Church Gay Marriage Is a Travesty of Christian Marriage

Today, during a conversation I was just about to use the word "family", when I realized that I don't know what "family" means anymore.

This is a semantic, and therefore logic, problem.

In logic, the 19th-20th century German philosopher Gottlob Frege distinguished between the two characteristics, the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning or significance and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by it. You could see it as its extension.

The sense or connotation are the concept's descriptive qualities, the information it conveys.

If you say "cat", the meaning of the concept is all cats; its sense is a domestic, feline, carnivorous creature who hunts, purrs, has whiskers and ears of a certain shape etc. The concept expresses both.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has a vast meaning of an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it.

If you say "everything", the meaning is infinite and therefore the sense is tiny. If you ask someone what he did today, and he answers "everything", he conveys little or no information.

So, about "family".

In this case, the reason why we don't know what it means any more is obvious. A couple of homosexuals, married or not, with or without children, is now considered a family. Even 3 people of either or any sex who had a ménage à trois and lived together would be considered a family. An unmarried (heterosexual, because we have to specify these days) couple each of whose members was married to someone else with whom they had children (living with either parent) is considered a family. The list is endless.

And again, by extending the meaning of "marriage" to the point of making it burst, we have enormously shrunk its sense, which has become very vague now. Hence, I could not use the word today when I needed it.

Many things have caused this unwelcome development. I want to focus here on the homosexuals' ever extending demands for their "rights".

It's OK for them to do what they want, as for everybody else, as long as it does not harm others.

Here we have got to the point when the gays' demands are harming others.

First, the direct victims are the children, either adopted or born through some artificial or concocted means (IVF or sex of one of the couple with a third person), that a homosexual couple can now legally call their own.

Freud was probably the first to say that a mother and a father have, among other things, the crucial task of being a model through example, showing their children what the different sexual roles are. Many things that Freud thought were wrong, but this is still considered true, this is what most psychologists think today.

Nobody denies - yet - that there are two sexes, and that they have important differences.

The children of these homosexual couples, having two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, will very likely grow up confused about sexual roles and differences, and this is not going to bring happiness and psychological balance but the opposite. They will probably become homosexuals in a disproportionate number of cases, compared to the others.

When in the next few years or decades the consequences on these children will become apparent (and in particular when it will be clear that they are not happy people), that may signal the start of a backlash against all this giving homosexuals whatever they ask for.

The other victim is indirect, and is society. It's all of us. The family is a vital part and foundation of society, and diluting its sense and value - obviously not just through "gay marriage" and all that, but also through many other unsavoury developments among heterosexuals - has already produced terrible outcomes (the underclass, with rise in: crime, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and others) and is going to continue doing so.

Homosexuals are not discriminated against any more. Like blacks, they are not victims anymore.

Wake up. The people discriminated against have changed, the oppressors have become oppressed.

Now, when there is a civil dispute between gay activists and people who have different views, the former will always trump the latter, as Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife owners of a B&B in Cornwall who were successfully sued by a male homosexual couple for offering them two rooms rather than one, experienced first hand.

The excuse most commonly given for this perversion of the law is to say: the B&B is a public business. There's a lot to answer to that. First of all, the couple did not send the homosexuals away, they just offered them two separate rooms. No law can oblige a hotel or B&B to offer one particular room instead of another; even reserved rooms can sometimes be replaced by others.

Second, pub landlords are entitled to throw out or refuse entry to whomever they like, they don't even need to justify that with motives. It's often said that the reason for this is because they have to maintain order in the pub, but in reality they have the power to use that right at their discretion, they may simply throw out whomever they dislike. So, why should people who run a hospitality business not have the same right? Night clubs refuse admission to people for simply wearing the wrong clothes and nobody talks about human rights violations, which would be ridiculous.

Third, I think that the law of contract should enable everybody to freely enter the contract or not. A business, public or not, should have the right to refuse to serve whomever they like. In fact, they do. Banks, for instance, may refuse to open an account without any valid reason.

I believe that the "public business" motivation is just an excuse, and the real reason is just that the gay agenda must take precedence over everything else.

If anybody has any doubt, just look at the new law about to be introduced in the UK that allows gay marriages to be celebrated in church, which Prime Minister David Cameron has yesterday backed.

