Re: Very disturbing
Well debated thread even though somewhat off color topic. Some of the members may have further improved the quality of discussion if they hadn't resorted to calling those questioning actions of the prophet some personal names.
That aside, I wonder if anybody knows how beautifully the Hindu Religion has solved this sort of problems. Here is a summary.
All people are attributed to a certain Gothra. Each Gothra is considered the descendency of a particular group of Rishis. The Rishis themselves are a multi-tired groups but that gets complicated so we will leave it for the moment.
Now the simple rule is that two people of the same Gothra never marry. This prevents most possibilities of even inadvertently inter-marrying. This is not a perfect solution imo but goes a very long way. (Not perfect because some of the higher level Rishi descendency categories are not yet fully decoded but with some limited amount of DNA research that has occurred in this respect, the rulesets for the Gothra classifications have proved astoundingly correct!).
Apart from that, I think in the old days, whether in Arabia or in any other part the plat, people lived in small hamlet and village communities. Travel was within very limited distances and therefore social interactions were within somewhat limited communities relative to today. Therefore because the choices were limited due to the small accessible community size, it is possible that alliances occurred within 2nd and 3rd cousing ranges and even 1st cousin range to some extent where the family tree was truncated. In some cases adoptions must have been the only way to prolong a family line. Therefore people who were more advanced and civilized would naturally have had the ability to travel wider and farther, thus being able to broaden the pool for alliances; and people that were less civilized and or advanced would have had a smaller area for alliances and so in those we will find higher acceptance of 1st cousin marriages. This is likely the explanation for the Quranic sanction (probably acquired a religious tone that way later).
As almost everybody (on both sides of the argument) has pointed out here, such close range marriages are unhealthy and whether you practice the Quran or not, should simply be avoided. Beyond that, whether Quran needs to be changed or not is a mere academic rhetoric and neither side is ever going to convince the other side! because one side (eg UsResident) believes in it as Allah's word and so requires no further tweaking whereas the other side (Tariq Aktar) is approaching it as a living document that needs to kept updated. How will these two ever agree?
As I said mostly good points on both sides but if I may, we should try to not get angry with people for questioning the sacrosanct - because truth will ultimately emerge and win (as we say Sathyameva Jayathey)