While I of course do not countenance the harassment of anyone by religious nuts, I also have something of a baleful view of the kind of self-conscious atheist who regards it as a good use of his time to spend the day winding up the god squad. And so, I think it’s hard to argue that anyone involved will look back on the PZ Myers/Bill Donohoe/Webster Cook/”fricking cracker” episode and think “yes, that was my finest hour”.
My basic sympathies are with PZ. I’m in favour of occasionally having a bit of harmless fun at the expense of the religious as long as there aren’t too many obviously foreseeable adverse real-world consequences. In other words, I’m basically of the view “it’s all fun and games until the Danish Embassy gets burned down”.
Onnnnnnn the other hand though, while I am perhaps the last person on earth who is well-placed to tell anyone else that winding people up for the sake of it is a really silly and childish thing to do … well, winding people up for the sake of it is a really silly and childish thing to do, and furthermore Dawkinsite militant atheists are as annoying as fundies in their own way and perhaps deserve a bit of winding up too. Thus I have determined to strike a blow in retaliation on behalf of the Catholic Church.
I don’t think that joke-desecrating a page of Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” (which PZ did, photo evidence in the linked post) is remotely symmetrical – it’s rather like a man with a huge ugly nose calling someone else names and then saying “well, I don’t mind if you call me big-ears”. The secular humanists’ Achilles Heel isn’t their reverence for any particular book or artefact – it’s their wildly disproportionate hatred of religious education.
And so it is that, at some point this weekend, I plan to tell a small, credulous child (about whom I will provide no other information) that a rainbow is a special sign from God that he promises never to flood the world again and that this proves that God exists. And PZ Myers will have this on his conscience that as a direct result of his actions. I think this rather than writing to somebody’s boss or soliciting a deluge of hatemail, might be considered a proportionate retaliation. Have a good weekend, true believers.
{ 310 comments }
That’s such a good and balanced reaction! “PZ Myers threw away a piece of bread so I will lie to a child!”
Congrats. This is the first genuinely funny response I have read to this whole affair.
This was covered pretty well on Cosmic Variance.
I have nothing to say about your weekend plans beyond this: if you do as you say you plan to do, for the reasons you give, you are not a nice man, Daniel Davies. And I think that is a proportionate retaliation.
I don’t get it.
>That’s such a good and balanced reaction!
Success! Success! D^2 wins!
I think Dsquared has outdone himself on this one.
Step one: Hypocritically look down on those who have a go at others for the sake of it.
Step two: Brazenly imitate this behavior.
It’s times like these that I realize that I can never really measure up in the area of being a pretentious, sarcastic wise-ass. It’s almost enough to make me give it all up, but I’m not sure my friends and family could bear the loss.
Y’know, after thinking about this for a while, and going back and forth, I’m eventually coming to the conclusion that PZ is onto something deep, even though it isn’t very nice.
He’s essentially saying “I will show disrespect for the symbols of a belief I regard as ridiculous, even though many people regard it as benign or positive”
And people who want to criticize him keep using wildly different supposed analogies, like the above plan to lie to child in retaliation.
What PZ is getting at, underneath it all, is nobody thinks ALL belief-symbols deserve respect. Not even all mild religious beliefs. For example, the wiccans who say the images of witches and Halloween are offensive to them, are typically not taken seriously.
He’s doing a type of performance art. And it’s got a valuable core to it.
I just had a big argument at work about asymmetric arguments, with someone who tried to make the case that “rationality” as a superior cognitive process to ‘religion’ should be separated from the most prominent activists of that line of discourse who are clearly trying to demarcate boundaries between a segment of the West and Muslims and the Christian right. The person feared for the danger that those public intellectuals are putting themselves into rather than the millions of Muslims who are seeing their liberties curtailed, or have their outreach programmes labelled as BNP rallies.
Good response!
Surely the “Nothing” in “Nothing should be held sacred” refers (or fails to refer) to the mind of a child as well as a piece of bread.
“The secular humanists’ Achilles Heel … [is] their wildly disproportionate hatred of religious education.” What would you offer in the way of evidence that secular humanists, generally speaking, have such a disproportionate hatred?
If you are basing this on the sayings of a strident few, you should say so.
If you are speaking generally, I think there are millions of secular humanists that don’t much care one way or the other. Tarring them all seems wrong to me.
I plan to tell a small, credulous child (about whom I will provide no other information)
Please tell me the child says “wainbow” and I will be satisfied.
Like many sensible people, you obviously find people who share your sensibilities but express them in a slightly differently manner than you might to be vastly more annoying than people whose outlook you actually find abhorrent.
An exposition of why this is so would make for an interesting read.
I think Seth gets it just about right. And that kind of performance art doesn’t happen to be my cup of tea, but I’m quite receptive to the argument that it’s valuable to have somebody doing it.
Certainly we live in a society in which the problem of offense being given is vastly outweighed by the problem of people imagining they have a right never to be offended.
I would only add that PZ (and I agree with him on this) would argue that religious beliefs are not merely ridiculous, but harmful.
And further, I think Daniel is demonstrating how to do performance art badly.
As in “Those people think crackers are sacred. You think rational thought is sacred. So you both think something is sacred. You’re annoying the believer in the sacred cracker by throwing it out. Some I’m going to annoy you by trying to make a child think irrationally. GOTCHA, HOW DOES IT FEEL HA HA!”
It’s actually a very stupid analogy, and it’s playing to the crowds with no value underneath (sigh, assuming some basic ideas of value, I know, I know!).
I suspect if people could get past their dislike of militant atheism they’d perceive that crackers and education are not a good equivalence.
It’s actually a very stupid analogy
Goes to winding up I think.
The fact that you can generate such a reaction merely by claiming you plan to do something—which is, in the final analysis, totally harmless—says a lot about the New Atheism. As they say on the less reputable parts of the Internet, 10/10.
But that’s my point – it’s an extremely trivial statement that anyone can be wound-up about something in the world. Because we can’t and don’t consider all things equally worthy of being wound-up about (= worthy of respect), that leads to absurdity.
The very fact that you refer to the nailing a page of Dawkins’ book as “joke-desecration” is interesting. It’s clear that the only point of PZ doing so is to show how little a concept like “desecration” means to him, no? It’s symmetric in action and wildly asymmetric in response. That’s the point.
But speaking of asymmetry, perhaps you do need to think more about the differences between children and food.
But that’s my point – it’s an extremely trivial statement that anyone can be wound-up about something in the world.
Right. Speaking as one of the militant atheist assholes I am quite certain that I deserve some winding up and it’s okay if someone gives it a shot.