Gays say that they just want to be like everybody else, but the fact is that they are not like everybody else. If you, either by choice or not (I don't think that anybody knows really) live a homosexual life, go the full length, accept your diversity and live according to it.

What's the sense of living as a gay but at the same time imitating heterosexuals and doing things which are definitely not gay, are the essence of not being gay, like having children?

In the case of the church gay marriage law, the Church of England rightly protested that clergy should not be forced to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs and doctrines. The government's reply that they will not be forced was ridiculous, because, as the Church answered, they will be forced not by the law itself, not by democratically elected representatives of the people, but by unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic judges of European or international courts in the hands of whom the certain legal actions initiated by homosexuals will eventually end.

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception?

Actually no, there is an exception, at least until now: the demand to lower or even abolish the minimum age of consent to sexual intercourse for homosexuals. This demand comes from associations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded in 1978 before the pederasty issue became vastly exposed, and is an activist homosexual and paedophilia coalition group whose primary stated aim is to overturn US statutory rape laws.

In short, it asks for pederasty to be made legal. Among NAMBLA advocates are well-known homosexual activist figures, like David Thorstad and the leader of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) rights movement Harry Hay, and was part of the American gay rights movement for a long time, participating in marches and gay pride parades. It is not just an American phenomenon, though. Our own Peter Thatchell, Britain's leading gay activist, also supports underage sex.

French Minister Threatens to Expropriate Church

Showing that the socialists of today are no less totalitarian than those of Stalinist times, as they try to make us believe, or, since we are talking about France, no less authoritarian than the Jacobins during their revolutionary Reign of Terror, Cécile Duflot, French Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing - to give the woman her full title - in the government of Socialist Francois Hollande, has announced that she will carry out the requisition of properties from the Catholic Church and other institutions by the end of the year to house homeless people.

Bring back the good old times of the French Revolution, Cécile! Like in 1791, when the Jacobins decided to expropriate the Church to offset the debts of the state.

Duflot is a member of the Green Party, confirming the metaphor of environmentalists as watermelons, green outside but red inside.

Hers was not a request, but a real threat. On 3rd December, in an interview with Le Parisien, she said she found the solution to the winter cold problems faced by the homeless, adding that she would not understand if the Church did not share the government's goals of solidarity and hoping that there will be no need for a showdown: "Therefore the Church must provide its unspecified 'semi-empty properties' to accommodate the poor, or else".

The prestigious Le Figaro wrote in an editorial the next day: "It is the latest insult in the series of attacks that this minister delivers against an institution that interferes with her fight for homosexual marriage. It is irresponsible. Francois Hollande would do well to pay attention to the training of his ministers."

Duflot's attitude is not easy to understand: the French Catholic Church in effect has historically always been involved in helping and offering shelter to the homeless.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Paris, in a joint statement  with the religious organization Corref, said: "The church did not wait for the threat of requisition by the minister Madame Duflot to take initiatives”.

Someone also remarked that on November 14 of last year, when Caritas France presented its initiative to help the homeless in the winter, minister Duflot, although invited, did not attend.

And France's main national business daily, Les Echos, said that the Church is "by far the institution most committed to serving the homeless, also in terms of providing them with properties and accommodation." The same thing has been confirmed by Paris Prefecture (local authority).

Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, head of the Centre for Religious Freedom established by Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made some interesting observations:

The minister's threat is absurd, considering that the Catholic Church is the largest organization that provides homes for the homeless in France, and in this field its private charity is much more efficient than the state's public assistance. As the bishops have pointed out, the Church could do even more if it did not have to face bureaucratic obstacles that sometimes come from an entrenched anticlerical hostility prevalent in sectors of the French administration.

In short, for some governments all pretexts are good to attack the Church, and today targeting its real estate assets, with taxes and threats of requisitions, has become one of the main ways to attempt to silence it when its interventions are a problem.

"Gays" are More Equal than Christians

UK Prime Minister, "Conservative" David Cameron, has today backed an enormous policy change introducing same-sex marriages in churches in Britain.

Tory MP Peter Bone said the PM’s party was split 50-50 and predicted that several government ministers would vote against homosexual marriage.

