Perhaps he could have done a better job explaining why the central premise of the New Testament is morally flawed. It’s flawed because it’s an example of vicarious redemption. In other words, it’s scapegoating. Instead of the guilty party being made to atone for their sins proportionally, a scapegoat is put in place so that the guilty party doesn’t need to do anything. This isn’t justice. This isn’t fair. Real life doesn’t work like this. Courts don’t send a proxy person to prison because of someone else’s crime. I could not call the court just if it placed someone else in prison for a crime I committed. I might be secretly grateful that someone else took the punishment for me, but I wouldn’t want to live in a country where courts are run like that, nor would I respect the court system that allowed such punishment. And it’s a similar case with the Christian God. I don’t respect a God that makes stupid decisions about punishment. The second point where the premise is flawed is to do with the ‘sacrifice’ theme. It’s not really a sacrifice if you’re going to live anyway.

This is where I disagree on 2 counts. One, telling lies like this isn’t the prerogative of woman. Men can tell these lies because they to have empathetic faculties. And two, they don’t do it to save the other person’s face but to avoid the perceived confrontation that would happen if they told the truth. I’ve been guilty of this to, where I’d opt to tell a white lie or say nothing in order to not risk offence because in offending there is the risk of conflict and this is what women, or should I say, people who tell these white lies are trying to avoid. I’ll illustrate this with a typical example that people would be familiar with. A guy asks a girl out to a bar and she says ‘I’ve got to spend time with my parents on the weekend.’ and he replies incredulously ‘But you live with your parents? You see them during the week?’ to which she has no response and the conversation dies to nothing. It’s quite clear her first response was a fabrication to avoid telling the truth. Now put yourself in her shoes and feel what goes on her gut in the moment she decides to tell the lie. It all happens really quickly, much quicker than you will read these words. She panics, there’s a bit of a flutter maybe a tingle of goosebumps and a rush of blood to the face as she prepares to defuse an awkward moment. She doesn’t think much of this guy so she could say ‘I don’t like you enough’ but, even though that statement is the truth, is is a ‘face losing’ statement and therefore insulting to the recipient. People don’t like being insulted and may act aggressively to the insulter opening up the potential for a physical conflict which she would probably lose. Hence the urge to tell these sort of lies is inherently selfish, is related to self-preservation, and does not stem from an altruistic urge to ensure he retains his sense of self-worth. Note that, like I mentioned in the earlier in the paragraph, men are also capable of telling these sort of ‘face saving’ lies but probably do it less frequently partly because there is less of a need for them to avoid conflict.

I could follow a pro-polygamous argument if its premise was not based on Islamic values but rather on some rational biological need. For example say the ratio of males to females was reduced to 1:20 (i.e. there is a shortage of males in the population group) by some cataclysmic event, like a male eradicating virus. In order to address this imbalance one could see the need for a polygamous arrangement. This arrangement would only work over the time frame of a few generations until the ratios had somewhat evened out. His article only addresses polygamy from the males perspective and relegates polygandry, where the wife has multiple spouses, as being un-Islamic. According to the article a polygamous marriage honours the old wife because it is a ‘spiritually rewarding experience that allows women to grow while the husband toils to provide for more than one partner.’ What women wouldn’t want to bestow that gift on her current husband by getting another husband?

According to the article, in a Western society where unions are monogamous, the only the other person in an affair is stigmatized. However, contrary to the article from what I know from living in a western society all my life, is that it’s typically both parties that are stigmatized and it’s the cheater, the person that is currently married, that endures the worst of the fallout. However continuing with the thread of reasoning presented in the article and assuming that its right in that the women is left a resourceless pregnant victim at the end of the affair, it leads on to congratulate Islam by saying that Islam recognizes this as part of human nature and allows for a polygamous marriage as a way of legalizing the affair and un-stigmatizing the women. However, Keysar fails to think, and doesn’t realize that you don’t need to legalize a polygamous arrangement in order to provide for the new mistake because in a Western society the daddy will be ordered to pay child support. In other words you can solve the problem of the women being left ‘resourceless’ without the need for some Islamic value injected into you.

This failed with the misleading error:

configure:7509: error: cannot compute sizeof (long double), 77
See `config.log’ for more details.

Inspecting config.log revealed that the failure was actually due to a missing file called crt1.o

configure:7491: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc -o conftest -O conftest.c >&5
/home/sashan/code/crosstool-0.43/build/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/gcc-4.1.0-glibc-2.3.6/gcc-core-prefix/lib/gcc-lib/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/3.3.6/../../../../x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Oddly the build of demo-i686.sh worked so I guessed that maybe it doesn’t work if the host and target machines are the same?

To prove the hypothesis this I tried:

linux32 ./demo-x86_64.sh

and surprisingly it worked. The command linux32 makes program named afterwards believe that it’s running on a 32bit host.