The fact that you can generate such a reaction merely by claiming you plan to do something—which is, in the final analysis, totally harmless—says a lot about the New Atheism.
Yeah, that we like to think about whether or not things should be “sacred”, whether telling children lies is proportional to stabbing bread, etc. I mean, beyond the comment calling Daniel “mean”, I don’t anybody’s too up-in-arms over the action itself, yelling “Think of the children!”, etc. It’s harmless, duh. But it’s still worth thinking about.
IMHO, the reason “secular humanists” and “militant atheists” are doing this is because we’re fed up. We’re tired of religion trying to take over the government, insisting this is a “Christian nation”, and essentially damning anyone who doesn’t share their narrow, ridiculous world view. I was adopted by a so-called “Christian” family – oh, the horror stories I could tell you: ignorant, racist, misogynistic, barely-literate idiots. I remember the day I was accepted to law school. All my mother could say is “I don’t understand what you want with all that education.”
Remember: one of the first edicts in the bible was god telling Adam and Eve to avoid the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Nope – education, erudition, and logical thought has no place in any religion.
Speak for yourself, weserei. I wasn’t wound up at all by Daniel’s post- I thought it was good clean fun.
It’s pretty funny, though, that “you can generate such a reaction merely by claiming you plan to do something—which is, in the final analysis, totally harmless”, while being way over the top as a description of this comment thread, exactly describes the anti-PZ venom issuing from Donohue and his scurvy crew.
Brilliant. Myers really got you wound up this time, didn’t he?
Correction: a rainbow is a reminder God made for himself not to destroy humanity again. Because as omnipotent and omniscient as God is, he still has a hard time remembering not to destroy humanity…
…which in all honesty is quite understandable.
P.Z. Myers can be a smugly irritating prat sometimes; but I think the only appropriate response is to say: “Good gracious, P.Z., you’re a smugly irritating prat today!” I doubt that one more bit of mythopoea in a cute little moppet’s ear will hurt the moppet in any lasting way—but who knows? Maybe that’s what tips the balance and turns her into a televangelist.
To bring up an only tenuously related point: I was commiserating recently with my own (utterly charming) moppet about how surprised and disappointed I was recently, comparing the local Borders with the local Barnes and Noble. Previously, Borders had been the better bet for highbrow and semi-highbrow books. But not any longer, for some unknown reason (I’m speaking of stores in Evanston, Illinois). My daughter agreed and said that while the Barnes and Noble was “jam-packed” with books on Wicca, she’d found almost nothing on that subject at Borders. It was a reminder of how much vaster the world of what matters to somebody is than the world of what matters to me. (Always useful, and a little humbling, to get that reminder.)
Nice, but slightly lame and amateurish. Hardworking professionals like Howard Stern have been doing these things 5 times a week 50 weeks a year for decades.
I’m having some serious trouble believing that any of you commenters are for real.
This is about 50% very funny, and 50% really fucked up. Funny because, well, it just is. Fucked up because, well, lying to a child is much worse than religious desecration.
(What’s “wildly disproportionate” about hating religious education, anyway? Religious education is a very bad thing—it takes people at their most vulnerable and fills their heads with destructive lies. All propaganda is bad, but especially propaganda directed at children.)
“The fact that you can generate such a reaction merely by claiming you plan to do something—which is, in the final analysis, totally harmless—says a lot about the New Atheism. ”
Slightly puzzled here. What is the “such a reaction” that is being referred to? Two comments?
In re-retaliation for Daniel’s retaliation, I plan to go to my small child and tell him that sometimes when people pray for help, they are really trying to talk to part of themselves. And then I will think about loaning him a run of Alan Moore’s Promethea. And then I will remember the sex scenes in Promethea and decide not to.
I am presuming that all the “o noes! You lie! To a child!” Posse are childless themselves. How on earth does one get through a typical day without lying to a child.
PS: just for that, I’m going to tell my own kids that Santa Claus exists for one year longer than I’d planned.
It’s not really about lying to a child. It’s about whether militant atheism is considered something worthy of being respected by liberal intellectuals.
Good luck with that if they’re smart. Mine started asking very inconvenient questions around age 5 and I couldn’t come up with clever enough answers to satisfy her, so that was it for old Santa. Probably what will happen is that your kids will pretend to believe in Santa for that extra year so as not to hurt your feelings.
Just for that, the tooth fairie is going to retroactively forget to put something under his pillow. (Oops.)
The sugar fairie, however—this being the entity in our household who takes all leftover candy e.g. from Halloween and makes it mysteriously disappear overnight, presumably building something with it, in exchange for some kind of small coin under the pillow—will probably have a long and vigorous lifespan.
Hey, you stole my post title, and my somewhat-middle-of-the-road point of view on this affair (yes, I’m linkwhoring). My reaction: I’m irked by the pretense of PZ that it’s about “a fricking cracker”. Obviously, the cracker is a symbol of some very deep feelings. The question is what respect is owed to people’s deep feelings. Answers about this can vary, of course, but it’s kind of stupid and dishonest to focus on the symbol rather than what is being symbolized.
If you’ve been telling your child that “Santa Claus” exists then you are guilty of indoctinating him/her with Yank expressions for which he/she should have been taught the correct English equivalent.
I love how sophistocated atheists imagine themselves when they distinguish religious thought/praxis from “reason. ” As though there is a thing called Reason out there untainted by all sorts of personal and cultural assumptions which can be scientifically proved. If that’s so, spend a few minutes looking under a microscope or into a telescope for proof that it’s wrong to lie to children about the meaning of rainbows. Or that democracy is better than, say, theocracy (or autocracy or whatever). Maybe you’ll succeed where all the brilliant thinkers before you have failed. But I don’t have much faith that you will, as it were (if you’ll permit my use of the F word).
I think you guys need to (a) lighten up and (b) read a little philosophy. Maybe start with MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Or even better, maybe spend some time meditating on why you have such disdain for religious belief but not for other, equally unprovable influences on society like political ideology, scienticism (i.e., the irrational belief that science will answer all problems and make everyone happy), consumerism, et al.
“Santa Claus”
Hmm. I think I’ll scare-quote Santa from now on and never explain myself.
“How on earth does one get through a typical day without lying to a child[?]”
My sentiments exactly, and probably one of the reasons I wasn’t particularly horrified by dsquared’s suggestion.
Paul Gowder wrote: “Religious education is a very bad thing—it takes people at their most vulnerable and fills their heads with destructive lies.”
