepresentation rests firmly upon the shoulders of the Brethren, who allowed, and apparently encouraged it to be introduced into LDS popular culture. It is a sin of commission no less. Furthermore it is most distasteful to suggest, as some do, that because the sin was committed by the Brethren, it is authorised by Jesus Christ, unless of course they are suggesting that the Saviour is a deceiver.” (Chris Ralphs 1st Open Letter)

http://mormonisminvestigated.co.uk/2012/08/28/an-open-letter-to-europe-area-presidency-by-chris-ralph/

[PapaBear3625]

Women tend to civilize men, especially in a culture that recognizes and encourages monogamous marriage.

It's not the women who civilize men. It is the system, which tells every man that he can have a woman of his own, who will bear him children of his own, if he works hard and becomes adequately prosperous enough to support a wife.

This is broken both in the Muslim world, AND in our "inner cities". In the inner cities, we still officially have monogamy, but the "men at the bottom" see that women prefer to be married to Uncle Sugar than to some MacDonalds manager, and prefer to spawn children of muscular thugs.

The results are similar: angry, alienated men prone to violence.

[PapaBear3625]

You’d need women to take multiple husbands and I just don’t see that working out in any but isolated, eccentric, cases.

Actually, the practice of women being financially supported by multiple men in exchange for sex is very widespread. It has existed in every society and every age, including the present-day United States.

[PapaBear3625]

I think it's the women in those societies who prefer polygamy. When your choices are limited to sharing a rich man, versus having a poor man all to yourself, many women will prefer to share a rich man.

The system of marrying the girls young, and to cousins, also reduces female infanticide -- it's less of an investment in the support of the girl, the investment stays in the clan, and after a young age it's the husband's responsibility to keep her fed and clothed.

[PapaBear3625]

It’s pretty common in Saudi. But interestingly one of the major problems is daughters who don’t marry. They are stuck in their dad’s household and with nothing to do. So they get depressed and neurotic.

The daughters can only marry somebody of equal or greater wealth and status. Otherwise the family loses face. But it's OK for a male to marry a beautiful woman of lower wealth, rather than a plain woman of his own class.

[restornu]

Lucifer never received a body and never will, he is an evil Lying spirit or should we be more correct he is a substance who will lie and deceive many....

Now what else have I hear is a substance???

[Tennessee Nana]

Feb 15, 1845 - Sidney Rigdon asks, in the LDS newspaper MESSENGER AND ADVOCATE “Did the Lord ever tell any people that sleeping with their neighbor’s wives and daughters had any thing to do with preparing the way of the Savior’s coming[?]” Ridgon’s daughter, Nancy, had been approached by Joseph Smith and asked to become a secret plural wife. This caused a rift between Rigdon and Smith.

[Tennessee Nana]

Feb 15, 1885 The SALT LAKE TRIBUNE editorial: “The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.”

[Tennessee Nana]

Only through celestial marriage can one find the strait way, the narrow path. Eternal life cannot be had in any other way. (Deseret News, Church Section, November 12, 1977, Salt Lake City, Utah)

[Tennessee Nana]

In 1831 Joey Smith tried to force 12 year old Mary Elizabeth Rollins to have sex with him.

—Smith Tells 12-Year-Old Mary Elizabeth that God Has Commanded Him in a Vision to Marry Her and that a Sword-Bearing Angel Threatened to Kill Him if She Didn’t Obey (Sound Familiar?)—

Authors Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery report Smith’s snag line as follows in “Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith—Prophet’s Wife, ‘Elect Lady,’ Polygamy’s Foe”:

“Mary Elizabeth Rollins claimed that Joseph had a private conversation with her in 1831; she was 12 years old.

“She said Joseph ‘told me about his great vision concerning me. He said I was the first woman God commanded him to take as a plural wife.’ [letter from Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner to Emeline B. Wells, summer 1905, LDS Archives]

“Although she did not become a plural wife of Joseph’s until a number of years later, that early conversation planted a seed that Mary Elizabeth long rememered.”
_____

[Elsie]

This faith-shaking disparity between what the missionaries are trained to teach, and what the world already knows about our spiritual heritage,

[Elsie]

Now what else have I hear is a substance???

GOD only knows!

[restornu]

Truth
Lucifer never received a body and never will, he is an evil Lying spirit or should we be more correct he is a substance who will lie and deceive many....

Now what else have I hear is a substance???

[Tennessee Nana]

“Satan is a person with a spirit body, in form like that of all other men.”

(Apostle Joseph F Merrill, LDS Conference Report, April 1949, p. 27)

[restornu]

You would believe anything negative about the LDS your stories as related is a fabrication of hearsay and half truths where ever you pick it up from, I suggest in the future you get your gossips from a more realizable source that is more accurate...

if you were an honorable person but than an honorable person would not even go there look for trutn...

[Tennessee Nana]

We are brethren and sisters of Satan as well as of Jesus. It may be startling doctrine to many to say this; but Satan is our brother. Jesus is our brother. We are the children of God. God begot us in the spirit in the eternal worlds.

(Apostle George Q. Cannon, March 11th, 1894, Collected Discourses, compiled by Brian Stuy, vol. 4, p. 23)

[Tennessee Nana]

What I posted was the published beliefs of the Mormons not my own words..

That was from a LDS Conference..

You need to admonish your SLC leaders if you don’t agree...

[Tennessee Nana]

Resty: Lucifer never received a body and never will,
_________________________________________________

Neither will the Mormon holy ghost...

Mormon scripture declares, “The father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the son also, but the holy ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the holy ghost could not dwell in us” (Doctrines & Covenants 130:22)

[Tennessee Nana]

Meanwhile although the Mormon god has a body because it was once a man according to Mormon lore...

The God the Father of the Christian Bible has no body but is Spirit.. John 4:24

and God the Son, the LORD Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity and took on the flesh of a human body when He was conceived in Mary by the Holy Ghost..

No sex act or father with flesh involved...

[restornu]

Neither does you Trinity substance have a body?

The Heavenly Father and the Son Jesus Christ has a body of Flesh and Bone and the Holy Ghost and comforter is sent from Heavenly Father

John 14

26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.