I am curious as to why so any people make assumptions about the motivation of authors that cannot logically be induced from the content they have written.
I can only assume that the answer is probably that those people are basing their assumptions upon their own experience, view or bias.
“Those concepts were designed actually to manage the true problem — the evil of the human heart.”
Really? If anything, I would suggest that the concepts and constructs you quote are symptoms of human motivation towards power and control. While some of them may have been or have elements of ‘design’ they are, I think, more accidental, coincidental and/or fortuitous and generally speaking have come about as a result of other factors relating to human survival and need for social grouping. I note that despite your opening your comment with a quote containing the many factors that I suggest are most often found to be at the core of appalling crimes in human history, you then choose to question only my motivation for one such factor, i.e. religion. You then make a fallacious and probably deceitful assertion, obfuscated within a question, that religion has done something to me, which is why I have expressed the views that I have. I suggest that this is also deceitful because I doubt that you are actually curious about why I hold the views that I do. Rather, I think, your real intent is to mound some sort of defence of religion.
‘Evil’, of course, is a religious concept. It cannot be quantifiably defined nor even very accurately qualitatively defined. It’s assessment is always relative to individual knowledge, personal experience, culture, socialisation, stereotyping, indoctrination, belief systems, personal proclivities and so on. The behaviours that we consider to be and describe as evil, exist on continua that vary according to the factors I have listed above and more. The very practice that was the subject of the article on which I commented is proof of that. Some see the practice as evil, some as normal or acceptable. Arguing that “we are selfish and corrupt naturally because we live in these bodies that desire to self protect.” makes no sense. Our bodies, at best, are vessels. They have no ‘desires’. It is ‘we’ that have desires and, to the best of my knowledge, none of us has yet discovered who or what it is that is “we” or ‘I”. If there is irony, it is not as you assert, that” “every religion AND (sic) non-religious worldview has the same problem — people.” That statement is as nonsensical as its predecessor, which claims that the true problem consists of the ‘evils of the human heart.” The human heart is an organ. It works or it doesn’t. It may work poorly or very well, be strong or weak, but never ‘evil’.
The irony here is actually that, effectively, you agree with me.
“So, let us be reminded by articles describing horrors such as this one does, that to prevent such edicts and actions in the future we need to promote human rights holistically for equality and equity for women cannot be achieved unless it is part of equality and equity for all.”
If that doesn’t say that people are responsible and people are the ones who can fix it, then I ought to stop writing.