This of course is the Dawkins take on religious education. I think that American religious education is generally so anodyne, that most people familiar with it are a little bit astonished at this sort of vehemence. For an only slightly atypical example, my Baha’i wife subjects our daughter to something called “virtues education.” For the most part, since it consists largely of moral exhortation, nothing remotely approaching a lie is involved. As for matters of Baha’i doctrine: well, Baha’is actually believe that stuff, so they’re certainly not lying when they impart it. (This is, by the way, a point that’s often lost on P.Z. Myers, who plays very fast and loose with the words “lie” and “liar” in his denunciations of the pious.)
But, you will say, Sunday School is different! Not a whole lot, really, in the mainline denominations. Mostly it’s moral uplift, with some very basic church dogmatics thrown in (“Jesus loves me,” that sort of thing.) For these reasons, I believe that most Americans just can’t get what Dawkins is so upset about.
Man, what a bunch of humorless militant atheists. First, the rainbow comment is funny because it is borderline Kitsch. I mean we are talking about rainbows, come on. (It’s like telling a kid, I know scraping your knee hurts, but it is all part of God’s plan.) Second, as far as religious education is concerned, I went to Catholic school, and I know lots of people who went to Catholic school, and we are probably so very agnostic precisely because we went there. So if your goal is create atheists I think a religious education is probably a great start. On the other hand, I actually value the education and feel like I understand both religion and the concepts of tradition and community because of it. Something some of you mini-Spocks would do well to also understand better.
But, you will say, Sunday School is different! Not a whole lot, really, in the mainline denominations.
You can’t generalize this. I went to an Anglican one and the actual services the adults went to were bland and unremarkable while us kids got the full measure of horror stories.
I believe that most Americans just can’t get what Dawkins is so upset about
There’s also a tendency among many Americans to confuse Richard Dawkins with Richard Dawson. And then we wonder why the hell we should be taking moral instruction from Family Feud.
Gowdah, come on. This is a pretty trivial lie to tell a child. People lie to kids all the time, anyway, about secular matters. I say go team Davies here.
The rainbow in that little story is traditionally viewed as a sign of divine promise. Out of the antediluvian chaos the semi-comforting threat issued from on high that next time it would be fire, not flood that destroyed civilization.
This has resonated amongst the faithful as well as among more poetical unbelievers for centuries, nay even millenia.
The fire next time.
There’s a traditional country gospel tune called “Sowing On the Mountain” that is based on it.
You’re gonna reap just what you’ve sown.
Hello earthlings! Hot enough for ya?
Pure coincidence of course, with a little soupçon of self-fulfilling prophecy no doubt. But still.
The communion wafer, or cracker, as object of contention in the hands of scoffing atheists is rife with ungoverned power, transubstantiated or no.
Imagining some uncontacted Amazonians getting their sacred gourd tromped to smithereens by PZMyers and Co. because there is no god of the harvest and the gourd won’t make it rain… but then those guys aren’t running around trying to get their nasty delusions back into the legal system so that even the unbelievers will have to obey.
Still it isn’t the little people in the churches and their vague beliefs that’s harmful, it’s the political power of the institutions. Poking the believers with sticks is cathartic and fun, but it just furthers the polarity, and strengthens the zealots.
It’s not about political correctness or respecting the beliefs of others, it’s about hurting innocent and basically harmless people to get at harmful nitwits like Donohue.
So what if Jesus isn’t in the baked goods? The real danger’s the power that’s zapping all around these issues. Being rational and right isn’t enough. You have to make the appropriate moves as well.
The point is not religion but “faith” and we all operate on faith most of the time and it’s up to others to catch us on it (when it causes a problem). For that reason we don’t run our societies on “reason” which will always slide into assumption, but on the interpretation and reinterpretation of written laws. My response posted on on Myers’ page was a link to this: FACING UP: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, by Steven Weinberg.
Look at chapter 14. If Steven Weinberg, nobel prize winning physicist and arch secularist can’t be relied upon to tell logic from ideology, then no one can. And as I’ve said before, if you examine the arguments of Colin McGinn, another arch moralizing atheist, you’ll see that his a prioris are basically Catholic. He claims to be an atheist but he isn’t.
I think it would be interesting to have a society built on, as a founding document, the complete works of Shakespeare, so that public arguments over the direction of the laws, of freedom and obligation would be built around the divisions of the Comedies the tragedies and the Histories; call it divided government. The Sonnets might be a problem though.
In a world of reason, justice would be ad hoc.
Everyone lies to themselves, all the time. A Ph.D won’t cure you of your assumptions. Usually it just magnifies them.
Not a whole lot of science goes on at Pharyngula, I wonder how Seed feels about that? And most of the posters there seem to me to be neuro-atypical (aspergers or related) and children in their first year or two of college. There seems to be very little awareness of social norms of behavior.
it’s kind of stupid and dishonest to focus on the symbol rather than what is being symbolized.
Ummm, yeah, that’s what religion does. Could it be that some militant atheists elevate their conception of science to almost religious levels?
lying to a child is much worse than religious desecration.
It isn’t lying to a child. Myths are not lies. It is a very impoverished culture indeed that sees everything in terms of black and white. And it is equally arrogant to believe that you and your tribe are the only ones who posses the Keys to Truth. The religion of Science is just as dangerous as any other ideology.
Sorry, I was of by 1: It’s Chapter 15.
“Not a whole lot of science goes on at Pharyngula, I wonder how Seed feels about that? And most of the posters there seem to me to be neuro-atypical (aspergers or related) and children in their first year or two of college. There seems to be very little awareness of social norms of behavior.”
That’s a mean-spirited and crappy thing to write, Mr. “social norms of behavior.”
It isn’t lying to a child. Myths are not lies.
They are on Fox News.
“And so it is that, at some point this weekend, I plan to tell a small, credulous child (about whom I will provide no other information) that a rainbow is a special sign from God that he promises never to flood the world again and that this proves that God exists.”
Immediate reaction:
Awesome!
“How on earth does one get through a typical day without lying to a child[?]”
I know what you mean! Also, a day without tasting their sweet, salty tears is like a mornin’ without coffee. Looks like it’s time for another family pilgrimage to Santa’s Tomb.
That’s a mean-spirited and crappy thing to write
No, it’s something that I’ve noticed. I’d say it’s even more true for the XKCD forums where they even have a sticky thread on how to relate to members of the opposite sex. I’ve spoken with them about it (I was quite respectful) and those I talked to agreed that there seemed to be a predominance of the nerdy, socially inept and the neuro-atypical. There was a thread where many took an online test for that and boasted of their high scores. That’s the XKCD forums, you can’t have that conversation at Pharyngula but it feels much the same to me. There is the same obsessional focus. The thread linked to in this post has 2354 comments. Just a little obsessive? Yeah, I think so.
