PZ Myers has gone and gotten himself embroiled in another one of those imbroglios. For those of you who don’t trouble to read any other blogs, the story began with the report of a student in Florida who smuggled a Communion wafer — the Body of Christ, to Catholics — out of Mass. This led to something of an overreaction on the part of some local believers, who referred to the stunt as a “hate crime,” and the student even received death threats. (You remember the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says “Blessed are those who exterminate those who insult Me,” right?)
PZ was roused to indignation by the incident, and wrote a provocative post in which he volunteered to do grievous harm to Communion wafers, if he could just get his hands on any.
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 … 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.
But the thing that took the whole mess to another level was the intervention of Bill Donohue, whose Catholic League represents the very most lunatic fringe of the Church. Donohue, who specializes in being outraged, contacted the administration at the University of Minnesota, as well as the state legislature. Later deciding that this level of dudgeon wasn’t quite high enough, Donohue soon after upped the ante, prompting a delegate to the Republican National Convention to demand additional security, as the delegates felt physically threatened by PZ and his assembled hordes. (The Republican convention will be held in the Twin Cities, about 150 miles away from PZ’s university in Morris, Minnesota.)
There is a lot of craziness here. People are sending death threats and attacking someone’s employment because of hypothetical (not even actual) violence to a wafer. Even for someone who is a literal believer in transubstantiation, threatening violence against someone who mocks your beliefs doesn’t seem like a very Christian attitude. Donohue and his friends are acting like buffoons, giving free ammunition to people who think that all religious believers are nutjobs. But it gets him on TV, so he’s unlikely to desist.
However.
We should hold our friends to a much higher standards than we hold our adversaries. There is no way in which PZ is comparable to the folks sending him death threats. I completely agree with him on the substantive question — it’s just a cracker. It doesn’t turn into anyone’s body, and there’s nothing different about a “consecrated” wafer than an unconsecrated one — the laws of physics have something to say about that.
But I thought his original post was severely misguided. It’s not a matter of freedom of speech — PZ has every right to post whatever opinions he wants on his blog, and I admire him immensely for his passionate advocacy for the cause of godlessness. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And there’s a huge difference between arguing passionately that God doesn’t exist, and taking joy in doing things that disturb religious people.
Let me explain this position by way of a parable, which I understand is the preferred device in these situations. Alice and Bob have been friends for a long time. Several years ago, Alice gave birth to a son, who was unfortunately critically ill from the start; after being in intensive care for a few months, he ultimately passed away. Alice’s most prized possession is a tiny baby rattle, which was her son’s only toy for the short time he was alive.
Bob, however, happens to be an expert on rattles. (A childhood hobby — let’s not dig into that.) And he knows for a fact that this rattle can’t be the one that Alice’s son had — this particular model wasn’t even produced until two years after the baby was born. Who knows what mistake happened, but Bob is completely certain that Alice is factually incorrect about the provenance of this rattle.
And Bob, being devoted to the truth above all other things, tries his best to convince Alice that she is mistaken about the rattle. But she won’t be swayed; to her, the rattle is a sentimental token of her attachment to her son, and it means the world to her. Frankly, she is being completely irrational about this.
So, striking a brave blow for truth, Bob steals the rattle when Alice isn’t looking. And then he smashes it into many little pieces, and flushes them all down the toilet.
Surprisingly to Bob, Alice is not impressed with this gesture. Neither, in fact, are many of his friends among the rattle-collecting cognoscenti; rather than appreciating his respect for the truth, they seem to think he was just being “an asshole.”
I think there is some similarity here. It’s an unfortunate feature of a certain strand of contemporary atheism that it doesn’t treat religious believers as fellow humans with whom we disagree, but as tards who function primarily as objects of ridicule. And ridicule has its place. But sometimes it’s gratuitous. Sure, there are stupid/crazy religious people; there are also stupid/crazy atheists, and black people, and white people, and gays, and straights, and Republicans, and Democrats, and Sixers fans, and Celtics fans, and so on. Focusing on stupidest among those with whom you disagree is a sign of weakness, not of strength.
