This is exactly where your views are completely myopic. Do we condemn religious beliefs,
any beliefs,
only when they become "a threat to western democracy"?
Do you know what
halakha is? It's Jewish law. And do you know that there are entire religious communities, here in the US, with citizens born and bred here in the US, that choose to abide by Jewish law, instead of by civil law? They stay in their own communities, they answer to their own communities, and even if there is a serious crime committed within the community, they report everything to their rabbi. That's firstly and foremostly. How many of them also then go to the police, well, we don't know. We only know of those who have gone to the police. What is known, is that there are exponentially more who
don't. And that is because they consider themselves answerable to their own law, and to their own community leader.
Do you know that domestic violence, for one single issue to even start this discussion, is so widely prevalent, indeed
rampant in some of these communities, that over the past two decades it has since become not only an epidemic; but a social
scourge of an epidemic which is also now by rights studied by academics, and recognized the world over by society at large?
US civil law "allows" communities to abide by their own religious laws in some cases, "as long as the laws do not conflict" with constitutional law.
The problem with this, is that once you have pockets of insular, unadapted, unassimilated communities, who have been granted the right to "abide by and enact" their own laws "as long as they don't conflict" (and who is going to enforce that?), to abide by and impose their own customs, and their own punishments which are enforceable under their "own" belief system, - what you end up having, is
rampant abuse.
Abuse of women, abuse of gays, abuse of anyone who does not "conform" to that micro-community's standards for living, for existing, or for whatever customs they may have historically had; and regardless of whether or not these traditions or views or punishments, come from patriarchal systems from medieval times which are no longer in line with our modern ways of behaving, or of treating women or gays or any other minorities.
By the time something has "threatened" your "western democracy" as you seem to know it, it is by far too late to do anything useful anymore. We supposedly, in the West, live in societies which, by our own mouths, we trumpet as having evolved over the centuries.
And people who are in such communities such as those I have described above, or any communities that are vocalizing their outright desire to live by their own populations religious law - whichever religion that may be, and people who have not assimilated into the wider population and who do not abide by the governing consititutional law of the land as the
first law which they answer to, perhaps are not
breaking the law if they don't murder someone.
But this is also not an environment that is protective of its needy.
Abuse of women, children, the weak, the uneducated, and homosexuals prevails. And these people are the people who have
no voice. And they remain forever the hunted.
Do you know how many women - in the US, in Britain, in France,
in wherever you want,
cannot go to women's shelters? No matter
what the abuse or mutilation they've suffered. And do you know
why that it is? It is because they answer to
no one outside their immediate community, and they have no one they can turn to. They don't even know what their options are. And meanwhile, "honor killings", which were not even part of the vernacular in passing discussion just a few years ago, are now things that happen on our doorsteps, in the US, and across every single European city. And
So do you want to live in a society with
your view, that you described above?
Where it sounds like that anything like any of what I'm talking about here, is just
fine with you, just as long as it doesn't "threaten" your
own idea of what "western democracy" is?
For as long as western democracy does not USE ITS VOICE to
CONDEMN the practices that are inhuman and beyond abomination, Western democracy is
COMPLICIT.
SEE NO EVIL. SPEAK NO EVIL. HEAR NO EVIL.
That's what people have always done. And that's always where we can
always find the problem.