He added: “Despite the PM’s assurance, the redefinition of marriage — because of the European Convention on Human Rights — will force churches to marry same-sex couples. This will outrage millions of people and hugely damage the Government in electoral terms.”

Not surprisingly, both Labour and the other party in the government coalition, the clueless Liberal Democrats, support "gay" marriage, and the LibDems have tried hard to push Cameron to back it.

Christian Today newspaper writes in the article PM's assurances on gay marriage 'meaningless':

Mr Cameron said today that he was a "massive supporter" of marriage and did not want gay people "to be excluded from a great institution".

What hypocrisy and what arrogance! Showing that you are a "massive supporter" of something by depriving it of its meaning, opening the way to its destruction.

I think that the most likely reason for Cameron's decision to back homosexual marriage in church was a quid pro quo, a compromise with his LibDem coalition partners who wanted a reform of the House of Lords. He could not agree to that, but in an exchange of favours he accepted to go ahead with "gay" marriage, which the Liberals had been calling for.

Some commentators have also acutely pointed out that, in the polls, popular support for Cameron is well above that for the Tory Party, and so it is in his interest to keep a distance from the rest of his party by showing a liberal, modernizing face, which does not cost him anything to do. After all, Christians in today's Britain don't matter.

He also insisted that churches would not be forced to conduct gay marriages if they did not want to.

"But let me be absolutely 100% clear, if there is any church or any synagogue or any mosque that doesn't want to have a gay marriage it will not, absolutely must not, be forced to hold it," he said.

Mr Cameron added that MPs would have a free vote on the issue.

His assurances of church protection, however, have failed to convince the CLC [Christian Legal Centre], which provides legal support to Christians experiencing discrimination.

CLC director Andrea Minichiello Williams said: "If this moves ahead the courts’ interpretation of equality legislation will not provide any effective protection from litigation for churches who do not wish to perform such ceremonies, whatever the Prime Minister says now. Any such assurances are meaningless.

“At the Christian Legal Centre we have seen countless cases where Christians have been forced out of their jobs for their refusal to condone and promote homosexual practice. Their views have not been respected or accommodated and Mr Cameron has ignored their plight.

“This does not bode well for British Christians if further legislation is passed. Assurances to churches who do not wish to perform same-sex ‘marriages’ fly in the face of all the evidence."

The CLC has itself faced difficulty because of its defence of traditional marriage.

A marriage conference organised by the organisation earlier this year almost had to be cancelled when two venues - the Law Society and the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre - pulled out of hosting it at the last minute.

Both centres said the bookings had been cancelled because the CLC's views on marriage contravened their equality policies.

The organization Coalition for Marriage (they have a petition going that you can sign at their website, as I have done) has declared:

Introducing same-sex weddings in churches and other religious premises is a radical departure from the consultation proposals. Ministers promised that religious believers could not be forced to hold weddings of homosexual couples because it would not even be possible to register them in churches or other religious premises.

But now that promise has been broken. Christians, Jews, Muslims and others will be exposed to the legal nightmare of equality and human rights laws, as well as the intrusion of the European courts. We have no confidence in so-called ‘safeguards’ Ministers will offer.

Legal advice from leading human rights lawyer Aidan O’Neill QC has made clear that the only completely safe course for churches will be to stop hosting weddings altogether, a massive change to Britain’s social landscape. He has also shown that, quite apart from the issue of buildings, individual people from any background who believe in traditional marriage face damage to their careers or even dismissal from their jobs, especially teachers, chaplains, foster carers and others in the public sector.

The Bill to redefine marriage will be published in the New Year. We understand there were behind-the-scenes attempts to publish a wafer-thin Bill next week to avoid proper scrutiny of the details by Parliament. Thankfully that seems to have been prevented by internal arguments.

Welfare and Prison Systems Reward Wrong Behaviours

I confess that I watch The X Factor.

For some time a few years ago the groups were doing badly in the competition. As a consequence the number of applications from groups to enter the contest fell so low, that new groups had to be formed by the judges putting together individual contestants in order to have enough entries for the group category.

In the last few years X Factor groups have performed remarkably well, with some of them becoming household names and selling who knows how many records even internationally.

Now the judges have no more problems in finding sufficient numbers of groups applying to the X Factor.

