PZ Myers has finally put the final nail (incidentally the only nail) in the cracker in what has been a study is crazy religous bullshit. PZ had promised to desecrate a piece of bread, resulting in enormous amounts of hate mail, attempt to get him fired, death threats against him and even death threats against his children. Christian tolerence and love!
Well done PZ. Perhaps if we all do things of this kind and the world doesn't end in fiery divine wrath maybe, just maybe the loons will begin to realise that crackers are just that and nothing more, that books are just paper and eventually that a guy wearing a fancy dress is juat a guy.
Probably too much to hope for.
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My two "cents": `white trash`. :-\
His windows are after all just glass; not to mention his high-school photos or graduation diploma, pictures of him when he was a child, pictures of his parents and family, or photos of his children: just a bunch of plastic papers, nothing more: nothing even remotely sacred there; you won't get in "hell" for burnin' them, stealing them right from under his nose, and dumping them in the first trash can that meets your way ... >:) Sure he'll be a real sport and won't mind us ripping his books apart, perhaps even setting his house on fire sometime (when there's no-one there, of course, so as to avoid any objective damage or real injury done to anyone), etc. -- I mean, it's not like he lives in a shrine or in a cathedral or somethin' ... >:) -- I just *LOVE* being mean. >:) After all, a spit in the face never killed anyone: it's not like it's poison, or somethin': just a bunch of meaningless, concocted social conventions that have no objective value anyway ... >:)
God, what a convoluted, disgusting logic! :-\
Hi Lucian,
My two "cents": `white trash`. :-\
I don't get this. Am I or PZ white trash or are you saying something entirely different.
The point was that nothing should be regarded as "sacred". A cracker does not become something which needs to be defended as if it were a human life just because someone says magic words over it. A book is just paper. If someone "desecrates" it, they only desecrate paper. It may be a symbol but the destruction of a symbol in no way destroys what that symbol represents. It is ridiculous to compare someone mistreating their own property (be that a cracker or a book) with burning down someone's house.
Do you think it was better when people (primarily the Jews) were burned en masse or banished because of a rumour one of them had dared to "defile" a bread wafer. Is it better "logic" to drag a doctor from his home and burn him alive because there was a rumour he had burned a Koran?
Do you think that the student in the story that sparked all of this off should be expelled from college for "holding hostage" a cracker?
You are quicker to condemn a blogger for suggesting that maybe a cracker is not worth getting upset about than you are to condemn the ones that threatened a child over it.
I was talking about value; and about belonging or property. Would he still be so obtuse if I were to go into his house, chat with him a bit, maybe even take a cup of coffee or tea together, ... then sneakily steal one of his most economically-non-valuable, yet personally-INvaluable, objectively most non-prised, yet subjectively most prised possessions, such as, say, some of his most treasured family-photos, ... maybe even put a few bucks in their change, so as to pay for their market-prise or market-value; then take'em home to my place, "desecrate" them in the most vile a manner as possible:... then -atop of all that- post my "honorary achievements" on the internet, makin' some wild pleads about tra-la-la and blah-bla-blah, when all I should be pleading about in such a case would be temporary insanity and forgiveness.
This whole thing kinda reminds me of the various possible meanings of the title of that movie: "21 Grams"; the tag-lines: only that in this case it's a wafer.
He couldn't have pulled his shitty little stunt in an Orthodox Church, though: ... we serve Bread and Wine mixed together, and administer it with the help of a small spoon (it's a rather tiny and fairly liquid portion, really).
Such a disgusting little specimen of "White American Trash" ! :-\ -- I mean, where does he get off!? :-\
You are quicker to condemn a blogger for suggesting that maybe a cracker is not worth getting upset about than you are to condemn the ones that threatened a child over it.
Wel, err, ... yeah! As Orthodox, we've been hard of the Catholics eversince they got this splendid little idea of giving us a "hand" against the Ottomans with the Crusades (the sack of C-tinople and all that); so, yeah, time to take a break, take a Kit-Kat, and go harassin' some cute, innocent, little bloggers once in a while, for a change: You know, for refreshment. :-\
Lucian,
You think that is a fair comparison. If the cracker in question had been one that had been sitting in a sealed case on the mantle of a priest and held significant personal value to him then it would be a comparable case. The cracker we are talking about here is mass-produced (no pun intended J). It has no individual special value to anyone. If you took a photocopy of that precious family picture and destroyed it, that would be a comparable case with the cracker destroyed by PZ. I doubt anyone would much care about the photocopy. Even if it looks exactly the same, it doesn’t hold the same sentimental value.
The fact that the “value” of this particular cracker stems from a ridiculously stupid superstition is completely irrelevant here. It is the wild over-reaction that has caused all the commotion.
The comparison is indeed extremely unfair. But not in the way You picture it.
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