Vlad found a salt shaker on the counter and decided to sprinkle it in their cage. They have white sand in the cage, so I guess he thought it would help. They didn't mind.
Posted on 07/18/2008 11:12:02 PM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Where to begin? Delving into this particularly sordid bit of Failed Academic Dementia is difficult, both because one hardly wants to start the day wading through a sewer, and because there are so many angles and implications to the story that it makes for large and unwieldy blogposts.
For those who have been in a cave since last week, PZ Myers, a washed-up academic at a third tier school who takes out his bitterness on Christians, claimed that some human toothache named Webster Cook had received death threats for stealing a Eucharist and threatening to desecrate it. Reader John Farrell repeatedly tried to get Myers to verify the "death threat" bit, but was shouted down by the throngs of Myers cultists who took the claim on faith. Myers' then decided to blow away the last shreds of pretense that his Pharyngula blog was about science and give full vent to his demented hatred of Jesus Christ by urging his throng of equally demented followers to steal some Hosts so he could desecrate them and put the whole thing on his blog. The Catholic League got involved (rightly in my view) and Catholics, as is our custom, have been arguing about it ever since, pursuing a range of responses from complete pacificism to some rather over-the-top reactions.
Myers, who seems to have been surprised by the response, has waffled between "I was just kidding"--(Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, "I am only joking!" - Proverbs 26:18-19)--and promising that he shall indeed carry through on his threat. One gets the impression that both he and his followers, having nothing but contempt for Catholics, have no real grasp of the interior contours of Catholic faith and belief and therefore no grasp whatever of the hierarchy of values at work in Catholic life. A Host is a statue is a banner is a Rosary is a Bible is a scapular as far as they can tell. You get the feeling that they are genuinely surprised to find that Catholics are attaching far more importance to the descration of the Eucharist than, say, the desecration of a Rosary. They seem to have reeled a bit at the volcanic response. Now they are getting their footing and realizing this *really* ticks off Catholics and so, like eight year olds, they are enjoying being in (they think) the position of saying, "Take one step closer and I'll torture your cat!"
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. Not all atheists are driven mad by their atheism. Many are quite respectable human beings. 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.
Now some forms of insanity are morally innocent due to organic troubles with the brain or body, or because of some sort of trauma. St. Benedict Joseph Labre was a man we would have had trouble distinguishing from a schizophrenic homeless person on the street. Fr. Benedict Groeschel took his name in religious life from that saint, partly as a way of saying that merely mental illness is no bar to sanctity.
But some forms of insanity are chosen and willed. The choice to go out of one's way to blaspheme Jesus Christ, purely for hate's sake, is one of them. And, as with all sins, the sin itself is the punishment, because you then have to organize your life around defending the indefensible and you become bricked round in the furnace of your own irrational hatred. The hatred breeds lies like, "I'm just exercising freedom of expression".
No. You are committing theft, vandalism, and incitement.
Or else you lie and say, "Unless Catholics can prove the Eucharist is actually the Body and Blood of Christ and not a worthless cracker, I'm just guilty of being rude."
No. Catholics are under no obligation to prove that in order to show that you are guilty of theft, vandalism and incitement. On my wall near my computer is a piece of paper with a crayon drawing on it. It's a self portrait of Sean with a little heart and a poem in which he informs us he hearts us and we are good parents. Any art dealer in the world would appraise the value at approximately nothing. Any literature scholar would tell you that the poem is very poor poetry. Likewise the value of the paper is zero.
To me, it's priceless. 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.
Yet another demented lie to cover up your naked act of aggression is to play the victim:
It's just so darned weird that they're demanding that I offer this respect to a symbol that means nothing to me.
The answer to this lie is that *nobody* is demanding Myers offer respect to the Eucharist. He's blasphemed the Eucharist on his blog off and on since forever. Catholics are free to disagree with him, just has he is free to disagree with them. That's the first amendment in action and I, for one, am glad to live in the land that is not Canada where even demented professors whose careers are stuck in Wilbur Weed Boxtop Diploma Mill can have a voice in the public square, if only to serve as a warning to normal people of what hatred of God can do to the human mind.
No, what Catholics are demanding is not that Myers and his cultish followers respect the Eucharist. We are demanding that they not invade our religious services, steal what does not belong to them, and incite others to vandalize what is ours and not theirs. We are pointing out that thugs who do this are of precisely the same caliber and guilty of exactly the same crime as somebody who paints swastikas on a synagogue. (Notably, people who do that sort of stuff also claim to be victims when caught.)
The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don't believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.
Crazy people talk that way.