This is the illustration of one of the simplest and most universal principles governing all animal behaviour, human and non-human alike: a desired result, called "reward" in psychology's learning theory jargon, encourages the rewarded behaviour, while an undesired result, called "punishment" in psychology terminology, discourages, deters from the punished behaviour.

Yet this simple, commonsensical thing that everybody understands and knows (which governs, for example, the education, socialization and acculturation of children) is not applied in some of the most important areas of our society and our authorities' policies.

The most blatant example of a perverse system of incentives rewarding the wrong behaviour is the welfare state. Everybody knows that, with welfare the way is run now, many people are actively encouraged by paradoxical, corrupting, deleterious government policies (which, to its credit, the current UK government is trying to reform) to stay away from work often all their lives and for generations, to have more children out of wedlock and without a father, and generally to scrounge from taxpayers as much as they can.

People who work hard are "rewarded" by high taxation.

Similarly, with the noble purpose of preventing them from re-offending, prison inmates are offered free training, life skills programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, substance-abuse counselling, job placement and housing when they are released. In these circumstances, you can say that crime certainly pays. Lots of people who want these desirables know that all they have to do to get them is to break the law and be considered at risk of re-offending.

This is what ideology, in particular socialist ideology, does to people, in power and non: they abandon the tools of reason and empiricism, logic and observation of evidence, to follow instead the diktats of their pet superstition.

Golden Dawn Offices Bombed

And people still think that we face a problem coming from the rise of the Right and a threat from right-wing fascism.

The worst, real fascists are in the Left.

Golden Dawn, the Greek ultra-nationalist, right-wing party that has been very successful in the last election in June, winning 18 seats in the 300-seat Greek parliament with 7 per cent of the vote, has seen its offices repeatedly attacked by anarchists and leftists in the past.

Golden Dawn enjoys great popularity among the Greek people because, among other things, it helps them in practical ways to face the dire economic situation they are in and protects them from violence by immigrants doing the job the police neglect to do. Recent opinion polls by independent polling companies show that the popularity of the party has risen since the election, with support for Golden Dawn standing at 14 per cent in October, making it the third most popular party in the country.

Digital Journal:

Media reports linking Golden Dawn to violent attacks are frequent: less reported are the attacks by the extreme-left against Golden Dawn.

Today, at 4am, a bomb exploded outside its offices near Athens, the latest in a spate of bomb attacks.

A makeshift bomb explosion ripped through a wall and smashed the windows of an adjacent building, causing no injuries but extensive damage not only to Golden Dawn's offices but also to a store on the ground floor and to adjacent shops and houses, according to the police.

The Telegraph:

A police official, who declined to be named, said the attack was most likely carried out by a far-Left group. "It was a powerful blast that caused a lot of damage," he said. "It looks like [domestic] terrorism."

The device packed with dynamite was placed outside the party's local offices in Aspropyrgos, an industrial suburb west of Athens.

Photo source

What Is Happening Today 4-12-2012

News in pills. The latest events worth knowing

That Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is newly pregnant and in hospital with a rare and acute morning sickness you already know, but it's just a starter.

The Pope has his new personal Twitter account, @pontifex (Latin word for "pontiff"), in 8 languages, starting tweeting in just over a week. The description: "Welcome to the official Twitter page of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican City · news.va". No tweet yet in his account, but already over 300,000 followers in the first 24 hours, which are at this moment approaching 400,000, and still counting.

Today thousands of Egyptians marched on the presidential palace in Cairo to protest the assumption by Islamist president Morsi of almost unrestricted powers for himself as well as a draft constitution, hurriedly adopted by his allies, that will establish Egypt as a Sharia state, burying any vestige of democracy. Is this "the Death of the ‘Arab Spring’", as Robert Spencer describes it, nearly 2 years after it started?

Obama held a reception party for Led Zeppelin, David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman while discussions to avoid the fiscal cliff continue. Many commentators observed that he could have waited until the fiscal cliff talks were done and a deal had been reached. This is not the first time that Obama puts being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities (or playing golf) ahead of doing his job. If America goes over the fiscal cliff, millions of Americans will suffer. But the president doesn’t seem to care.