It seems to me that the default stance of a proud secular humanist should be to respect other people as human beings, even if we definitively and unambiguously think they are wrong. There will always be a lunatic fringe (and it may be a big one) that is impervious to reason, and there some good old-fashioned mockery is perfectly called for. But I don’t see the point in going out of one’s way to insult and offend wide swaths of people for no particular purpose, and to do so joyfully and with laughter in your heart. (Apparently the litmus test for integrity vs. hypocrisy on this issue is how you felt about the Mohammed cartoons published in a Danish newspaper a couple of years ago; so you can read my take on that here, and scour the text for inconsistencies.)
Actually, I do see the point in the gratuitous insults, I just don’t like it. Like any other controversial stance, belief in God or not divides people into camps. And once the camps are formed, the temptations of tribalism are difficult to resist. We are smart and courageous and wise; the people who disagree with us are stupid and cowardly and irrational. And it’s easy enough to find plenty of examples of every combination, on any particular side. There is nothing more satisfying than getting together and patting ourselves on the back for how wonderful we are, and snorting with derision at the shambling oafishness of that other tribe over there.
My hope is that humanists can not only patiently explain why God and any accompanying metaphysical superstructure is unnecessary and unsupported by the facts, but also provide compelling role models for living a life of reason, which includes the capacity for respectful disagreement.
I say all this with a certain amount of care, as there is nothing more annoying than people who think that professions of atheism or careful arguments against the existence of God are automatically offensive. Respectful dialogue cuts both ways; people should be able to explain why they don’t believe in the supernatural or why they believe. Even if both atheists and believers are susceptible to the temptations of tribalism, that doesn’t make them equivalent; the atheists have the advantage of being right on the substance. Richard Dawkins and his friends have done a great service to our modern discourse, by letting atheism get a foot in the door of respectable stances that one has to admit are held by a nontrivial fraction of people — even if they stepped on a few toes to do it. But stepping on toes should be a means to an end; it shouldn’t be an end in itself.
I think that Sean’s parable about the rattle is bordering on “emotional exploitation” (did he really need to resort to dead babies?). A better comparison might be to a baseball (=cracker) that was given to Alice by her favorite player (=priest). I think everyone would agree that Bob is an asshole if he threw Alice’s ball into a river, even though “the laws of physics” would say that Alice’s ball is no different from another ball.
However, there is still the fact that Catholics have a history of doing some pretty bad thins in the name of their crackers (and they still do to this day), so I have to say that PZ isn’t quite as much an asshole as Bob.
If you try to say I can’t marry who I’d like because your cracker said so, I’m not an asshole to say I’ll flush your cracker down the toilet.
Point taken, Sean. I agree with your sentiment (I won’t be flushing any crackers) but I think PZ’s actions don’t quite fit into the category of “piss[ing] people off solely in celebration of your own superiority” since the Catholics who overreacted first were sort of asking for it.
I think Sean (and Other Sean, who I must thank for his interesting perspective) are on the ball with this one.
I am an atheist. My mom is of the “Catholic on holidays” variety of religious, and one of the biggest double-takes of my life was realizing people really believe a wafer can be anything other than a wafer and not just a slight symbolic gesture or something like that. It’s silly, if you ask me.
But at the same time, being an atheist does not mean I do not feel compassion for my fellow human beings. They think it’s more than a cracker, but so what? It’s not like I’m ever going to go up to my very Catholic grandmother and say “you’re silly for receiving Communion” because while I might be right she’d just get upset and I don’t like to upset those I love.
And while there will always be idiots out there who think a death threat is appropriate in this circumstance (and I’m sure everyone reading this agrees that it isn’t), we all know most Catholics are not that imbecile. It’s not like anyone in that mentality is going to come around and say “by golly, you were right and I was wrong!” anytime soon anyway, especially upon seeing you destroy a wafer.
I think the analogy is misleading for a different reason. The trauma of losing a child is different from the trauma of — well, living as a Catholic. Bob is an asshole for destroying Alice’s rattle because her sentimental attachment to that rattle stems from the psychological torment of losing a child, and because his actions are likely to make that torment worse. I don’t see why Catholics would be so emotionally fragile. P.Z. Myers blog post might not have been especially sensitive, but he’s certainly not an asshole for having written it.
The general point about respectfulness and our tendency toward tribalism is well taken.
Completely disagree, and here’s why – PZ’s not mocking the believers here, but the belief regarding the wafers.
He’s not even focusing on the believers at all.