“One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.” (Jack Handey)
Myers, bluntly put, is a Jacobin at heart. I have a great deal more in common with people less certain that they are correct about essentially unprovable matters. This tempers my sympathy for him considerably. If you deliberately set out to insult people you aren’t entitled to act wounded when they get angry. If someone makes you angry a death threat, or attempting to get them fired, is not a proportional response.
(My response would be to convince his neighbors to surround his house with extremely sappy devotional bric-a-brak. Especially if it involved big puppy-eyes, statues of the virgin, and annoying cutesy angels. Accompanying music optional.)
“The fact that you can generate such a reaction merely by claiming you plan to do something—which is, in the final analysis, totally harmless—says a lot about the New Atheism.”
Oh dear.
I wonder how PZ would confront the challenge of offending a religion where the belief is there is just the person in a direct relationship with God, no symbols necessary.
there seemed to be a predominance of the nerdy, socially inept and the neuro-atypical
Really? That’s shocking, and so completely unlike the comments section on this blog.
Giblets plans to tell a small child this weekend that the truth is always the exact midpoint between two opposing arguments.
How on earth does one get through a typical day without lying to a child?
Anthropomorphize your ass off.
.
“Obviously, the cracker is a symbol of some very deep feelings.”
Yes, very deeply stupid feelings. What possible reason should anyone who believes in anything remotely as silly as religion not be casually wound up whenever the mood strikes?
Offending religion is rather lame, the hate letters quoted are insipid. There are plenty of more interesting sacrosanct concepts out there to desecrate.
A REAL man would establish the PZ Myers scholarship at the local Catholic school.
PZM writes well about biology—he does interesting research and you can learn stuff. But he knows bupkis about religion, and his tiresome, troll-baiting rants on the subject are unproductive of insight not to say corrosive of discussion.
How do you share community with people whose ritual lives and understandings of the world differ in important ways from yours? I don’t think the most obvious answer is taunting them and interrupting their rituals.
There are plenty of more interesting sacrosanct concepts out there to desecrate.
I don’t don’t—the whole ritual anthropophagy/theophagy thing is pretty interesting, or at least, strange . . .
“How do you share community with people whose ritual lives and understandings of the world differ in important ways from yours? ”
Myers doesn’t think he has a “ritual life.”
He’s lying of course.
ritual anthropophagy/theophagy thing is pretty interesting, or at least, strange
Really? I thought the idea of circulation, food/wine produced by the soil fertilized by the bodies of one’s ancestors was pretty common. Just a few days ago someone described to me some such stuff she heard from locals when visiting Sicily; I think it had something to do with Etna volcano.
Hi,
No harm, no foul. As every good and wise parent knows, it is absolutely essential to occasionally lie to our children, especially when they will soon be able to detect the lie. That is how they learn to become skeptical of even those they most trust. Thus they will eventually be prepared to live and survive in our real world.
Have a nice day!
Antti
I’d have been more impressed with PZ’s stunt if he’d burned about $1000 in cash. After all, “it is just paper” right?
@17: It wasn’t you I was referring to—I was talking about the references to “lying to a child” and so forth.
Let’s be serious here. Dsquared’s explanation of the rainbow is on par with “lightning is when God goes bowling” or the tooth fairy or something. I’d wager most of us here grew up on such stories, regardless of hwo religious our families were or weren’t. And we all realized that the grownups were bullshitting us and moved on. Not are these things not “what tips the balance and turns [someone] into a televangelist,” they’re arguably (I don’t think anybody’s done a longitudinal study) a sort of inoculation against these sorts of beliefs.
After all, “it is just paper” right?
Not at all. I don’t think much of the stunt, but yours is a completely inept analogy.
No it’s not, it’s actually a very good analogy. Communion wafers, like money are valuable because they are scarce. To put it another way, anybody can buy a cookie and throw it out, and that’s pretty meaningless, as is burning pieces of paper. But to toss a communion wafer means actually getting up on a Sunday morning, showing up at a Catholic mass, and receiving communion, just like you have to exchange goods or your labor for those pieces of paper we call “money”.
I just don’t see how proving the equivalence of “atheist” and “asshole” is doing Myers’s cause much good.
In fact, I’m a bit worried about him, on the grounds argued in “Death or Glory”:
But I believe in this—and it’s been tested by research—That he who fucks nuns, will later join the Church.
P.S.—site suggestion: preview button?
I’d have been more impressed with PZ’s stunt if he’d burned about $1000 in cash. After all, “it is just paper” right?
FIAT CURRENCY! GOLD STANDARD! ELECT RON PAUL!
Bill Drummond of the KLF burned 1 million pounds. Was it successful performance art? Opinions differ, and Drummond himself apparently had regrets. He would; he’s Scottish.
No it’s not, it’s actually a very good analogy. Communion wafers, like money are valuable because they are scarce.
Feel free to mail these valuable wafers to a poor family in Bangladesh. Then mail their neighbours $1000. Then visit both families.
“Feel free to mail these valuable wafers to a poor family in Bangladesh. Then mail their neighbours $1000. Then visit both families.”
Unless they are going to eat the money, it will only help them if they can exchange it for things that are valuable. Paper money is valuable because people value it.
The analogy holds.
Unless they are going to eat the money, it will only help them if they can exchange it for things that are valuable.
Are you positing that they might not be able to?
In any case the analogy doesn’t hold because money does not involve magical transformation through ritual, its value is an agreement, not a miracle.
Piss Christ, meet Banana Cracker. Burn a flag why didn’t he? Been there done that? People lost in metaphysical symbolisms: is Myers one of those who tends to believe the universe is entirely and essentially mathematics? Will he confess; will there be nonsense involved?
Rightous Bubba, you are proving my point: if, as you argue, the Bangladesh family would prefer the cash to the wafer that proves that the cash is not “only paper.” It is valuable because of the symbolic attachment humans place on it. If it is possible the cash is more than “just paper” is it not possible that the wafer is not “just a cracker?”
And, you don’t have to be Catholic that believes in Transubstantiation to think that the wafer has symbolic value beyond its physical “crackerhood.”
Bill Drummond of the KLF burned 1 million pounds. Was it successful performance art?
Well, it’s been topped several times since 1994. One well-known performance artist, for example, burned up more than $1 trillion. Of course, he had to invade Iraq to pull it off . . .
I wonder how these militant atheists behave on holidays in far away countries: do they run around mocking people congregating at Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines or Mosques?
