A Great Desecration
Friday, July 25th, 2008
PZ Myers, evolutionary biologist, outspoken atheist and astonishingly prolific blogger, has done what he recently promised to do in the wake of a kerfuffle about some kid who took communion but didn’t swallow (thereby smuggling out a piece of the flesh of Jesus himself according to Catholic doctrine).
PZ couldn’t believe the fuss (well ok he probably wasn’t so surprised) and promised to do the same himself, prompting a hysterical flurry of pleadings and condemnations for it. Being an atheist (and therefore fashioned of pure evil) he was unmoved by such appeals, and went ahead and did it anyway. Read his report here, along with some interesting references to the slaughter of Jews perpetrated by the Catholic church over the centuries as punishment for the crime of host desecration.
Also fun (although sometimes alarming) to read is the hate mail PZ gets; this is one of the more civilized ones:
You must be the devil himself as even he knows the power in the Holy Eucharist (don’t you dare disparage the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by calling Him Who died for you a cracker!). You must be a freemason, or just a very sick man who needs healing and believe me, I will pray for your conversion. Pray you live to see that day so you can ask Him to forgive you and your uncircumcised heart. Just the mere thought of desecrating the Holy Eucharist is enough to get one into hell, but, maybe that is, for now, the horrible place you are aiming for. I dare you to read about Our Lady of Fatima and the accounts of hell as the three children saw, then, maybe you will change you sick mind. God forgive you. However, it was great that you got many people praying for your conversion since you showed the world how sick you are, and maybe God will convert your hard heart. Pity you. From a lay evangelist who prays for you and the rest of this sick world of secular humanists.
Some level-header Catholic named thinks PZ defiling a wafer is tantamount to breaking into someone’s house and stealing their child’s drawing:
And if you send one of your blog readers into my house to take it, I would be quite justified in calling you a thief who has stolen something precious. I would also be quite justified in defending it and my house from your naked act of aggression.
He also refuses to mince his words:
I won’t mince words. Myers is an evil man. And as evil men, particularly evil intellectuals, tend to be, he is also a mad man as are most of his acolytes and followers. One need only read Pharyngula to know this. But those who make it their raison d’etre tend to be made crazy by it. That’s the tragedy of sins of the intellect. They don’t just make you stupid. If you persist in them, and particularly if you persist in them to this degree, they make you crazy.
In Mark Shea’s mind (and those of his perfectly sane acolytes) PZ Myers is an evil mad man because— although he wouldn’t hurt a fly — he would symbolically disrespect a cracker to make a point.
I honestly don’t get it. I can understand someone calling the demonstration obnoxious perhaps, but evil…?
Nothing is sacred. That’s not a lament of our modern times. It’s simply true, and it’s good that it’s true. Nothing is above question or even ridicule. We have ethics, morals and taste; we have no need of the sacred for to live well as humans.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
So to take up the example that Myers dodges, I take it that next you’ll be pissing on Korans at Guantanamo Bay, claiming ethical impunity. Desecration is always contextual, and must always be read contingently in terms of social power — I’d applaud it if it were committed under the banner of queer sex activism against the forces of repression. For instance, I find Darth Benedict to be a foul and despicable man, and welcomed the protests at World Youth Day. Not from the involvement of sundry rationalists, who simply had a random, asocial axe to grind, but from people involved in social movements seeking to break the Church’s genocidal stance on contraception and sexual morality.
So *this* kind of quixotic grandstanding doesn’t get *any* of my sympathy. Frankly, Myers is a *dick*. Or at worst, somebody who has displaced his own crypto-religiosity into a kind of perverse martyrdom — the content has been swapped, but the motivation (to indulge in the loathsome odour of one’s own preening sanctity, like smelling one’s own farts) remains the same.
I now feel like I have almost nothing in common with other atheists. I might as well part company with the term, because while it may technically describe my state of disbelief, for me, it now sullies any sense of community, ethical communication and respect, and has turned into a smug badge of reductionist imperialism, under which all philosophy other than positivism is reduced to “silly superstition” and “sky fairies”.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
“I take it that next you’ll be pissing on Korans at Guantanamo Bay”
Seriously…? and by “you” you mean me specifically? At least you didn’t say I’d therefore be keen to paint a swastika on a synagogue to demonstrate the silliness of fearing a symbol.
Fucking hell Ben, you are smarter than that. Don’t give me this slippery slope bullshit– it isn’t the same. What PZ did was for himself, his audience, and some hot headed assholes busting a nut over some kid’s juvenile iconoclasm.
If he had walked into a church, taken communion, locked the doors, threatened the parishioners with violence and then pissed on a wafer to show ho much he despised them (and I had applauded him for it) then I could see your point.
There’s a difference between “I’m desecrating your wafer to demonstrate it’s just a cracker” and “I’m desecrating this symbol to show how much I hate you and wish you were dead” As you say, context is important.
Fine, Myers is a dick in your eyes and many others and I can completely see why you say that. I would probably try harder to follow your crypto-religiosity argument if you hadn’t insulted me so at the beginning of your comment.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:02 am
I wasn’t suggesting that you’d do it, I was just being provocative. I mean, *Myers* implies that maintaining the sacredness of the Catholic communion establishes an unbroken continuity with genocide — that’s a slippery slope if I ever saw one, and much more deeply offensive one at that. Meawhile, my point was that it didn’t take much at all to push your blanket “nothing is sacred / nothing is above ridicule” rhetoric to an unsavoury conclusion. In fact, I’d argue that the rational rhetoric of progress is just as invested in the tendency to violent supremacism as the religiosity that Myers deplores.
