in my opinion after reading this article, the word honor should be stricken from human thought. to use the word honor is to agree with this mans actions. end of story.

I’ve got it down to an overly simplistic statement:

Honor in the noun form is bad, honor in the verb form is good.

In other words, to honor somebody by conducting yourself appropriately towards them = verb form = good, whereas to do something in the name of honor (respect, reputation) = bad = noun form.

I leave it to whomever to tear that apart and see if it works or fails. Try adding more conditions/caveats to prop it up, etc. Just for fun, guys.

I remember a group of bedwi(moslems) people here killed a biotechnology professor in a nearby village because he complained about their driving…

Simple isn’t it?

I find this a really interesting.

Honor is yet another english word that is “overloaded” with multiple meanings, one of which, the one you are using, equates to “virtue”. This is the usage most of mean these days, because it is the only one operational in our lives.

Go back a few centuries though, and the more significant meaning of “Honor” was that of the Code Duello - I guess these days your “Rep” or “Cred” - basically, don’t “Dis” me or I’ll bust a cap in your ass, and everyone knows it ’cause I did it last week to some other punk. Respect based on fear, based on a demonstrated readyness to kill. It’s what humans end up doing when forced to live without the protection of law, as in the ghetto.

A very old and wacky code of honor is the one practiced in Afganistan - Pashtunwali. Apparently it’s so backwards that, under the Taliban and Sharia law, womens rights actually moved *forwards*
Wikipedia is a bit sanatised about it, but there was a really good article on it in December’s economist - It would be worth stopping at your local library to see if they have it.

It is apparently quite ancient, and not much changed since Winston Churchil wrote the following during his time in Afganistan:

Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind.

I think there’s a little something in that for all of us athiests, don’t you? :)

I found Churchil’s stuff here, and I don’t know which is better value - his own blind acceptance of the organised brutality of British colonialism, or the bizzare honor code of the Pashtun. Check this out:

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Nor are these struggles conducted with the weapons which usually belong to the races of such development….. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.

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… Truth is unknown among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from which they regard an oath. In any dispute about a field boundary, it is customary for both claimants to walk round the boundary he claims, with a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor’s land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of an appeal to force.

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All are held in the grip of miserable superstition. The power of the ziarat, or sacred tomb, is wonderful. Sick children are carried on the backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited in front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back — if they survive the journey — in the same way. It is painful even to think of what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in the ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit swinging a stone or coloured glass ball, suspended by a string from a tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered on some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few instances; but they may suffice to reveal a state of mental development at which civilisation hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.

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Their superstition exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood — “Mullahs,” “Sahibzadas,” “Akhundzadas,” “Fakirs,” — and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of “droit du seigneur,” and no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write. As Macaulay has said of Wycherley’s plays, “they are protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters.” They are “safe, because they are too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach.”

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