Cracker Desecrated, As Promised

I actually have a fellow blogger writing from Blogger.com to thank for bringing this item to my attention (his blog, incidentally, can be found here).

Readers of my blog may remember a brief post of mine roughly two weeks back telling of a college student in Florida causing a huge dust up among Catholics because he carried a communion wafer out of a Catholic mass uneaten. This story was written about beautifully by PZ Myers at his blog Pharyngula.

After Dr. Myers railed against the absurdity of it all and asked his readers to send him some communion wafers so he could do some desecrating of his own, the angry e-mails from irate Christians began to pour in. Dr. Myers dedicated an entire post to all the holier-than-thou vitriol seeping out of his inbox.

Well, Dr. Myers made good on his promise to disrespect his own personal piece of Jesus. He writes first of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 in which the doctrine that only Catholic priests could handle the Eucharist was set down. he then goes on to quote from representative hate mail he has received from angry Catholics, a few of which threaten violence against him and his family. Dr. Myers shows no fear in the face of these zealots while pointing out some incredible hypocrisies in a few of the quoted e-mails. He ends his post with a beautifully written paragraph decrying the desire to hold anything sacred and a picture of a communion wafer with a nail driven through in his garbage can, alongside pages from both the Qur'an and The God Delusion. The paragraph I feel I must quote here; if only for the purpose of expressing my jealousy of not having written something like that myself.

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."