If it weren’t for the parable nitpickery, this thread would be very interesting. That part’s quite comical.
I certainly agree with Aloysius that we (the humanist cadre) have absolutely no reason to be polite about our disagreement with the Catholic Church, or any other fundamentalist sect that tries, as an organization, to impose its will on non-member individuals and/or society at large. The views and internal policies of the Catholic Church would be none of my business, and safe from ridicule and abuse, if the Catholic Church and its radical members would *completely stop* attempting to impose their worldviews on the rest of us through legislation and, occasionally, intimidation. Until that time, they are, quite frankly, my mortal enemies – speaking in an absolutely nonviolent but nonetheless completely serious way. I hold them in absolute contempt and will make no secret of this.
I know a fair number of people that I really like (generally members of my extended family) who are very religious. My ability to communicate peacefully with them on matters of religion is related to the level of social activism associated with their church. So I basically have no problem with (for example) Methodists and am quite friendly towards Buddhism and Unitarianism; none of these groups have ever tried to restrict my rights or those of my fellow citizens, or not to my knowledge. For this reason I accord these faiths a basic degree of respect and acceptance, since they have had the courtesy to do the same for me.
Interestingly, this places the Scientologists in a grey zone. For the most part, I have no problem with this group because of the above logic. To me their doctrine seems no more or less bizarre than the Catholic one – and no, Other Sean, that is not hyperbole, I honestly think they are about equivalent. But my main point is that my thoughts about their doctrine are irrelevant – they haven’t picked a fight with me, so I have no problem with them…except for the fact that they have been exercising their worldly power in the form of censorship, squashing critics online and in real life. That’s very problematic behavior and I hope it stops. That’s the grey zone I mentioned. But other than that, I consider Scientology a *much* less harmful religion than Catholicism or fundamentalist protestantism, since it infringes less on the liberties of nonmembers.
The Catholic Church, and the Southern Baptists, and other fundamentalist churches of their ilk, have picked a fight and kept up the attack day in and day out. If this were not the case, it would be quite rude to insult their beliefs, and I wouldn’t do it, at least in public. However, they keep trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, and I’m not having it. Their own actions place their beliefs in the public sphere, and then they have the temerity to be insulted when we mock those beliefs for the crude, primitive, delusional nonsense they so patently are?
Other Sean, if you want us to stop attacking your beliefs, stop your damned church from intruding on the lives of nonmembers. Until then, you have nothing to complain about. We’re rude? Tough. Your church is a barbaric band of bullies and you are guilty by association.
PZ may be a jackass, but he’s our jackass.
The power of an idea and the power reserved for some object of veneration by tribalist or cultists is theirs to administer as they see fit. Just as there is unspoken relativism in otherwise doctrinaire and absolutist notions of religiosity, it is the responsibility of those not so afflicted to do no harm.
Other Sean:
“His actions are different because his intention is to mock, insult, and offend Catholics in a way that he apparently knows is very hurtful to us.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong – almost as wrong as your comment that you support Sean’s right to “believe” as he does (he doesn’t believe in atheism; atheism is the LACK of belief, period).
PZ is mocking the BELIEF, not the believers. World of difference.
In a world running out of cheap energy and clean water and farmable land and harvestable oceans, the stakes are too high to accord any respect to intellectual and moral laziness in any realm of knowledge.
Sure, we all believe in a wafer of some kind to make sense and meaning of the world, and I’m incredibly fortunate that my bulwark against the darkness is science.
I thank you for writing this post, because it’s impossible not to be part of this conversation (although many mistakenly imagine they are “above” it), as it is the invisible undercurrent of every conversation and touches every public and private decision.
This is the principle conflict of our time, and we better figure out that this is the real enemy (not teenage terrorists in pajamas in a desert 12,000 miles away) before the lights start going out.
The recent New Yorker cartoon lampooning the right-wing’s portrayal of the Obama’s as secret revolutionaries and closet Muslims — should be shocking in its accurate portrayal of the right-wing as utterly un-American in its values, let alone un-human. But this isn’t what the current conversation on the cartoon is remotely about.
Even in its simple-minded mythology of broad-brush homilies, America was built by revolutionaries seeking religious freedom who had no respect for nationalist impulses, standing armies, aristocratic exceptionalism, corporatist thugs, or a specific flavor of god. For a while we were those ingenious Yanks.