In Sudan, Christians living in the Nuba Mountains continue to be the target of bombers as the government continues to fight a rebel group in the region. Will the world speak up to protect the Christians in the Nuba Mountains? Don't hold your breath.

A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs today, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to Syria's state media. Obama and other world leaders warn Syria against using chemical weapons. Nato has now given the go ahead for Patriot surface-to-air missiles to be deployed along Turkey's border with Syria.

In the meantime, in another "Arab Spring" country, Yemen, an Amnesty International report released today details ‘horrific’ abuses. It documents that in its 16-month rule between February 2011 and June 2012, during which it took over parts of southern Yemen, Al Qaida beheaded an alleged sorcerer, crucified a man accused of spying and amputated a man’s hand for stealing, in a “human rights catastrophe”. The report also accuses Yemen’s government of abuses.

In the US, Iraqi refugee were arrested for bombing Arizona Social Security office with IED. The mainstream media are silent about it.

Still in America, Speaker John A. Boehner initiated yesterday a small purge of rebellious (mostly conservative) Republicans from prominent economy committees, sending a harsh message before the approaching vote on a fiscal cliff deal.

Christians in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh continue to face persecution at the hands of Hindu radicals. Police remain complicit to the violence perpetrated against Christians.

The highest US military court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, yesterday ousted the judge in the Fort Hood shooting case for “bias”. It ruled that Col. Gregory Gross didn't appear impartial while presiding over the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the 2009 shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others. The "bias" consisted in the judge's order to have the suspect's beard forcibly shaved before his court-martial, which the court threw out.

In the US, a newly-released colour photo showing George Zimmerman with bloody injuries, allegedly taken on the night of his altercation with Trayvon Martin which ended up with Zimmerman shooting the 17-year-old dead, could prove that the killing was an act of self-defense and that "media coverage of the story was an exercise in manufactured race-baiting".

In Mali, Jihad gang boss Oumar Ould Hamaha declares war on all music everywhere. He says: "We are in a struggle [Jihad] against all the musicians of the world".

Yes, There Is a Link between Islam and Paedophilia

People often make comments to the effect that there is no relationship between being Muslim and paedophilia, that this non-indigenous religious group has been unjustly targeted.

As an example, here's what I found posted in a student forum:

What I've never been able to grasp is why whenever middle-eastern men commit a crime, they are not identified by their nationality, but by their religion? This is blatantly an attempt to make Islam look bad. If a brit were to rape a teenager, it wouldn't say "Chrisitan [sic] male rapes teenager". How do you even know that these people are in fact muslims? Is it their names?

This might seem irrelevant, but if their seemingly muslim heritage is the only thing that links them together, then it is not at all an epidemic. I could just as easily find an epidemic of increasing Christian murderers in the UK.

PS: I'm not a muslim myself. I just find this extremely hypocritical.

Someone else in the forum corrected the poster saying that these childrens' sexual abuse crimes are not commited by "middle-eastern men" but mostly by UK Pakistanis.

Putting aside the factual errors of the comment quoted above and its naivety, it nevertheless expresses a recurring opinion that we hear frequently.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, far from being targeted, Muslim paedophiles have been let off the hook for decades by police, social services and media, who were too afraid to establish the connection between Muslims and paedophilia and left them undisturbed to go about their business sometimes for as long as 40 years.

It is interesting to note that one of the people responsible for the cover-up, Joyce Thacker, Rotherham Council's Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, is the same woman who took three children away from their foster parents because these were members of the right-wing UK Independence Party. In the end, both these scandals helped UKIP and the BNP achieve second and third place in the recent Rotherham by-election, which gave UKIP in particular a record result.

Second, even today, after the truth has been exposed, there is a strong reluctance in public discourse to make this link, reluctance of which the comments I described above are an example. Just look at this video clip of an episode of the BBC programme Question Time to see a glaring case of people falling over backwards in order not to say the "M" word. So great is in many the fear to be called racist and Islamophobic, that they resort to any way to avoid saying "Muslim" and "paedophile" in the same breath, even if it means offending others.

Non-Muslim Asians like Hindus and Sikhs have resented the fact that Muslim paedophiles have been called "Asian men", implying an involvement of the Asian community as a whole which does not exist.