Myers’ performance art, at its best, serves to remind people that the symbol is not the referent.
This is a lesson that flag-pin-headed Americans desperately need to learn, because our political process is infected with irrelevant symbols (“earth tones” “have a beer with” “arugula”) and our political media are actively making it worse.
Catholics, for whom it’s apparently dogma that the symbol is sometimes the referent, seem to need a particularly direct lesson.
Daniel’s performance art, at its best, reminds overly literal-minded atheists that mythological thinking isn’t devoid of meaning. I don’t think this is quite effective; they’re usually quite well acquainted with at least one or two mythologies (typically found in the Fantasy/Sci-fi section) and are well aware that mythological thinking is more species-typical than rationalism. Also, rationalists are powerless, except possibly on the internet, so it’s not much of a joke.
As an attempt to annoy Myers, Daniel’s art is a bit more successful. If he were immortal like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, he might eventually manage to individually insult the rest of the secular humanist community.
“Also, rationalists are powerless, except possibly on the internet, so it’s not much of a joke.”
Rumsfeld was a rationalist. The neocons are rationalists. Give their rationalism a referent… say an Iraqi, and that referent doesn’t act the way “logic” says he should, they blame the Iraqi.
You want a longer list of rationalist garbage? Try the long 20th century.
The analogy holds.
No, it doesn’t, or at least not very well. Assuming you were talking “real” dollars, and not some niche-market barter-bucks or the like.
In some sense they are a matter of faith, sure. But it’s not the same sort of faith at all, the extrinsic values of the two are completely different, and one is a marginal belief. So as I said, it’s not that the analogy cannot be made, but it is inept.
“phosphorious 07.25.08 at 11:01 pm
“Feel free to mail these valuable wafers to a poor family in Bangladesh. Then mail their neighbours $1000. Then visit both families.”
Unless they are going to eat the money, it will only help them if they can exchange it for things that are valuable. Paper money is valuable because people value it.
The analogy holds.”
The poor family in Bangladesh would be better for eating the money than the translucent dried paste that passes for the body of Christ.
And whoever called a communion wafer a rare thing…surely you jest.
My impression, because I didn’t pay that much attention was that PZ was zinging Bill Donahue and his band of insane attention whores. Would PZ have done this if the Catholic League, etc. hadn’t gone bonkers about it?
Rightous Bubba, you are proving my point: if, as you argue, the Bangladesh family would prefer the cash to the wafer that proves that the cash is not “only paper.”
I am agreeing that the cash is not “only paper” yes.
If it is possible the cash is more than “just paper” is it not possible that the wafer is not “just a cracker?”
It’s the transformation that is the crucial element and absurdity. We all agree that once money’s off the press it’s money; it’s a useful way to move stuff around and no magic required. We don’t all agree – most notably a good proportion of those who take communion – that the communion wafer has become the flesh of a man/god.
Look, if someone burns my flag in Morocco I don’t really give a shit, and I think most of us agree that it’s shitheads who get all hot and bothered over such burnings. Rather than make an equivalence with money – which can actually save lives in its use and which for practical and non-magical purposes is agreed to substitute for “value” – why not make an equivalence with the dear old flag our countrymen fought and died for and blah blah blah. I think there was a recent CT thread or two on patriotism and it seems to me that guarding national symbolism is as stupid as the guarding of religious symbolism: if you’ve got the love-of-country/faith then you know that the symbols might be convenient tools of expression but they’re really meaningless next to what’s in your heart.
Maybe if those religious types stopped being obnoxious about forcing their religion on us – harassing gays, trying to rewrite abortion laws, trying to get creationism taught in public schools, maybe, just maybe, fewer people would be compelled to be obnoxious to them.
Just a thought.
Seth,
You want a longer list of rationalist garbage? Try the long 20th century.
I award you “One pointe Godwin” for your implicit reference.
Rumsfeld was a rationalist. The neocons are rationalists.
Neither neocons nor secular humanists believe in religion themselves.
But here’s the difference: secular humanists like Dawkins and Myers want to liberate people from irrational beliefs…
While neo-cons want to use religion, irrationality and symbolism to manipulate people to serve their ends.
This is the core of Straussian neo-conservatism, and the reason it’s utterly consistent with authoritarian atrocities.
ScentOfViolets re: Making the world a better place
ur doing it wrong.
From what I have read on his website, Myers’ often tends to what Steve Sailer calls “liberal creationism,” that is, the idea that evolution has no produced any variation between human populations.
So if we want to do something to offend him as much as his treatment of the communion wafers, how about desecrating a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr.? I’d like to see how all of the liberals who make fun of religion would react to having one of their icons demeaned.
I’m a secular humanist. The phrase I’d use to describe Dawkins & Myers et. al. is “proselytyzing athesist.”
Ooh, a Sailerite troll has appeared. Now the thread is complete.
Dsquared’s explanation of the rainbow is on par with “lightning is when God goes bowling” or the tooth fairy or something.
Would that it were so. Alas, Genesis 9:8-17.
“Maybe if those religious types stopped being obnoxious about forcing their religion on us –”
Wasn’t this episode sparked by a catolic who took a consecrated host to show is friends, and in response was threatened with death by Donohue-type zealots?
Why is Myers insinuating himself into an internal affair?
“Why is Myers insinuating himself into an internal affair?”
because crazy catholics went on national news and wahhhhed about it?
I heard about it in the news somewhere, not from my quarterly church letter…(yeah, I still get the thing, though I am about as feral a Catholic as one can be…and I married an Episcopalian..they have better wafers).
I think the point of the whole exercise was to make people look at the whole claim of transubsantiation afresh. To expose it as an absurdity in the modern world.
Colin Danby :
“PZM writes well about biology—he does interesting research and you can learn stuff. But he knows bupkis about religion, and his tiresome, troll-baiting rants on the subject are unproductive of insight not to say corrosive of discussion.”
You are assuming here that there are religious truths that one can know. That assumption is very much in dispute. One can meaningfully talk about the history of religions and the sociology of religion and even the competing ideas of religion, but any such knowledge is not religious knowledge so much as knowledge about religion.
A friend of mine knows a lot about Klingons and their ways and even writes notes to herself in Klingon. I do not have to be equally versed in “Klingon knowledge” to know that it is all made up. She knows it’s made up, too, but what if she didn’t….
Try for a moment to understand that non-believers, when confronted with the claim that they do not have sufficient theological knowledge to have an opinion, feel just as you would if my friend told you that you could not make dispute the truth of her Klingon knowledge because you lack the requisite knowledge.
