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 agree that post #13 is a much closer analogy to the events as they happened.
I disagree entirely Sean’s construal of this. There is indeed no redeeming value to the paragraph of text quoted from Myers’ blog post. If that paragraph existed in a vacuum it would truly be an ugly, juvenile display of contempt for ones fellows.
Context matters though. Here that context is calls from the Catholic League for the expulsion of a student for not eating his wafer, and mad claims that the student committed a hate crime and that his actions amount to kidnapping. The boy’s even received death threats.
There is indeed a need to be sensitive and courteous. There is also a time to stand up in solidarity: I don’t share Myers’ apparent revulsion / hatred for religious symbols, but this isn’t the time for THAT debate. This is the time to say ‘I refuse to discuss religious tolerance with a thug and a bully like Donahue.’
*I* am irritated enough by the behavior of Donahue’s thugs that I’m half tempted to buy a wafer on ebay, masticate it thoroughly then mail the results to Mr Donahue. He has no bloody business demanding a student’s expulsion for trivialities like these.
Once moderate Catholics have taken up the cry to marginalize the Catholic League on this matter I’ll gladly join them in criticizing PZ Myers for his occasional boorishness on matters religious.
What makes this whole episode farcical, BTW, is that there is no substantive evidence from Cook that he ever received death threats in the first place. Despite the hype of the headlines PZ linked to, and the Fox anchorwoman leading with Cook ‘fearing’ for his life, we don’t have any evidence he was threatened with death. We have one student who threatened to break into his apartment and steal the wafer back.
I have gleaned from some other Catholic blogs that Cook is well known on campus for opposing the support of the Campus Ministries on the university grounds, so I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest this whole thing was a stunt from the get-go to make his point. If he ever really wanted to simply show a host to a non-Catholic, one wonders why, for example, it didn’t occur to him to…you know, just take his pal up to the priest after Mass and say ‘hey, padre, do you mind showing one of the wafers to my friend.’
Meanwhile, PZ decides to post two of the death threats he got from a couple of nitwits, was dumb enough to provide their internet addresses–and was soon horrified to find that his fans were happy to take matters into their own hands, with the result that he had to post twice begging them to stop.
Good grief.
I neglected to mention that Bill Donohue is a boob who was all to ready to bellow his way into this mess.
There’s a great comedy script here.
What I find farcical is death threats from people who believe they are protecting the actual body (in the form of a wafer) of some Bronze age mythical character, and which they intend to eat!
I didn’t realize the first century C.E. was part of the bronze age….
Kirk,
PZ Myers wasn’t soliciting anyone to disrupt a Communion, though. Never once did he advocate gatecrashing a service or in any way interfering with any Catholic’s right to worship in any way they see fit. If someone sent him a host, though, he might treat it disrespectfully and webcast it from the comfort of his own home or lab or dungeon or whatever. That does not in any way, shape, or form affect the practice of Catholicism for any Catholic. I really don’t see how they have any reasonable grounds to take offense in a liberal, pluralistic society. No actual harm is being done, except perhaps to the feelings of extremists who insist that our whole society must show deference to their particular religious rituals. That is not a reasonable request and not one in my mind that we are obliged to honour, any more than I am obliged to agree that everyone’s wife is beautiful or that everyone’s child is an angel. As a matter of common courtesy I’m happy not to enumerate the faults with wives and children unprompted, but when the husband or father in question makes it a public issue and insists that his wife’s or child’s virtues be a matter of public consensus I draw the line.
There has been a large volume of virtual ink expended on arguing where Webster Cook’s or PZ’s actions lie on a continuum of [blame | praise]worthiness spanning:
1) the illegal,
2) the strictly immoral or unethical,
3) the sleazy, lame, assholeish or generally poor form,
4) the unstrategic (as likely to lose more hearts and minds than it wins),
5) the morally neutral but defensible on grounds of individual rights,
6) the rather clever thing I wish I had said or done, and
7) the necessary and heroic act taken at great personal risk.
Most of PZ’s fans put him at a 6 or 7, and most of his detractors (on sites similar to this one, at least) make him no worse than a 3 or 4.
It’s an essentially subjective call, and we will never have a single authoritative answer.
What does admit of an objective assessment is the observed reaction of the population.
Will there be a rash of wafer thefts? Unlikely; the stunt is too public, and easy to thwart.
Will PZ get fewer death threats? At a minimum, I bet the emailers will be more careful with their addresses.
From Salman Rushdie to the Danish cartoonists to the wafer caper, the pattern we see seems to be provocation, followed by overreaction and overreaction-reaction, followed by both sides colling their respective jets while they jaw endlessly over which internal faction is right about strategy.
It’s great theater, if nothing else.
