Remember the old saying that for people to do evil things, you need religion [note: ok, the quote is actually from Steven Weinberg and is “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”, but I wanted to save the space! Sue me!]? Well, here’s another great example of why this is true. You’ll find our usual moral compass can often be hijacked when following the code of ethics of now extinct civilizations.

Case in point: It is against Iranian law to execute a girl if she is a virgin. That’s why any young woman facing execution in Iran are typically ‘married’ to the prison guards who are then instructed to rape them. This is how the Ayatollahs want things to be run, and because they have religious infallibility on their side, they get their way.

I won’t even get into the details of why these women are killed in the first place; it could be from accidentally killing her male attacker (this is a fairly popular one, as it seems these are not the types of women you want to be messing with), or being a political dissident. The disturbing thing here is the guard being interviewed in this article doesn’t even sound like he wanted to do this at all. In fact, if anything, he seems most disturbed by his actions. How could he not be?

I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”

Instinctually, there are bound to be certain religious doctrines we find morally repulsive, but the unfortunate thing here is our cultural and religious traditions discourage us from abandoning these terrible and dehumanizing practices.