You would, rightly, be justified in laughing at her assertion, and doing so would not make you a bigot. In fact, you might still be quite fond of her.
We really are laughing at you, usually behind your backs. We are not therefore bigots. And we are still quite fond of you.
So posphorious, just when exactly would be a good time to be obnoxious because a group of people insist on making their dogma into a law that I must follow? Ridiculing the belief of accident vs substance and transubstantiation, well, I can’t think of a much more transparently absurd belief to attack. “It’s not a symbol of the body of Christ? It’s the realthing_?
People who insist on being obnoxious about their beliefs shouldn’t profess surprise or outrage when people are being obnoxious right back. Here’s a little something from The Four Horsemen on just this subject.
Various (Ben et. al): fair enough re: the minorness of the lie. (Though I don’t buy this “myths are not lies” bullshit—if I tell someone something that I know is false, I’m lying to them. The Santa Claus business is acceptable only because it’s understood that children will eventually be told the truth—something that hardly applies to religious indoctrination! (But probably—hopefully—applies to the rainbow thing standing alone.))
But I don’t buy the constant claims (36, 44, 45) that religion is on an epistemic par with science, or that the empirical approach to the universe is just another form of faith, etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah—and I don’t think anyone does in good faith. Because that way lieth global skepticism, and it’s impossible to sustain that.
Sorry for the typo:
“make dispute the truth of her Klingon knowledge”
should read
“dispute the truth of her Klingon knowledge”
A couple of facts some of you commenters don’t seem to be aware of:
1. Professor Myers is not a “militant” athiest. He does not commit or endorse violence, even against religious people.
2. It is a crime to destroy or deliberately damage money in the USA.
3. Non-religious Americans, and scientific Americans, have PLENTY to be legitimately angry about. The ongoing effort by organized religion to pollute science classes with a theory of the supernatural. (Governor Jindal is a disgrace to the Rhodes Scholarship and should be forced to pay back the money Rhodes Trust spent on his education.) The abuse of science by right-to-lifers (see for instance http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/
). Government funding of “faith-based initiatives”. Religious prosletizing to captive audiences in prison.
4. Noen, you are right that myths are not lies. However, telling a child that a myth is literally true IS a lie. And science is not a religion.
I go back and forth on whether I approve of desecrating the Eucharist. On the one hand, it is certain to alienate at least some potential converts to non-religion. On the other hand, a shock is sometimes the best way to wake people up. And if anyone deserves to have their sacred symbols desecrated, it is the Catholic League (and muslims).
Speaking of muslims, can anyone explain to me why they have not reacted publically to his desecrating pages of the Koran? I am very surprised that he has not received muslim death threats. (Islam is, after all, the two-year-old child in the world’s family of religions.)
But speaking of asymmetry, perhaps you do need to think more about the differences between children and food.
That sounds like a decent suggestion.
A couple of facts some of you commenters don’t seem to be aware of:
I think this has something to do with that mean thing Noen said.
This thread has like three dissertations worth of material, for you enterprising young fieldworkers not going to Papua New Guinea. Awesome stuff.
I really thought I’d never see somebody recommend McIntyre again. It’s a look back at a lost world, seeing that appear mid-thread.
This post is very amusing. Finally, someone said it rather than requiring that we take umbrage on one tetchy side or the other. In a strange way, it was somewhat interesting for me as it suddenly dawned on me why tolerance isn’t some wishy—washy boring thing but a genuine civic virtue. I’ve thought little about tolerance over the years and sort of concluded it was sort of a minor wimpish virtue, entirely overshadowed by community or unity on the one hand and then intolerance for the truly icky. It’s clear to me now that tolerance is the best we can get and dang, I think we need it. There will be no friendly beer between the atheist and the priest at the local pub, as I was envisioning, in my naive way.
But if you want something to really sting, have a mass said in his name.
Regarding “Speaking of muslims, can anyone explain to me why they have not reacted publically to his desecrating pages of the Koran?” – the answer is because nobody in a similar position in the muslim world, as Bill Donohoe has in the Catholic world, has decided to make hay over it – yet.
I think you’re interpreting “PZ knows bupkis” about religion incorrectly; you can know an awful lot about religion without, per se, being a believer, understanding, at the very least, the extensive history involved, and even the sociology and psychology—and you can understand the latter two without, not to put too fine a point on it, being a prick about it.
Myers may know a great deal about religion historically, but I’ve tried to read his blog on multiple occasions—one of my friends is a great fan—and he consistently comes across as if the extent of his interest in religion both begins and ends with the conclusion that it’s unscientific and has demonstrably lead to bad things. Yes, this is more logical and, dare one say, enlightened than the religious followers whose interest in science begins and ends with the conclusion that it makes them uncomfortable and can lead to questions they’d rather not face, but bluntly, that’s an awfully low bar to beat.
“So posphorious, just when exactly would be a good time to be obnoxious because a group of people insist on making their dogma into a law that I must follow?”
When they actually try to force you to believe it. Nobody is forcing PZ Myers to believe in transubstantiation. But is it outrageous that the catholic church insist that catholics take the host seriously? Admittedly, the death threats are outrageous. . .but they were directed by catholics against a catholic. I fail to see that Myers has a dog in that fight.
In addition, the whole point of communion, as I understand it, is that non-catholics are NOT forced to take it. . . in fact they are not allowed to receive it. This is one article of the faith that is not forced upon the world. . . which is why Myers had to steal a wafer.
Intelligent design? Gay Marriage? Birth Control? All good reasons to reject the church and fight them tooth and nail.
But this was exactly the wrong battle to pick.
When this affair began I was pretty sure that PZ Myers had jumped the shark. Now I’m not so sure. I believe it was Dr. Tartakower who pointed out that every chess game is won because of a mistake, but sometimes the mistake is made by the winner.
Admittedly, the death threats are outrageous. . .but they were directed by catholics against a catholic. I fail to see that Myers has a dog in that fight.
Yes, you fail.
Daniel missed the boat, as did phosphorious (unless she was being tongue-in-cheek) and by a wide berth. “Nothing should be held sacred” refers (quite plainly) to no THING, rather than no ONE. P.Z. was mocking those who anthropomorphize (and thereby deify) crackers and books. Children, by contrast, are true moral subjects, not merely objects. You guys seem to have overlooked the entire point of this excercise. It was supposed to be a few mental laps, not a mental lapse.
Because one can easily separate blind faith in dogma re: crackers from issues such as evolution/ID, reproductive rights, and the proper definition of marriage. Hey, it ’s not as if the same faulty logic underlies all these contentious issues.