Myers and Co. are enmeshed in these lies because they have chosen evil. It is evil--archetypally evil--to desecrate the Eucharist. It's the sort of stuff archetypal bad guys in the movies do. It's completely unnecessary gratuitous evil. Myers can do all the blasphemy he pleases on his blog (though not on the taxpayer's dime). But the curious thing is that he cannot rest with this. C.S. Lewis describes the curious evangelical itch that rankles in the shriveled soul of the God-hater in his Great Divorce. In that novella, the damned are offered a chance at Heaven if they will only just get on a bus, go there, and stay. Instead, almost none of the damned do. They prefer to be what they are. And they love talking about Hell and themselves (which really comes down to the same thing). Lewis continues:
This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts – the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven. There were tub-thumping Ghosts who in thin, bat-like voices urged the blessed spirits [already in Heaven] to shake off their fetters, to escape from their imprisonment in happiness, to tear down the mountains with their hands, to seize Heaven ‘for their own good’: Hell offered her co-operation. There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. There were materialistic Ghosts who informed the immortals that they were deluded: there was no life after death, and this whole country was a hallucination. There were Ghosts, plain and simple: mere bogies, fully conscious of their own decay, who had accepted the traditional role of the spectre, and seemed to hope they could frighten someone. I had had no idea that this desire was possible. But my Teacher reminded me that the pleasure of frightening is by no means unknown on earth, and also of Tacitus' saying: "They terrify lest they should fear." When the debris of a decayed human soul finds itself crumbled into ghosthood and realises "I myself am now that which all humanity has feared, I am just that cold churchyard shadow, that horrible thing which cannot be, yet somehow is," then to terrify others appears to it an escape from the doom of being a Ghost yet still fearing Ghosts-fearing even the Ghost it is. For to be afraid of oneself is the last horror.
Regardless of your views of the deity of Christ, to make oneself into a creature who deliberately descrates the memory of an innocent man who died in torments, solely for the purpose of spite, is an utterly pathetic and deeply evil thing. As all acts of blasphemy do, they serve only to destroy the image of God in the blasphemer. They do nothing whatever to harm Jesus (except in the sense that this sin too becomes one of the billions he bears in his body and soul on the Cross).
What remains is for us to decide what to do. I think the first thing that needs to happen is, of course, prayer. Various people have mentioned acts of reparation. That's the right idea. Our first task is to forgive. And I mean forgive, not excuse. There is, literally, no excuse for this. None. If some clown sent Webster Cook a death threat, that does not justify persecuting and insulting people who did nothing wrong. (And it is still far from certain that this even happened. All we have is the word of the apostles Cook and Myers, which their followers were ready to believe in blind faith despite Farrell's requests for evidence.) Myers' logic is that of Kristallnacht, punish all Catholics everywhere with theft, vandalism and incitement because of the (alleged) actions of a couple.
The next thing to do is to fight. Forgiving and fighting not only may, but must be done at the same time. If you doubt that, just look at Jesus, he forgave his impenitent killers at exactly the moment he was fighting (and winning) the most important battle ever fought against all the powers of hell. Paul likewise forgave his persecutors but was absolutely ingenius in making use of everything (including civil law) to fight them and advance the gospel.
I have absolutely no problem with appeals to Caesar where it is appropriate. I think invocations of "hate crime" laws are stupid, because I think the dumbest thing a Catholic can do is encourage the notion of ThoughtCrime or labor to make Caesar the arbiter of Allowable Speech. Canada is currently engaged in that social experiment to catastrophic effect. So I think attempts to arraign Pharyngula as "hate site" are deeply wrong-headed.
On the other hand, I have no problem with Catholics pointing out that many a Pharyngula post has been made on the taxpayer's dime and that misuse of state monies should be punished. I have no problem with Catholics lobbying the university to have this bigot canned (I doubt it will happen but they are welcome to try). That's because Catholics have free speech too.
Similarly, just as St. Paul had no problem at all asking the civil power to protect him from persecution when some mob threatened him or one of his churches, I see nothing at all wrong with going to the civil authority and arraigning Myers et al with theft, vandalism, destruction of property and incitement, if the court system allows it. It is perfectly just to seek this, just as it is perfectly just for Jews to seek justice when some thug paints a swastika on a synagogue.
Catholics rightly have hope of Myers' redemption. That's as it should be. But I also am mindful of Jesus' very solid counsel: "Do not cast your pearls before swine. Do not give what is holy to dogs." Myers et al are precisely the sort of people Jesus has in mind here. If they are insulted by that, our first duty is to pray that they will somehow receive the grace to consider how dire it is to be insulted by the Son of God, whose insults are, like everything else about him, without any sin whatever. In short, they are people who *deserve* to be called swine because they have made themselves swine by their actions. Our orders are clear: don't imagine that argument will do you any good when you are dealing with people who have lost the good of the intellect. Pray for them certainly. But pray that they repent, not that they get clearer explanations of things they already know but refuse to admit: such as "You don't go around vandalizing what is not yours."
It is right and just to be angered by Myers' assault on the Eucharist. Not all anger is sinful. But the purpose of anger is action, not desire for vengeance. Catholics who threaten violence against Myers in return disgrace our Lord who forgave his murderers and, just as surely, extends forgiveness to Myers even as he fights him with the same goads with which he fought Saul of Tarsus. Our task is to realize that our principal audience is not Myers and his vicious crew, but all the onlookers in our culture, who want to know if there is any real difference between Catholics and Myers. Show them, by your actions, that there is. The world is watching.
Very nice summation. Thank you for posting this.
Read later Bump
Regards,
Intelligent, good read.
Excellent article!
Outstanding. Thank you for posting.
This is worthy of Mark Steyn.
*EXCELLENT* post!
Cheers!
I thought Vlad was too young to post. ;-)
Cheers!
LOL! I just wish Vlad was broadening his mind on FR when my back is turned, instead of salting the dragons!
Inquiring minds want to know...and so does mine.
Cheers!
Vlad found a salt shaker on the counter and decided to sprinkle it in their cage. They have white sand in the cage, so I guess he thought it would help. They didn't mind.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.