New book from atheist author Michael A. Sherlock
Michael A. Sherlock’s latest book, Blasphemy: The Selected Works of a Blaspheming Atheist, is a collection of well-sourced essays written to see just how far free speech can be taken. Two of his essays received high praise from Richard Dawkins, so Sherlock revised those essays, adding additional arguments, scholarly sources, and most importantly for Sherlock, making them even more offensive. Sherlock is studying a master’s degree in religion at the University of New England, and he uses the scholarship he encounters in his studies to take aim at the fragile and easily-offended hearts of the religions he criticizes.
This book doesn’t just call the Prophet of Islam a demented and brain-damaged lunatic, it brings to bear some of the most serious scholarship to show that Muhammad was, more than likely, a demented and brain-damaged lunatic. Further, when Sherlock calls Jesus’ mother a promiscuous adulterous, he does so with the assistance of primary sourced historical material, secondary scholarly sources, and most amusingly, Monty Python.
But Blasphemy isn’t just a book filled with well-researched blasphemies – it is also concerned directly with the harm and mayhem wrought by Blasphemy Laws, which is the reason why Sherlock dedicated his book to Raif Badawi. Raif Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, has endorsed this book, and it contains a petition letter to the U.N (written by Sherlock, D.M. Murdock and Michael Nugent), which is the foundation of Sherlock’s Human Rights organization, ‘Human Rights for Atheists, Agnostics and Secularists.
One might say that Sherlock’s deliberately offensive writing is the passive-aggressive product of the anger Sherlock harbours over the injustice suffered by so many in the name of one god or another, but there is nothing passive about this book.
Just how offensive is this book? Sherlock may as well have punched the Pope’s mother in the face, spray painted atheist symbols all over the Vatican, spat in the face of the Prophet, decorated the Kaba with murals of pigs fornicating, and smeared the entire country of Saudi Arabia in bacon grease.
The following is an excerpt from one of the essays in Sherlock’s new book:
‘So, what are we to make of Muhammad’s abhorrent behaviour? Was he the product of faulty wiring, a bad environment, or possibly a combination of both of these factors, or was he just a mean and perverted old man? More importantly, what are we to make of verses in the Qur’an and Hadith that encourage modern and even moderate Muslims to emulate his perverse behaviour, to walk like an epileptic wife beating paedophile, if you will? Surely these exhortations serve no healthy function in societies marked by a superior moral code, a code that frowns upon and even proscribes rape, paedophilia, misogyny and beheadings for blasphemy, along with the various other machinations of medieval madness that marred Muhammad’s hostile and inhospitable environment. Notwithstanding the pertinent nature of these questions, there is but one fundamental question raised by this investigation, and it cuts to the very heart of the religion of Islam:
If Muhammad was suffering temporal lobe epilepsy, which may have been the case, then aren’t the 1.6 billion Muslims living in the world today simply squandering their precious lives in service to the hallucinations of a medieval tyrant with temporal lobe epilepsy?’
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