Unless of course, it does. Perhaps believing every ridiculous dogma that Rome vomits forth is really is the fundamental problem we are facing here. In which case, why not start with something patently ridiculous, like transubstantiation?
My take on the, err, evolution (sorry) of this incident is that it started out as a bit of snarking at a news item, like one sees on high-traffic blogs every day, and then escalated wildly. But you’d have to condemn a lot of blogging (which maybe one would want to do) to read too much into the origins.
“The Santa Claus business is acceptable only because it’s understood that children will eventually be told the truth”
Wait – what?
“Glaivester 07.26.08 at 12:32 am”
Oh crap, one of those.
“ what Steve Sailer calls “liberal creationism,” that is, the idea that evolution has no produced any variation between human populations.”
But of course, PZ and everyone else fully realizes that evolution has produced variations between human populations – lactose tolerance is a great big biggy, and then there’s skin color and all that, and any number of fairly obscure things, some just emerging in recent studies. What we don’t do is grasp any paper-thin excuse to believe that brown people are in general moronic subhumans, nor do we blindly accept “research” by (for example) people who had to be disciplined by their institution for wandering around a local shopping mall asking men to talk to him about their penises, and whose major contribution to “science” is a kind of racialized version of ‘The Three Bears’ .
“I fail to see that Myers has a dog in that fight.”
For years now I’ve been waiting for the right time to make a comment about ‘having a [member of the] Dominican [order] in that fight’. Sadly, this is not that time.
“Of course, he had to invade Iraq to pull it off . . .”
rea wins.
But this was exactly the wrong battle to pick
This makes no sense. Mocking the dogma – using ridicule as a weapon – has been used for literally millenia. Are you saying you don’t get this? I’ve made snarky comments myself pertaining to crackers and body parts when discussing the absurd opposition to gay marriage and other matters of doctrine. Things like, “Well, these people also believe a cracker can turn into a dead body and wine can turn into blood. I don’t think we need to take their views on anything concerning science seriously.”
I might also mention that my daughter was baptized in a Catholic church, her mother is Catholic, my mother is Catholic, about 3/4 of my whole family is Catholic . . . and not a single one believes that jive about ‘the blood and the body.’ So you’re wrong those counts as well.
I also detest this use of convenient proxys. If the church really found Donohue’s statements disagreeable, they could lean on him plenty hard. If the people who claim that what Donohue and his claque did was reprehensible, they could lean on their priests, bishops, etc. to do something about him. They haven’t done that to any extent that I’ve seen. I have seen a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that while Donohue may be behaving badly, there’s really nothing anyone can do about it.
As the Church Lady says, “How conveeeeeenient.”
It sure is great that God will no longer repeat the Great Flood which killed millions of innocent infants and children.
I believe it was Dr. Tartakower who pointed out that every chess game is won because of a mistake, but sometimes the mistake is made by the winner.
I don’t remember who said it, but the way I heard it was: “the winner of every chess game is the player who makes the next-to-the-last mistake.”
Thanks to Watts (106). I don’t know where Dave’s weird misreading (96) comes from.
One bit of background that’s missing from the discussion is that Donohue is a bully who actually gets people fired. His bluster actually kept Amanda Marcotte and another feminist blogger from working for the Edwards campaign, and he was trying to get a student expelled from a public university for mistreating a host.
It’s generally held that the best way to stop a bully is to stand up to him, which Myers did. Anything less than a threat to desecrate a wafer wouldn’t have done the job.
As for the differences between a consecrated wafer and a banknote: you can’t manufacture a banknote by casting a magic spell upon a blank slip of paper. It is not difficult to distinguish a banknote from a blank slip. The value of a banknote is a function of its scarcity. Better analogies, please.
Yer kidding, right, bad J? Myers’ stunt is an absolute gift to someone like Donohue. You want to “stand up,” make the case on principle, not long-winded rants and photos of your kitchen garbage.
SEK made a relevant point in a different context here:
http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/but-but-but%e2%80%94he-started-it/
Stirring up trolls, and then “claim[ing] to demonstrate the abiding truth about your political opponents via the behavior of trolls” is silly. Worse than silly.
Colin, I’m not saying that it was a wise or effective gesture, just pointing out its motivation. For what it’s worth, Ms. Marcotte was appreciative.
One of the comical aspects of this affair was the insistence of the angry Catholics, even as they were making death threats, that at least they weren’t as violent as the Muslims, a sentiment that one wit dubbed “fatwa envy”. So far, the Muslims don’t seem to have taken umbrage over Myer’s adding a few pages of an English copy of the Koran to his kitchen garbage.
What PZ Myers is doing is not to “make the case on principle”, but trying to move the “Overton window” of social acceptability regarding how nonbelievers can campaign against religious ideas. This is especially valuable with respect to those who instinctively want to be middle-of-the-road types.
“I might also mention that my daughter was baptized in a Catholic church, her mother is Catholic, my mother is Catholic, about 3/4 of my whole family is Catholic . . . and not a single one believes that jive about ‘the blood and the body.’ So you’re wrong those counts as well.”
This I don’t get: do they also reject the church’s position on gay marriage and abortion and so on? If so, in what sense are they catholic? Can vegans eat meat, and see nothing wrong with eating meat?
And if they reject that “jive” about transubstantiation, but accept all the other crap. . . then attacking transubstantiation obviously doesn’t make a difference.
Right?
Why did the Catholics feel the need to go after PZ at all? Can’t one assume that if God is real and Catholicism is the one true faith that if God does not punish PZ in the here and now, he surely will in the afterlife? Isn’t any sort of action taken against PZ either a display of your own lack of faith in God, or else a sort of unfair “double-jeopardy” where PZ is getting punished twice for the same crime?
The secular humanists’ Achilles Heel isn’t their reverence for any particular book or artefact – it’s their wildly disproportionate hatred of religious education.
Not true, for example I’m very much in favour of religious education :-)
ScentOfViolets
just when exactly would be a good time to be obnoxious because a group of people insist on making their dogma into a law that I must follow?
There is never a good time to be an obnoxious jerk. This is something you should have learned as a child. I am just as concerned about religious fundamentalism as anyone and believe we should fight against their influence. This is not how you do that. If you are really interested in fighting religious intolerance what you need to do is to organize and build alliances. Prof. Meyers has made that task more difficult and set us all back a few years.
Paul Gowder
I don’t buy this “myths are not lies” bullshit—if I tell someone something that I know is false, I’m lying to them.