This isn’t just an abstract thought experiment, but a slippage that you can find enacted in the world all the time. When the “war on terror” began, and mosques were being attacked in Sydney, I recall some anti-war activists despicably refusing to defend places of worship from racist hooligans. (I’m not condemning people who aren’t interested in such activity, just people who sanctimoniously refuse it, on misplaced principle.) Others prevented veiled Muslim women from speaking at political rallies about their experiences of racism and Islamophobia — because “veiling is barbaric”. This isn’t some marginal “crazy lefty” thing that can be written off — for me, it’s clearly a case of simplistic Enlightenment values unravelling in a more complex world. Think of the rational, progressive people who’ve rallied around deeply disturbing figures like that secular hero and protofascist, Pim Fortuyn. The minute we begin writing off innocent people because of our own ideas of their backwardness, Koran-pissing’s the least of our worries.
On Myers’ lack of “hatred”: but so much of the horror of recent human history hasn’t been about *hatred*, but about self-congratulatory, “progressive” ideals. J.S. Mill, that wonderfully reasonable and liberal man, advocated “the most vigourous despotism” in India because he believed in the supremacy of western civilisation. He didn’t hate Indians, he just thought they were *backward*. This isn’t some bizarre quirk of Mill’s, but a common feature of the superstitious belief in liberal progress. Instead of hating people who believe in the sacred, we can simply ridicule their *backwardness*, perhaps invade their countries because they need our help, and champion a stubbornly nerdy, almost autistic dissolution of the variegated realities of social life in our confident proclamations of the truth. I’m as much of a nerd as they come, but the spectre of giving people like Myers more social power gives me the creeps.
And on the sacred: while I believe that “God” is clearly a human fantasy, and that we should be creating intellectual conditions that enable all of us to recognise this, the call to abandon the sacred sounds to me as absurd and small-minded as trying to ban fiction. The persistence of the sacred demonstrates our species’ continued engagement with the fact that we are elastic but still finite beings, who make social rituals around acts of creation and destruction in order to honour and interpret our existence (with its beginnings and endings) in a larger universe. Sky fairies are kinda beside the point. If anything about our deep ritual investments has gone cancerous and lunatic, it can be found in commodity fetishism, developed under that child of progress and rationality: capitalism. With commodity fetishism, the sacrificial drive has been perverted into compulsive waste, and the creativity of our human, interspecies and ecological relationships are reified in “things”. Bizarre and ludicrous. If Myers wanted to challenge superstition, he’d do better to walk into a department store and start smashing things.
And frankly, I’ve learned much more from theology in the past week than from any other discipline, and this is for research about the conjunction of geopolitics, everyday creativity and computer networks — hardly sky-fairy territory. Despite my disbelief in God and my almost blinding hatred of the Church’s involvement in colonialism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s meditations on the place of the Church in the world (to reveal the whole world’s importance to God in its tiniest, insignificant spaces rather than to conquer it in an expansionist manner) speaks more to me about how people electronically position their everyday lives in relation to the global stage than most social science can possibly attempt. Thanks, theology!
July 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
“I was just being provocative.”
If I had taken a deep breath and counted to ten before launching into my reply I might have appreciated that.
PZ is also being provocative in connecting the communion ritual with genocide, but is this really so unreasonable? He makes the completely valid point that hysterical attachment to one’s dogma can lead to horrendous crimes. More specifically he rails against a dogma rooted in the sacred, ie that which may not be questioned. As an evolutionary biologist he is obliged to defend his discipline from (admittedly non-catholic) religious lunatics all the time. People who believe utter nonsense and would have their beliefs inform political decision making.
Any dogma is bad, and atheists are constantly accused of being dogmatic themselves (even though they constantly disagree about exactly the sort of things we are discussing here) but you’ll note that they almost never invoke any supreme authority in the matter, not even Dawkins. In fact I can’t even remember the last time I saw someone quote him in an argument.
If you can’t keep God out of government, and you can’t keep Him from meddling with people’s reproductive freedom, the least you can do is work to demonstrate that He is a social construct and nothing more, and a great way to do this is to take tangible superstitious claims (transubstantiation in this case) and demonstrate their absurdity. Had the communion wafer been acknowledged as a *symbol* and nothing more, this entire episode would never have happened.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Myers’ response to the host desecration issue is inflammatory and lacking compassion. I suppose it’s good that he is passionate about his (non)beliefs but I don’t think the scorn and derision he dishes out can amount to anything good.
The exchange does raise and perhaps illustrate the paradox of sacraments. Yes they are just objects, but when meaning is ascribed to an object it becomes something else. The man who drew the analogy of the home invasion was close to the mark. A house is just a bunch of bricks but we imbue it with so much more meaning so that when someone breaks in and invades that place we feel enraged. Yet if a child wonders in or maybe someone from a culture that has no concept of ‘home’ as we know it, perhaps we would forgive that instance.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Myers is only human, and if I had received as much abuse as he has I probably wouldn’t be feeling too much compassion toward those I had offended either. From here:
“Just to be fair, let me mention the current tally: somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims.”
July 30th, 2008 at 2:41 am
PZ’s hate mail is funny… until of course it is suddenly very very depressing
July 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I think it’s fascinating to read the “you wouldn’t dare offend the Muslims” messages, which do little to conceal the desire to see physical harm done to Myers. The peaceful Christians wouldn’t do it themselves, oh no (notwithstanding some of the truly vile threats he has received) but they quiver with vicarious delight at the thought of the scary Muslims doing it for them.
What I really don’t get is the amount of hatred so many Christians express towards atheists— Is it not enough to know that they will suffer eternal damnation for their sins of pride? If some Christian had offended my sensibilities but I had foreknowledge that he would shortly be diagnosed with cancer I would probably lay off the guy, not spit bile. If he insisted there was no such thing as cancer, I would feel even more sorry for him.