Shaheen Hashmat has thoughts on Islam and Honour Abuse.

It’s not just Islam. On the other hand it’s not completely independent of religion either.

I look back on my own experiences and I know that religion was used as justification for absolute control and horrific abuse. Some awful things were done to me by my family.

That’s the thing, you see: it’s used as justification. Nothing else can do that as effectively. One of the projects of atheism is to make it less effective that way.

It doesn’t work to say “I forced my fourteen-year-old daughter to marry a man of fifty because we’re socialists.” Or “…because we’re Federalists” or Labour or Tory or Christian Democratic or Communist … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)