You don’t even know what myths really are nor what their social purpose is. I grew up watching Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”. I’m sure you could find the book or the videos somewhere. I recommend them. I am a non-believer and yet I have great respect for how myths structure experience. If you are incapable of understanding how something can be neither true nor false then I don’t know how we can communicate. It’s a very inhuman thing this absolute belief in a binary world of black and white.
But I don’t buy the constant claims that religion is on an epistemic par with science.
That is not the claim being made. I’m not sure I can explain it for reasons given above.
Because that way lieth global skepticism
That is the big fear isn’t it? The yawning abyss that threatens to open beneath your feet.
bad Jim
Donohue is a bully who actually gets people fired. His bluster actually kept Amanda Marcotte and another feminist blogger from working for the Edwards campaign
Amanda sabotaged her own career. It was a huge mistake for the Edwards campaign to hire either of those two loose cannons. Lindsay Beyerstein said as much at the time and she was right. Politics is not a game for the self-righteous.
Jim Harrison
every chess game is won because of a mistake,
Life is not a game of chess. Do you really believe that that’s what life is all about? That this is all one big game and if you are really smart and make the right move you’ll come out on top? Really, I feel very sorry for you. You have some big lessons in store for you. I hope your paying attention.
Noen… I don’t even know where to start with this.
Joseph Campbell?! Nothing but warmed-over Jungian mysticism, with a dose of Taoism for spice.
Not knowing how something can be neither true or false? Let’s get the sorts of sentences we’re talking about clear here. In large part, we’re talking about simple declarative sentences, like “God made rainbows” or “some guy blew a trumpet and the city walls fell down,” or “the cracker turns into the body of Christ.” What kind of a meaning are you giving these sentences?
Sorry, was that inhuman? Such melodrama! And then there’s the “yawning abyss”… please.
[not the one at #96] I’d just like to say “wow!” Clearly CT is as vulnerable to religious warfare as every other corner of the interwebs. Into three-figure comments in less than 24 hrs, and we’re not even discussing Israel!
Best line so far: “I grew up watching Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”. ” Gee, it must have been fun in your house. Did you have special times of the day for the ceremony? A nice pointy hat?
Oy. So missing the point about the chess anecdotes. “It isn’t right. It’s not even wrong!”
Just to make things clear to the international audience: in America, only 73% of atheists don’t believe in god, according to a recent Pew survey. Roughly a quarter avow a naturalistic view of evolution; the rest agree that godidit.
Within that context, it’s not without value for someone to stand up and say “I don’t respect your religious magic and I’m not afraid of the power of your bully pulpit.* This is a free country.”
Dollar bill is an excellent analogy. Money is our God, people routinely kill and die for money, not to mention lie, cheat, and betray. Dollar bill is, of course, the symbol of our God’s body (or maybe it’s a Euro coin these days). The fact that there is a law against destroying it makes it even more conspicuous.
Outside this religion, in some lost Amazon tribe for example, it has no value whatsoever and the passions induced by it look like madness. Excellent analogy.
Of course hardly anyone would object to burning a dollar bill, but destroying, say, a million of them would’ve certainly caused a controversy, like that woman who died recently and left millions to her dog.
Forgot to mention that rainbows remind me of Ganymede.
Hmm… I don’t know if I dare add to a 130+ comment thread, but my first thought about hearing all of this is: desecrating the host is sooo 17th century. Perhaps PZ Meyers should read Sade’s “Lusts of the Libertines” for inspiration.
But all silliness aside, an important nitpick. Since Catholics believe in transubstantiation, desecrating a wafer is not desecrating a symbol, of Jesus, but the actual body of Jesus itself. That may seem like a minor distinction, but it actually is fairly important in terms of significance imported to it. Once the wafer has become Jesus, it becomes a powerful ritual object, and an integral part of religious practice. That’s why participation in communion in the Catholic church is heavily restricted to only those considered adequately qualified to handle the spiritual responsibilities of receiving the host. Although different, desecrating the host draws parallels to banning headscarves as “symbols of religious ostentation” in that “militantly atheist” nation France, in that the supporters of the ban confuse religious symbolism with religious practice.
Finally, yes, to me (an agnostic Lutheran), transubstantiation seems like a silly concept, and obviously the reaction of some Catholics has been extreme. But if it’s a central part of people’s belief system and it’s not actively bothering you or your lifestyle, I don’t see why anyone should enter someone else’s ritual space, commit several major violations (accepting communion w/out being a Catholic & running off with the host) and then brag about it on their blog unless they want to be considered a blowhard. Chances are if it weren’t Catholics being insulted, but Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc, there’d be a different reaction from many of those who denounce all religion as nothing more than mumbo jumbo and claptrap.
“wildly disproportionate hatred of religious education.”
Idiot
Britta,
Actually insults to buddhists and the ilk are pretty common among religious churches here in the U.S (e.g some of the baptist churches) and also by catholics (e.g the pope). However, there is not particularly much outrage about it.
noen,
Whatever you may think about the wisdom of Mr Myers in getting into this fracas, I think he is really the victim here and does not deserve what he is getting. There is little point in blaming him as many others have done. I also think that there are a lot of nasty things about religious beliefs that go against the grain of many who may not subscribe to them, but their feelings are rarely given the weight you seem to ascribe to those catholics who may have been offended. There is a clear double standard here, and I think a lot of the criticism he gets from otherwise rational people implicitly subscribes to this double standard by accepting the rules of “politeness” about religious belief.
It’s good for children to be lied to by adults. It’s how they learn not to trust them.
Cabalamat , your cartoon teacher is also being untruthful. Muslims believe in the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. I think the resurrection is explicitly mentioned in the Koran.
But if you want something to really sting, have a mass said in his name.
yeah, but that would be a bit like overkill – at the end of the day, it was just a fricking cracker.
Full circularity achieved. Can we stop now?
Kris—It’s one thing to make fun of a religious group, it’s another to attend a religious ceremony, lie, violate ritual space, steal an artifact and make fun of it. If you went to a Buddhist temple, made off with something, and desecrated it on your blog, I’d assume you were being a bit of an asshole.
If you went to a Buddhist temple, made off with something, and desecrated it on your blog, I’d assume you were being a bit of an asshole.
Yes, but he starts with accusing Catholics of being assholes. Though not recently, which kinda makes his righteous indignation less convincing.
“at the end of the day, it was just a fricking cracker.”
But as touched on above, if it’s just a fricking cracker, he did something far worse than sacrilege – he wasted food. If my grandmother was still around, I think she’d be sending him death threats. Or at least highly guilt-inducing letters.
And as for ripping pages out of books . . .