I’m beyond tired of the inroads made by right-wing and religious fanatics who can’t perform basic human functions, like write a song, solve a quadratic equation, tend a garden, love a partner, steward even their own small portion of the world without utterly savaging it, and raise children to do the same.
I have revolution in my blood and I think you should, too. I’m not going to give the world to thugs in uniforms (police state or church) with wafers and magically-written texts who’ve spent the last decades (I’m thinking of Jimmy Carter’s 1979 speech) ensuring that the basic science we needed to be doing to get to energy independence, with efficient solar cells and fuel algaes and fusion, would be here now.
It’s not merely that these people are not on our side. They’re committed to a path that destroys the enlightened parts of the world and impoverishes what’s left. They send women home. They kill gays. They burn libraries. They close schools. They believe god should be in government, shellfish are an abomination, and anybody who disagrees should be stoned.
Jung wrote a great deal about the religious function. It’s time you scientists started to understand, as the economists are finally beginning to understand, that we are not a rational species, and absent considerable assistance, we make lousy decisions.
PZ Meyers gets this, and is willing to step outside the ivory tower of soft-toned elitist disagreement and go toe-to-toe, on an almost daily basis, with these ignorant creeps in the language they understand. Somebody has to fight the slime mold in the basement or it takes over.
Both of your voices are needed, but please do not add your voice to those who hit him from the rear.
The easiest thing in the world to do is to make religious people angry. The reason is that they believe in magic, and deep down or subconsciously they know this. Whether it is water into wine, pumpkins into coaches or a wafer into the body of Christ categorically the ideas are all the same. Stripping away the theological or mythological particularities these all amount to supernatural or magical interventions that transform one thing into another. I suspect that deep down in the subterranian regions of the most ardent believer in a religion there is some neural circuitry saying “it ain’t so.” It takes little argumentation to get that little circuit to scream loudly. When that happens these people get really mad.
This is one reason there is so much fuss over evolution. They hate the whole idea because to them what this does is to get that “it ain’t so” voice talking loud in their heads. This can be accomplished without the antics of PZ Myers. I suppose that PZ wants to demonstrate he could use a eucharistic wafer as toilet paper without thunderbolts and lightning zapping him. That undoubtedly will be the case, but his demonstration may fail to change many minds. In the end believers just build an even bigger wall to try and seal off that “it ain’t so” voice.
Lawrence B. Crowell
One thing I allways have problems with in cases like Myers finds himself in now and that is if self-censorship is a good thing? Now if he had decided not to post this post like he did, would he then be practising self-censorship? When is self-censorship a good thing? What is the difference of self-censorhip and being polite?
I am just wondering because I recall vagualy that the first sign of a totalitarian system is that people start to practice self-censurship. But there has to be some kind of a balance between being polite in conversation and self-censurship that doesn’t lead to a totalitarian system, right?
Just wondering.
Cheers
Oli
“There is a lot of craziness here. People are sending death threats and attacking someone’s employment because of hypothetical (not even actual) violence to a wafer.”
That is the funniest thing I have read in a long time!!
I read PZ a lot. He runs a great blog. I hope this doesn’t affect his blogging or his job either!!
This is insane to the nth power
There is I think a difference between debunking something, or showing where its argument fails, and engaging in silly stunts. It is one thing to debunk a fortune teller, but another to commit her crystal ball to a hammer. The line is a bit thin. When it comes to the cartoons depicting Mohammad or Islam in an unflattering light that is acceptable. It is another to enter a Mosque and spill pig’s blood — which BTW you might not come out of alive.
These things are magic, and just as Linus has a right to wait for the great pumpkin on Halloween night, so too people have a right to believe in supernatural ideas. Convincing society that the world does not work by magic, even if told it does by ancient texts, is going to be a long term project. This will take continued research to roll back the event horizon of ignorance, education to instill proper thinking skills, and effort to create a social sense of what might be called natural philosophy. Little stunts will not accomplish this.
