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.
Who says “dirty-mouthed” these days, anyway?
Oh and, UMM isn’t “spending band-width” on Pharyngula.
Janus, not everyone is a “hip” South Park fan and why should they be? Some people are actually grown ups, and please don’t lay down a pretentious gripe about pretentious people etc. who think they’re better than “everyone” else, yadda … BTW, I didn’t mean UMM literally needs to spend extra money supporting the extra metaphorical sewage going through the “Intertubes”, it’s more a case of the support they give in esteem, the reputation etc. (Should I be surprised that you took it in a literal, technogeek sense and didn’t see the larger aesthetic?)
Wait, sorry – South Park actually is a funny and clever show I can enjoy for what it is, I should say instead: not everyone believes that style is acceptable everywhere else as well. I’m not as stodgy as some might think from when I get really turned off. I got down against SP ever since Andrew Sullivan promoted the “South Park conservatives” which I think means Limbaugh, Micheal Savage ? Coulter, etc. and I don’t like them.
(I’ve posted a lot so I’ll try to keep a low profile for awhile.)
Neil,
I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about in the first half of your post.
As for the second half, well OF COURSE I understood that by “band-width”, you meant the support UMM gives in esteem, the reputation, etc. In fact, that is also what I meant by “band-width” in my own post. What made you think otherwise? I mean, it’s perfectly obvious, isn’t it?
Neil,
you’ve made a second post before I hit the submit reply button. I think I understand what you were talking about in the first half of your previous post a bit better now. I’m glad you approve of South Park, although I don’t watch that show myself.
I think keeping a low profile for a while is a good idea. You wouldn’t want to waste band-width, or anything.
For anyone still reading this –
Webster Cook was impeached from his student government position last week. An official investigation by the Legislative, Judicial and Rules Committee is underway.
Well Trace, I think the key focus was on “rudeness” and offense and it may or may not be appropriate to force resignations etc. when someone misspeaks etc. I wondered if Don Imus should really have needed to resign for his racist remarks, or just apologize. His critics said, he’d talked like that before. It is ironic in this case that “PC” is said to be a liberal excess, yet here Webster Cook is mostly defended by liberals.
BTW, I don’t blame the moderators for removing my post where I quoted (even with asterisks) some of the language from another thread on Pharyngula where PZ asked for contributions of insults about creationist crank Ken Ham. Likely it wasn’t a good idea to put up. I was bitter about the original, but I realize and need to remember there’s no need to be so graphic. But that just goes to show how vulgar that thread was. Inviting ridicule etc. of traditionalists is not the way to go, and reinforces an image of arrogant modernist vulgarians. Like I asked before, what would Bertrand Russell do, or maybe even Plato?
(And, given a third comment in a short time and several elsewhere, this is just replacement for that and I’ll let it all go for awhile.)
“I just think they’re wrong, and am happy to explain why in enormous detail.”
No you aren’t. Your “enormously detailed” explanation of why you think transubstantiation is false consisted of a passing reference to parapsychology. Transubstantiation has nothing to do with parapsychology. It also has nothing to do, according to Catholics, with the laws of physics. As one poster mentioned the law of physics deal with the accidents of the wafer, not the substance. So the theory of transubstantiation makes no predictions that can be tested in a physics experiment.
Whatever.
PZ Myers is an idiot. He may or may not be a good scientist; I don’t know. But his philosophy is silly & absurd.
His campaign for atheism is not motivated by any kind of rational bried that can be made for atheism. This silly little affair just illustrates how much his crusade owes to malice & bile.
Just to pipe up with my 2cents…
As a Catholic, I completely understand the non-believer’s (and I REALLY don’t mean that in a perjorative sense, I promise!) irritation with the tenet of Transubstantiation. Of COURSE it’s not “testable” and yes, I see who one can draw a parallel with the “pseudoscientific” claims of other religions and, of course, kooks, cranks and woo-mongers (i.e. “it’s not scientifically testable so it MUST be true!!”)
The big difference is that Catholic’s do not claim that its untestability PROVES it, in the way that kranks do. We simple shrug and say “it cannot be tested; indeed all tests show it to be false. And yet we continue to believe it.” We do not hold up a scientific test proving the host to be just bread, the wine to be just fermetned grape juice as if the lackof science’s ability to demonstrate anything other than their physical makeup is direct evidence of its veracity.
Catholicism is a relatively scientific belief (oddly)… it accepts evolution, the ancient universe, Big Bang theory, genetics, pretty much the entire canon of modern science. Indeed, some of the breakthroughs in these areas were MADE by Catholic priests (Mendel anyone?)
We believe what we believe, because of faith; science shows that in PHYSICAL terms the host remains unchanged, but that is what Catholic theologians have already said for several centuries now.
And FWIW… I think the Catholics calling for physical harm against Meyers, and the threats against Mr. Cooke are reprehensible; that is NOT what our faith is, or should ever be about.
Bit of a late comer here
The problem with the rattle analogy is that the rattle would never have been used to justify mass murder. Some symbols, no matter how beloved by certain people, need to be disrespected and the people who love them need to be offended. Simply because the history of said symbol is full of horror and blood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_desecration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard#Accusations_of_host_desecration
The point has three shortcomings:
1. The wafer is handed out with the intention that it be destroyed. What the student did was not destroy it according to a certain ritual. So anything about property damage is not analogous.
2. This is not making a point about a crazy extreme subsection of religious people, but is making a point about the standard belief of the religion.
3. Point 2 of course does not say that it isn’t still an asshole move, but it’s also important to remember that religion is an extremely powerful institution in the U.S. and the world. This isn’t someone picking on poor Johnny the little mentally retarded kid down the street. This is an act that highlights the bizarreness of a powerful force that has damaged the lives of many other people for centuries, and the reaction this prompted might have some people question why they hold such great influence and are considered reasonable by polite society.
Clayton C., you may have a point. However, note it’s a fallacy to think, that using false (or even true) accusations of X for nefarious purposes does not justify the actual doing of X. As for your basic point, let’s go further: what other institutions, “forces” etc. maybe need to be challenged for being harmful? Maybe filter that through the idea that what should be ridiculed is the direct harmful actions of an institution, not the common ritual of shared meaningfulness that is the very basis of the belief and the community thereof.
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Unusually interesting, and I hope no one will be offended if I say I think I stumbled on this for a reason. You don’t often find a secular humanist who is willing to provide some respect for beliefs he/she disagree’s with, and while I despise the term tolerance, I think there is something the Christian community could learn from this, as well. Thanks Sean, for giving me something to think over.
“Focusing on stupidest among those with whom you disagree is a sign of weakness, not of strength. “
Myer’s doesn’t just do this with the religious. He does it with any broad group he has a disagreement with. Like libertarians.