And, as is so blatantly and painfully obvious in the Question Time video clip, Catholicism and the Catholic Church have been dragged into this discussion for no other reason than to distract the public, to draw attention away from the fact that the paedophiles we are talking about are indeed Muslim.

So other, innocent religious groups have been unjustly blamed to avoid accusing the real culprits.

Third, there is a high statistical correlation between the UK's Muslim community and paedophile gangs. The Times and The Daily Mail in 2011 reported some illuminating figures:

Charities and agencies working in conjunction with the police to help victims of sexual abuse in such cases have publicly denied there is a link between ethnicity and the on-street grooming of young girls by gangs and pimps.

But researchers identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men.

The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.

In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child.

Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community.

Those convicted allegedly represent only a small proportion of what one detective called a ‘tidal wave’ of offending in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and the Midlands.

The fourth is a very strong argument that goes straight to the core and deep to the foundations of the correlation between Islam and paedophilia.

Islam does not forbid paedophilia, indeed it allows and even rules about it. The following Quranic verse refers to times when divorce is allowed  - notice "those too who have not had their courses", meaning prepubescent girls (wives) who had not started menstruating:

And (as for) those of your women who have despaired of menstruation, if you have a doubt, their prescribed time shall be three months, and of those too who have not had their courses; and (as for) the pregnant women, their prescribed time is that they lay down their burden; and whoever is careful of (his duty to) Allah He will make easy for him his affair.

Qur'an 65:4

And from the Bukhari, a collection generally regarded as the most authentic of all hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) collections:

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death). Bukhari 7.62.88

"Allah's Apostle said to me, "Have you got married O Jabir?" I replied, "Yes." He asked "What, a virgin or a matron?" I replied, "Not a virgin but a matron." He said, "Why did you not marry a young girl who would have fondled with you?" Bukhari 59:382

Another hadith compilation confirms what he meant by "young girl":

'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: “Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine.” (Sahih Muslim 3309)

It seems hard to believe that Islam has no problem with paedophilia if you don't know that Muhammad, who is for Muslims the ideal man, the "perfect example", the supreme example of conduct, the model to follow and imitate, just as Jesus is for Christians, was indeed a paedophile. He married Aisha, one of his wives, when she was 6 and had complete sexual intercourse with her when she was 9.

The argument that in those times the law and public moral code were different is irrelevant here. First of all, a religion, to be worthy of that name, must give ethical guidance and directions. The self-proclaimed founder of a new religion who passively follows the diktats of contemporary mores without questioning them, without having a vision for the future - as Jesus Christ did, whose ethics is modern and in fact pioneering even today, after 2 millennia -, does not deserve the title of prophet and his is not a religion.

Secondarily, that argument must be overturned. Paradoxically, saying that Muhammad just followed the rules of his day not only gives him and his pseudo-religion the coup de grace, but also encapsulates in one sentence what is wrong with Islam: a 7th-century AD warlord who was simply a slave of his time, killing, slaughtering, having multiple wives, having sex with children, was no better and no worse than many others of his contemporaries; but what has made him so perverse is that he enshrined all these terrible behaviours into moral guidelines for the posterity, so that what could have been consigned to history long time ago, barbarism, gratuitous violence, oppression of women, paedophilia - among his other abominable activities -, has now been set in stone for all future generations to obey to and adopt as an ideal way to conduct one's life.

And this leads us to the fifth point, that paedophilia is commonly practiced with the blessing of the law in Muslim countries today, in 2012, as child marriage. From WikiIslam:

A second look at the question; was Muhammad a pedophile? One of the most disturbing things about Islam is that it does not categorically condemn pedophilia. Indeed, it cannot, for to do so would draw attention to the pedophilia of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Many Muslims cannot condemn pedophilia even if they would like to, for they would have to abandon Islam. Muslims tacitly approve of pedophilia, even if they are embarrassed to say so. So mesmerized are Muslims by the example of Muhammad's pedophilia that they are unable to categorically denounce pedophilia or feel shame. It is prevalent in many Muslim countries disguised as child marriage. The UN is today trying to stop the evil of child marriage among the backward Islamic regions of Asia and Africa. The future of some 300 million young girls depends on it.

Scholar of Islam Raymond Ibrahim writes:

Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed."

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."