Sunday, February 18, 2007

What the Well-Dressed Prophet Wears

For those of you who — like me — aren’t at church this Sunday morning, here’s a new way to occupy your time:

DRESS UP MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET!

Dress up Mohammed!

Normal Bob Smith has developed this useful and educational interactive website so that everyone in the family can attend to the Prophet’s sartorial needs.

Dress up Mohammed!Now you don’t have to be a Danish cartoonist to earn your very own fatwa!

It’s a kind of a virtual paper-doll arrangement, with many large accessories; Mohammed the Taxi Driver is particularly apt. The result of one of my own efforts is shown at right.

Don’t set your monitor at 800 x 600, as I did initially, if you want the interactive scripting to work right. It’s designed for higher-resolution settings.

File under: Blasphemy, Trivial.


Hat tip: Reader LN, via email.

[Nothing follows]

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

This posting comes as a big disappointment. I'm normally big a big fan of Gates of Vienna, but I see no redeeming value in this sort of ridicule. The Danish cartoons made a point. But these need to filed under the 'adolescent' category.

This sort of nonsense hurts more than it helps.

Baron Bodissey said...

Roy, I guess I'm too easily amused.

Anonymous said...

Baron,

We all need a laugh. I'm just going to have to be careful about recommending Gates of Vienna in my ongoing efforts to usher people out of the darkness multi-culti darkness. Gratuitous slams are not helpful in that effort. My new rule of thumb will be 'check before recommending'.

But your normal posts are very helpful, so keep up the good work!

Dymphna said...

Roy --

One person's gratutious slam is another's funny bone. When they were handing out Silly, the Baron took twice his share. And most of the Tact that was on offer, he left on the table so as not be loaded down with things he didn't plan on using.

Besides, he's been hanging with the Danes too long; one of their strengths is that they like to laugh...at anything.


He's headed into a potentially dangerous situation soon, and I hope he indulges in all the gallows humor he needs to in order to feel calm.

Lighten up...this is mild, innocuous stuff. You may be getting a bit brainwashed if this kind of post on a quiet Sunday morning puts you off.

Consider the possibility...

montecristo said...

I thought this article is really funny, it cheered me up on a Sunday evening. The depiction of the cartoons is lighthearted, which narrates the light substance in the religion itself.

ziontruth said...

This is just the old "Jesus Dress Up" remade to be about the founder of a different religion.

As I recall, there were attempts by some Christian believers to have that site taken down. Well, there was also an outcry over "The Life of Brian". In fact, there ought to be some dissatisfaction voiced from the offended, otherwise people might think it doesn't offend you. But that's about it.

"Jesus Dress Up", "The Life of Brian", Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and Richard Dawkins' rants against the Bible sound so old and tired today... I feel like yawning just thinking about them. The reactions from the offended believers, heated though they may be, yet never crossing the line of violence, have made it so.

While, as we all know, doing unto Islam and Mohammed and the Koran the same is, uh, a little bit more risky. Hence it really makes the news--not just because of the flaming (literally) reactions of the offended believers, but because those same reactions have brought about the situation that few people dare to do it. Dawkins wrote an anti-Islam article right after 9/11, but not another one since (and even that article, "Design For A Faith-Based Missile", was structured on the equivalence of all three "Abrahamic" religions).

So, Roy, I agree with you it isn't all that funny--all the more so because I saw the anti-Christian original--but I think it's still of importance, as it tests the sensibilities of all people in our age. The reaction can tell us who is a moderate Muslim and who is not, who is a dhimmi non-Muslim and who is not, and who (among secularists) is a consistent advocate of Enlightenment values and who is a hypocrite whose fine words stop at the foot of the Crescent. The Danish Cartoons were among the first tests, and certainly a dazzling demonstration, but the point still needs to be made.

X said...

Actually, the irony about Life of Brian is in how surprisingly accurate its portrayal of contemporary Judea really. Granted, the judean people's front probably didn't exist in real life (and certainly not the suicide squad, at least not in that form). The israelites were living in a period when the supposed messiah embodied by the Maccabbean kings had been squashed by the greeks, and then supplanted by the roman-sponsored dynasty of Herod, who liked to style himself as the saviour of Israel. They were looking everywhere for a new messiah to throw out the romans, who were starting to increase their presence in the region, and consequently they latched on to any half-wit who claimed he might be the messiah, or at least not a naughty boy. The scene where Brian is telling everyone the secret of eternal life could have been filmed from real life. Possibly.

As a christian I found the film hillarious. A god without a sense of humour isn't worth serving and I know from personal experience that God has quite a wicked funny bone now and then. It wouldn't surprise me if he had some equivalent of Dress up Jesus lurking around the heavenly realms.

Anyway, that's off topic. To call this childish misses the point, I think. If you can't allow for the occasional joke about your own beliefs, then it's likelyyour beliefs aren't resting on a very firm foundation. Of course a muslim could be forgiven for not seeing the humour in something like this, but that' hos right. It isn't our right or duty to claim offence on their behalf and, Roy, you put yourself in a very bad position when you do so. The shrill assumption that muslims will automaticallty be offended, and the further assumption that we therefore shouldn't enjoy something like this... well, it's identify politics at its worst. Don't fall in to that trap. It isn't fun.

anti-uffe said...

Nothing in this cartoon is more offensive than the regular MSM cartoon. I'm pretty sure that nobody, Roy included, would have found any reason to take note of it were it not for the fact that it deals with the always offended submissives

Me, I actually find it funny. And I do think that the fact that cult of the always offended are, well, offended by this sort of satire should be exploited to the max.

The situation is far too serious to be squeamish about ..... cartoons. Use them. Deconstruct Islam. Create cognitive dissonance.

Profitsbeard said...

Muslims, being self-professed "iconoclasts" (icon-destroyers, in order to avoid idolatry) should be all in favor of such anti-making-Mohammad-an-idol silliness as this.

But, they betray their true intentions by turning Mohammad into an inviolate icon as shown when they rage and kill every time their human "prophet" is brought down to Earth.

Mohammad was an illiterate pedophile warlord, whatever his better qualities might have been (uniting the "pagan" polytheists of Arabia... if that can be considered an "improvement").

Mocking the two-faced pretensions ("We are against making anything but Allah Surpreme..." -but meanwhile: "Don't dare visualize, much less lampoon our 'holy' prophet!") of his adamantly uncritical followers is exactly what they invite through their bald-faced, icon-creating hypocrisy.

It isn't the level of sohpistication of the joke that matters, but the hysteria of the reaction it exposes.

Any God that can create both the platypus and flatulence can't be all serious.