Has Islam and Sharia Law changed punishment and penalties, though? Have those laws been revised and updated to accomodate today's culture?
Did you nor read a word I wrote earlier?
Islamic law does not judge via an
aesthetic paradigm of evaluation, but via a moral paradigm. The European can decry the allegedly barbarity of the Islamic penal code, while at the same time engaging in the most atrocious transgressions of human rights against non-Europeans in their colonial ventures. And because you are increasingly doing it from a distance (you are far-removed from the actual violence, it doesn't hurt you, it hasn't made you bleed), and now via clandestine means, killing using drones, you don't see it. You just see the final product: your comfortable lives and the final state of the third world after usurping its resources, and then you call them barbaric for the way they live and do things. You say "ThEY haTE Us fOr oUR fReeDom." If it doesn't look good, if it doesn't seem nice, if it doesn't look beautiful, you don't accept it. "God is dead and we have killed him, what must we do now, we must become God ourselves." This aesthetic morality is based on making yourself a god, above God's own laws.
Those are your standards. Where 100 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable to hang someone for sodomy, now, you allow them to be paraded them through the streets and in your churches like trophies to virtue signal your progress. 100 years ago women used to cover from head to toe, now, your entire society is sexualised, and you have problems with abuse, r*pe and sexual perversion. Your standards are not consistent, and now, as a result of the morality you are espousing, your societies are entering a period of precipitous moral decline. Homosexuality and effeminacy appear in decadent societies that are on the verge of collapse, according to the likes of the great historians like Arnold Toynbee. Your countries are all secularised, while our countries still hold on to God. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and render unto God, that which is God's" your Bible says. The Taliban are attempting to espouse morality as defined by divine revelation - the Quran and the Sunnah. (If you want me to prove its divine revelation, please let me know, I am happy to explain; the more you ask, the more people will realise.)
Daniel Haqiqatjou explains: Thomas Hobbes believed that the only way to establish social order is through the top-down control of the state, and without it, society will collapse into a war of all against all, where life is "nasty, brutish and short." But as Daniel Haqiqatjou has pointed out, Thomas Hobbes' model, the model that is currently in use by your nation-states, was wrong; there is another way to generate social order and cohesion in an organic way that doesn't involve a mass imposition of a mass surveillace, technocratic, bureacratic state.
Humans are instictively social creatures which allows the bottom up establishment of social order and cohesion, and Islam strengthens these social instincts as opposed to liberalism and other ideologies, which erodes them. Islam fosters relationships that are important for humans instinctually, and that lead to social order: kinship - you are more likely to co-operate and not harm your blood relatives, stong ties of kinship creates solidarity and social order; male-female/heterosexual pair bonding fosters social cohesion via feelings of love, companionship and commitment; reciprocity - helping others leads to social cohesion; similarity - you and I share something, like culture, ethnicity, religion, way of dress, so we will treat each other more altruistically. Islam fosters these social linkages, and stops or punishes those practices and behaviours which erode them, in order to establish bottom up social cohesion and order. So a bureacratic surveillance modern nation-state where every person is scrutinised and observed, is not necessary as in the Hobbesian worldview. Humans are happier and more fulfilled under such states. In contrast, under liberalism, philosophical naturalism and utilitarianism, it is believed that your personal autonomy and ability to choose, is what leads to happiness. Social ties impose duties and reponsibilities on a person, and these are a detriment to one's personal autonomy and liberty. Why not simply not get married, or have children, and be promiscuous or experiment with your sexuality? - that's more pleasurable than duty and responsibility, but it less conducive to societal order and cohesion. Islam prescribes a system of life that is in perfect accord with the natural human instincts, and limits destructive human tendencies.
This standard of morality does not change, because human nature does not change, and God does not change.