One Utah

PZ Myers was righteously and correctly offended at a nonsense nonissue kerfuffle over a student “stealing” and “holding hostage” a communion wafer. The story goes something like this: the student went to Catholic communion service, didn’t eat the wafer immediately, was physically assaulted by someone trying to force him to eat the wafer and subsequently left the setting; he was accused of, I shit you not, of holding the communion wafer hostage and committing a hate crime against Catholics. The school now has someone armed guards at communion services. The diocese sent a nun to stand over communion services to make sure everybody behaves. The student in question has received death threats and the local church community is trying to get him expelled from school.

Myers wrote:

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It’s like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

Myers is right. The student - whether he meant harm or not - did something incredibly trivial. Had the church not made a big deal out of it, there would be nothing to report on. Instead, the local church lost its marbles and engaged in a fit of ignorance, foolishness and idiocy. Paul wrote of Christians that you will know them by their fruits and it doesn’t get much fruitier than this.

PZ Myers, in the role of provocateur, wrote:

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

Just wait. Now there’ll be a team of Jesuits assigned to rifle through my mail every day.

Over the top, yeah, but faced with the raving ignorance of a group of people who have issued death threats to a student who didn’t eat a wafer just like they thought he should, what else do you do? Well, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League - who is a inflamed boil on the buttocks of faith, as well as one of the biggest assholes in America today - caught wind of Myers’ offer. And responded. Myers described the outcome:

So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email that says I should be fired, that the author would like to kill me, and that I only criticize because Catholics are so gentle and kind.

I read Myers’ offer to desecrate the communion wafer as wholly satirical and deliberately absurd. I guess I was one of the few who did.

Given that Myers has received death threats and there is a concerted attempt to get him fired from his job, I have to be honest that I’m tempted to visit our local Catholic churches and score me some communion wafers and send them to him.

The overreaction to this absurd incident by the Catholic faithful has me bothered. Is Christianity nothing more than a howling medievalism? A screaming, barbarous faith at the core of which is a symbolic (and possibly literal) act of cannibalism? Has the cool rationality of the Hellenic world been subsumed entirely into the irrational and wild-eyed superstition of the Dark Ages? One need look no further than the raving fatwas and jihads of Islamic fundamentalists to see where this thinking leads - to the end civilization, a return to blood-thirsty, blood-feud tribalism. To me, it is like the credulous breathlessly passing around emails about Barack Obama being a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda or the epidemic of men in sub-Saharan Africa who are convinced witch doctors are using cell phones to steal their penises or the frequent claim the ghosts only appear to true believers, that disbelief makes it difficult for psychics to do their work. This world isn’t even the world of faithful Christian humanism or the world of the Social Gospel. It is nothing more than the raving of the terminally gullible and perpetually offended.

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets said as much:

Indeed, true believers are left with the paradox of proving the legitimacy of their belief by defending somebody who wouldn’t validate it on a bet or a dare. The alternative, of course, is to allow religious discourse to sink into straightforward tribal barbarism, where the strong dominate the weak for no better reason than that they can.

Eff that. Follow the Pharyngula link above and find out how you can send a letter of support to Prof. Myers’ boss. As Tristero says, it’s the Christian (Muslim, Jewish…) thing to do.

There are Christians out there who can’t see to wrap their brains around the fact that just because they believe something is sacred doesn’t mean everyone has to. If you believe the communion wafer is the body of Christ, go ahead but for the majority of the world it’s just a tasteless, colorless cracker. If stating that belief, if even mocking it requires you to issue death threats, then the problem is not the unbeliever, it is your faith. And I want nothing to do with it.

Take your sacred book and your ceremonial robes and your mumbo jumbo invocations and get thee behind me. I will not leave my brain at the door when I enter the church and I have no interest in your blood feuds. The thinking that makes it okay to issue a death threat to someone who doesn’t treat a cracker the way you think it should be treated is from the darkest of the Dark Ages, it is the function of mind that never escaped the world in which the literate were 5% of the population, in which bathing was a once a year event, in which witches and goblins and ghosts hold sway over the night. It is a fearful, ruinous and ruined world and I say “No thank you.” If Christianity is nothing more than a howling medievalism, I’ll take secular humanism and go my way and be all the better for it.

This entry was posted Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 6:56 am and is filed under Bullying, Mental Illness, People Are Nuts, Religion, Religious Fundamentalism, Taliban, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.