As to the validity of Sean’s parable, I thought it was crystal-clear that his criticism of Bob stemmed from his willingness to cause Alice emotional distress, independent of whether that distress was rationally justifiable.
Yet, several commenters seem to be looking for some rational distinction between Alice’s reaction (the rattle was unique and irreplaceable) and the reaction of Catholics to the threatened wafer-defilement (jeez Louise, it’s just one cracker among zillions!).
A better example of two parties talking past one another could hardly be found.
First of all, I want to thank Sean for his reasonable post on this issue. I agree with what he wrote in this post, except for his atheism, but I of course also respect his right to believe as he does. The posts on this blog about religion are almost always good and avoid the mockery that so many others slip into when discussing this sort of thing.
I am Catholic (and a physics grad student — the two are not mutually exclusive!) so I thought I’d offer my perspective.
After looking into the original story more, I can say that, for me, Cook’s actions are easily forgivable. He did not act out of malice or a desire to mock a sacred Catholic tradition. He simply didn’t fully understand all the rules of the ritual, and ended up somewhat unwittingly doing something that is offensive to many Catholics. I am embarrassed by the actions of those who confronted him and of course those who have sent him threats. I am not very sympathetic about his response in which he is claiming that the Catholic student group’s celebration of the Eucharist was a form of hazing and underage consumption of alcohol.
PZ’s actions, on the other hand are very offensive, and it embarrasses me that he represents a branch of my University and scientists in general in this way. 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.
Like Sean’s analogy points out, if you know something is very important to someone, then that should be enough for you to choose not to mess with it. Even if you don’t understand why it’s important, or disagree about its importance, damaging that precious thing, whatever it is, serves no purpose other than to be hurtful to a fellow human being.
As for Catholics, the foundation of our religion is a belief that Jesus, God Incarnate, gave himself to us in a very real way, both at the Last Supper and through his death. We believe that this action of Jesus giving himself to us is repeated in a miraculous and very real way through the Eucharist. So a consecrated host is not just a cracker to us, and that’s why it’s so important.
Again, I’m not defending any hateful speech or actions on part of my fellow Catholics, but I just thought that knowing would help people understand how this could be so upsetting to someone.
if you know something is very important to someone, then that should be enough for you to choose not to mess with it.
Why?
So a consecrated host is not just a cracker to us, and that’s why it’s so important.
It is a cracker.
Every experimental technique will tell you it is a cracker, and just a cracker.
It’s you having the burden of proof of telling me it’s more than a cracker. It’s you having to bring substantial evidence telling me you’re not a fool deluding yourself thinking it is not just a cracker.
I am deeply offended by people who suggest desecrating communion wafers is in any way bad.
I assume this means no one will do that anymore since “if you know something is very important to someone, then that should be enough for you to choose not to mess with it. “
devicerandom: That’s the point of Sean Carroll’s analogy. It’s not Alice’s son’s rattle. Every experimental technique proves that. She really is being kind of obtuse and silly in insisting otherwise. She is clearly not dedicated to the search for truth above all. Nevertheless, it’s extremely rude and really sort of juvenile to insist on smashing it in front of her.
Your implication that other people are not worth of respect if they aren’t as smart as you is also really creepy. (And yes, you said “intellectual respect,” but if that’s all you really mean, then your point is just irrelevant. Sean didn’t say that religious believers are worthy of intellectual respect on the subject of religion; he said they’re worthy of respect as other people, whom we ought not take pleasure in cruelly provoking just because they don’t know as much about the world, or about how to learn about the world, as we do.
Here’s a question…
I’m a gay man. The Catholic Church teaches that, while I as an individual deserve respect, my lifestyle is wrong and should not be accepted by our society, and that if I actually express love for another man rather than suppressing my natural impulses this is a sin in the eyes of God that could doom me to Hell. Certainly not all Catholics feel this way, but this is the official position of the Church itself. It is also the rankest bigotry. Many other faiths take positions on homosexuality that are even more reprehensible.
Am I obliged to show respect for the feelings of some Catholics and other religious believers by staying in the closet, abandoning efforts to win social acceptance for non-heterosexuals, and not calling various churches out for their bigotry?
It’s a rhetorical question. Of course I’m not obliged to do any such thing, even if being out and proud offends some people, goes against their sincerely-held beliefs, and hurts their feelings because they don’t consider themselves bigots. The Catholic Church wants to marginalise and condemn me and millions of other otherwise-inoffensive people, and this can’t be whitewashed away. It’s wrong and needs to be confronted as such.
The point of this is that it shows we are not obliged as a matter of principle not to hurt people’s feelings by vocally disagreeing with their sincerely-held religious beliefs, even in very strident and (in their eyes) disrespectful ways.
The real question is, where do we draw the line? Sometimes beliefs ought to be treated civilly, and sometimes, as above, they definitely ought not. Even if people will be hurt and offended.