Lawrence B. Crowell
On the contrary, it’s an essential feature. Civilisation was created by rational thinkers, not magical thinkers. Progress, science, democracy, equality, liberty, etc, are a result of people thinking rationally and logically about the world, reasoning and questioning, testing and observing, abstracting and synthesising. Religious people are not fully human because they refuse to use or genuinely lack the critical faculties which define a modern human being. So why should we treat them with respect when they haven’t earned it? While they continue with their irrational belief in gibberish and nonsense, they fully deserve our ridicule and contempt. Oh, and to the god-believers I would add eco-zealots, animal-rights activists, right-wing libertarians, crackpots & conspiracy theorists, and New Age spiritualists.
As a child, George Gamow swiped a communion wafer and brought it home to examine it under a microscope. Finding it identical to a common cracker, and not at all like human tissue, he immediately rejected his religion.
If someone could demonstrate that a consecrated wafer is in fact transubstantiated, then I suppose that messing with it could be criminal, just as tampering with a corpse is considered a crime. But as Gamow found, it is just a stupid cracker.
Of course Gamow wasn’t RC, he was Eastern Orthodox — maybe their magic incantations don’t take?
Joshua’s comparison of the communion wafer to a baseball is a little silly. The consecration of the Eucharist is the central ritual of Catholicism. It is at the very heart of the Church’s theology and ritual. Anyone who’s been to a Catholic church — especially the older ones, in Europe and elsewhere — has seen the elaborate paraphernalia that accompanies the Eucharist. There are chapels where a consecrated host is placed in a monstrance and venerated twenty-four hours a day — someone is always there to worship, not the wafer, but God through the wafer (the “perpetual adoration”).
Now I agree that to take the Church’s dogma about the communion wafer literally is silly. It doesn’t become Jesus’s body; it’s just a cracker. Well, so what? If a little kid believed, and told you, that a favorite stuffed animal had magical powers, would you grab the animal, spit on it, and tear it to shreds in front of him? So maybe religious believers are, when it comes to rational understanding of the world, not much better than little kids. It’s still creepy to get your kicks by pissing other people off.
My difficulty with both sides of the religion/secular humanism argument is that both treat the other like a problem to be fixed. Religious belief is not something to be eradicated like smallpox anymore than secular humanism is. There are extremist on both sides, crazies in both camps, social problems that arise from both world views. Both points of view have a value and sometimes they even (gasp!) co-exist quite comfortably. The only reason mockery is called for in any argument is as a corrective mirror, but it seldom functions that way. People don’t like to be mocked, so they tune it out and the message is lost.
Listening to arguments like these, I’m reminded of the opera lovers I know, so many of whom are completely convinced that, “of course you’ll love this! You just have to hear this person, that aria, this conductor, see that production! It’s so wonderful! How could you not love it? I love it!” Opera is a matter of taste, beliefs are a matter of conscious choice. No amount of sincere insistence of any kind is going to change either. Changes in belief happens from the inside out.
And from the disinterested distance of someone who’s in the process of making changes in my beliefs, both sides of this argument sound too damn much alike. Richard Dawkins has not done the secular humanists any favors. He’s your Oral Roberts.
Oops.. Sorry, I meant the Jurassic period!
I have the deepest respect for your even handed response to this ridiculous debacle, Sean. I’d mail you a gift-wrapped box of Wheat Thins if I knew where you lived or thought it appropriate.
Initially my opinion was very similar to Sean’s, but, as satire, it works. PZ’s post came off as somewhat childish and petty, but the reaction to it was spectacularly obtuse. In the end, you have people equating desecrating a cracker with violence against actual people, not to mention threatening violence. Heck, they’re calling out additional security for the Republican National Convention (which has what again to do with Catholicism?) for fear of cracker stealing. That puts PZ firmly in an old tradition of satire – offending people by pointing out the absurdities of their position and watching the lengths they’ll go to avoid admitting they’re wrong. Which, to be clear, they are: crackers don’t transform into the flesh of Jesus.
My hope is that humanists can not only patiently explain why God and any accompanying metaphysical superstructure is unnecessary and unsupported by the facts, but also provide compelling role models for living a life of reason, which includes the capacity for respectful disagreement.
Say what? Considering the uncertain grasp we have of basic issue of why there is a universe/s, why it/they is this way and not another way, and what that happens to be very convenient for life, somewhere at least – there is no excuse for saying that. (And the statement references the general philosophical concept of a First Cause, not any particular traditional conception. The latter are irrelevant to the sort of argument folks like Plato and Aristotle would have about why something exists, is like this, etc.)
