Everyone is making such a big hubbub about Susanne Winter's (no relation) comments on Muhammad. That he would have been a child molester in our system, that he allegedly wrote the Koran while suffering from epileptic attacks. Now the Austrian government is deciding whether that was hate-speech and whether she should go to jail for two years. To be honest, this pisses me off.
Now before I go on, I want to state very, very clearly that I don't like what Susanne Winter stands for. She is a member of a nationalistic party which would like Austria to stay a White, Catholic country for White, Catholic people. And this doesn't fly with me, because I am a flaming liberal who doesn't believe in the notion of race and promotes freedom of movement across the globe.
Having said that, I do think it's an outrage that Susanne Winter is being put under fire in this way for these two comments. First of all, neuro-scientists and brain researchers have indeed found links between religious revelations, apparitions and electrical mis-firing of synapses in the brain. To cut a long story short, it is highly likely that many prophets (including Jewish Jeremiah, Christian Paul and Islamic Muhammad) had epileptic symptoms which are likely to be the cause of their visions. Many more probably had serious personality disorders. This is not "incitement to hate", it is plain likely in the face of current scientific discovery.
The second comment is also likely to be accurate. There is some debate if Muhammad wed this girl when she was six, but then only consummated the marriage at the ripe age of nine. Islamic scholars now want to claim that he married her and consummated the marriage at age fourteen. Either which way you put it, be it six, nine or fourteen, a fifty-plus year old man doing it to a minor makes him a sex offender and the girl a victim. By any modern, western law, Muhammad would have been sent to jail. And what is more, I would argue that this is a good thing. In my eyes, it is not morally just to force such a relationship on a minor.
What then, if at all, should Susanne Winter be attacked for? For her blatant lies about the "demographic threat" the Muslims pose to us. For her failure to realize that it doesn't matter if we have the evil of christianity or the evil of the islam. All organized religion is inherently undemocratic and relatively genocidal in nature. And maybe we should attack her for her redneck approach to immigration. But certainly not for mentioning two things about a prophet that are likely to be perfectly true.
St. Paul was likely brain damaged while he was writing his letters to the Corinthians. Furthermore, he was a woman-hater and probably had a small penis. So who's going to throw me in jail for that statement?
Posted by Chris at January 15, 2008 03:29 PM