I’m not saying you have to believe it’s anything more than a wafer of unleavened bread. You’re free to believe whatever you want. The burden of proof is not on me because I’m not trying to prove it to you. If you want to believe I’m deluding myself, then that’s fine.
And I sort of assumed a basic respect for other human beings when I said that you shouldn’t try to hurt the things they care about. And let me be clear, I’m not trying to impose my religious beliefs on you. I’m not asking you to do something that should interfere with your life or things you want to do, I’m asking you to not come and mess with something important to me, something that you would have to go out of your way to do. I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, unless your actions are hurting me.
I hope that I made that clear.
As others have pointed out the parable is a little bit off, mainly that the wafer was freely given out. PZ’s actions still were a bit childish, and I would not have done it, but I don’t see it as being particularly assholeish. Now I do see a problem in that that the issue has become about PZ, not about the kid who originally got in trouble (and is being abandoned by his university). This may be a good thing, in that it draws attention away from the kid (and the death threats move to PZ), but it could also lead to greater attacks against the kid.
On a side note: I agree that atheists/humanists/miscellaneous nonbelievers should give respect out as a default, but people can lose respectability, and one way of doing that is mailing in death threats or trying to get someone fired for (even hypothetical) actions to a cracker.
Also, it’s important to emphasize that what Myers did is not akin to some kind of clever satirical cartoon. A certain mocking of religion is an important tool in the struggle to free the world from needless superstition. There’s a huge difference between that kind of thing, and intentionally provoking religious believers just for the thrill of watching them writhe in anger and knowing how much smarter you are than all that. Does anyone think that Myers’ stunt is going to further the cause of rationalism in any real way?
Finally, while this seems too obvious to need saying, it apparently isn’t: the fact that some Catholics launched death threats or whatever against Myers really doesn’t make it okay to spit in the face of every Catholic in the world.
After I made my last post, Aloysius brought up a point that might help me illustrate what I mean better.
For example, I don’t think that my personal beliefs about what is a sin should affect your life as a homosexual man. Nor do I think that the Church’s teachings make you less of a human or more of a sinner than I am or anyone else is.
I agree that you are not obliged as a matter of principle not to disagree with my firmly held beliefs, and you are perfectly welcome to do so out loud and in a public way. I’m just saying that such things should be done civilly. I do think that malicious mockery is something that we should avoid on principle just out of respect for other people.
Just wanted to point out that PZ insulted the crackers only after the Catholics had already “over-reacted,” which seems not too be quite as “misplaced” as just waking up one morning and deciding to offend a whole bunch of “tards.”
Other Sean, how exactly can I disagree with the Church’s teachings on homosexuality in a civil way? They’re vile, evil, despicable, reprehensible, completely beyond the pale. They’re no different from racism or misogyny. Anyone who publicly supports these teachings deserves to be mocked and shunned and treated with a certain amount of outright contempt. These views are simply incompatible with the whole framework of a pluralistic civil society, and treating the people who voice them with respect only serves to degrade the value of civility for everyone.
Sean, you can’t hear Him, but I know God agrees with your position on respecting and valuing each other. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.
… and every year Alice tried to force Bob and all of Bob’s friends to buy identical rattles to hers, and when Bob and his friends refused Alice attempted to get politicians to force everyone to have a rattle, and erase any book that taught that people didn’t really need rattles. Wars were started with those who preferred pacifiers, and many objectors were burned at the stake…
Just to add another voice to the dissent, your ‘parable’ is not correct–the analogous situation would be if Alice has millions of these rattles, hundreds of millions, actually, with the possibility of creating many, many more whenever she wants. She gives these rattles away to her friends weekly, expecting them to do a certain thing with them. If she gives Bob a rattle, and instead of doing this certain thing, Bob gives it to someone else…well, you might have a different stance on “re-gifting” than I do, but if Alice is going to be extremely upset by this, she probably shouldn’t have given the rattle-facsimile to Bob in the first place. Once she gives it to Bob, it’s his. If he wants to send it on to his friend PZ, he certainly can.
It is true that PZ was reacting to an overreaction that had already occurred; that’s a good point, and sadly no analogy is perfect. (Most of the other belabored attempts to point out failures in the analogy are sadly missing the point.)
Which is: why should anyone take joy in doing things that disturb other people, even if the other people are being irrational? Explain to them why they are wrong, yes; oppose them (with mockery if necessary) when their irrational beliefs start to affect the lives of others, of course; but to piss people off solely in celebration of your own superiority seems unnecessary to me, and not much fun. If I’m going to piss people off, it will be for a good reason.
So are PZ and Donuhue like Tweedledee and Tweedledum?
It’s starting to look that way.