As I explained before, using fundamental rules about the way things act to explain phenomena they are involved in does not explain the rules themselves. I note, critically, there is no explanation here (patient or otherwise) “why God and any …. is unnecessary and unsupported by the facts.” I’ve seen people try here and in Pharyngula, etc., and I can’t prove they are wrong. But, I and others can tangle them up in enough issues about modal realism, existential selection problem, etc., to show there is no way they can get away with pretending they can justifiably make such statements. It’s basically a very tricky question with an unknown and unproven answer, and we can’t even prove whether it’s provable/meaningful or not.
PS: What PZM and the like are doing to needle religious believers is very tacky and immature, aside from the issue of “who’s right” about ultimate issues or even evolution etc. I am not a “religious believer” because I use philosophical reasoning and not traditions or revelations to find likely truths about ultimate issues. Such people are left out of the debate, except for big figures like Paul Davies. The culture likes bi-polar oppositions; hence e.g. liberals/conservatives but forget libertarianism, etc.
BTW, most ADers (Anthropic Design aficionados, like me) don’t want the FC needing to meddle in the universe once that’s here (ID?) because the more the universe can accomplish on its own, the more clever the AD was to begin with. As for multiple universes, bring me one in a test tube or at least show us a picture, literal measurement that’s not just an interpretative claim of what happens here, etc, and I’ll respect that hypocritically unpositivist dodge a lot more. The whole issue is full of ironies like that, and the hard-liners at both ends don’t get that and aren’t helping us understand ultimate questions.
PZ’s remarks aren’t a very good strategy for spreading freethought and atheism though. (Not that I think that was his intent.) There’s a place for ridicule, but it’s a mechanism that divides people. You have to make sure that the people you’re trying to convince are on your side of the divide; you aren’t going to convince the people you’re ridiculing.
I have no problem with PZ as a provocateur. I just think he shouldn’t waste his ammunition. It isn’t clear what he was trying to accomplish except getting a rise out of the usual suspects. If he had a book coming out or was attacking a particular person or policy it might have made some sense. It’s one thing to poke a mule with a stick to get the cart rolling. It’s another thing to poke a mule with a stick so that it kicks you.
P.S. My problem with PZ is that he is a puritan.
Other Sean: if you know something is very important to someone, then that should be enough for you to choose not to mess with it.
devicerandom: Why?
A mature and ethical person wouldn’t need to ask. Basic consideration for other people’s feelings should be enough reason to avoid offending them unless you fell compelled to make an ethical “statement” to the greater good (e.g., offend people who believe in reflexively supporting our leaders, because you want to fight the use of torture, etc.)
I think the appeal of this irreverency chic stuff is to adolescent types who think it’s funny to play practical jokes and wear tee shirts with smart-ass lines on them, etc; it’s the South Park kiddies. Grow up. It isn’t actually funny to grown ups. It’s just boorish and reinforces the image (very accurate IMHO but why advertise it?) that nowadays, skeptics and new atheists are often snooty brat types and not gentlemanly doubters like Bertrand Russell. Worse, they indulge contradictory ironies like doubting a First Cause beyond the universe, but casually throwing around “multiple universes” as excuses for not needing God. Their forbears realized that consistency meant just not believing in anything at all we couldn’t find. Both of those developments oddly parallel what happened to political conservatives: Note the devolution from Barry Goldwater and even Reagan to Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage; their nastiness and their odd embrace of contradictory notions about strict construction, expanded executive powers, etc.
Aloysius, I did not intend for this to become a discussion of the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, but allow me to respond to your comment.
I think that Christians today make to big of a deal about religious teachings about sexuality, especially in regards to homosexuality. It is hardly mentioned in the Bible, and homosexual practices are discussed only briefly in the Catholic catechism, where it is put into the same category as masturbation, pornography, and fornication. It is not singled out as being worse than any other sort of sin.
There is also a paragraph about the need for homosexual people to be “accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and stating that “Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
I don’t expect you to agree with these teachings, but maybe you will see them as less bigoted than you thought they were. Or maybe not. And it is probably the case that people use the Church’s teachings to justify their own prejudice, but bigotry is by no means the official teaching of the Catholic Church.