PZ's crackergate scandal

I'm getting a little worried about this whole cracker abuse threat. In an interview for the Minnesota Independent PZ promised he was still planning to do something with the cracker:

Myers: The response has done nothing but confirm it: I have to do something. I'm not going to just let this disappear. It's just so darned weird that they're demanding that I offer this respect to a symbol that means nothing to me. Something will be done. It won't be gross. It won't be totally tasteless, but yeah, I'll do something that shows this cracker has no power. This cracker is nothing.

And this is after getting a couple death threats, one threat that got a woman fired because her husband sent it.

PZ did succeed in getting a lot of people's attention, but desecrating the cracker now wouldn't add a damn thing to the point made by PZ in his first post. He didn't have to do it to get the reaction he should have expected doing it would get him. It was Bill Donohue who drove home PZ's point and Donohue and his emailing followers are too blind to see it: getting upset over a cracker is insane and some people are that insane. But also, getting angry and taking it out on a cracker is just as useless and crazy. Some of PZ's old allies are starting to turn against him on this issue. Unless PZ is going to do something funny or with some point to it, then there's no reason to abuse the cracker. Yet, if he doesn't, it will look like he was intimidated by all this.

Frankly, I would be intimidated. Death threats do that to me. By threatening violence they do indeed get a kind of respect -- the respect one gives a dangerous rattlesnakes one avoids stepping on, a respect that is only born of fear. On the other hand, once you've got that much attention it would be such a waste not to use it to make a strong point. But what point? Some ideas for dealing with the issue can be found on youTube:







This isn't over.

Saying that "PZ deliberately acted like an outrageous asshole," is a fair criticism, but he got himself a lot of attention (more than the rest of us can get - I wish my blog got read so much, don't you?) -- the question, the real test, is if he can do anything useful with that attention.

PZ has a chance to redeem himself if he does something smart with the crackers he gets (if any). And he doesn't really need to get any - he can buy unconsecrated crackers from any number of online suppliers and just say they're consecrated. Even if he does get crackers, how can he be sure they're consecrated?

He could challenge Christians to tell which crackers are consecrated and which aren't. He could do scientific tests on them -- which might involve burning them. He could do a comedy bit where the cracker talks like Mr. Bill: "Eat me! Eat me! I'm your savory Lard -- Oh nooo!!!"

I sure hope he doesn't merely stomp on a cracker -- that would be so pointless.

If you've been reading PZ's blog you already know that he has published some of the emails he has gotten. Those are the mind sets of people who are now paying attention. Most of the emailers seem to have been effectively lied to about the context of PZ's remarks. Any video should fill them in on the context, the student who took the cracker, the original post Bill Donohue objected to and how crazy it is to take a cheap cracker and because some priest mumbles some mumbo jumbo over it some people think it is more than it really is.

Several emails made reference to how some Muslims reacted to the Danish Cartoonists and stories of Korans being pissed on. For example, you'll find comments like this in PZ's collection of emails:

If he is generally against religion, I suggest that he show the courage of that position by publicly using a copy of the Koran to wipe his behind. If he plans to do so, please let me know so I can give prior notice to the Muslim communities in your State AND recommend to a mathematics instructor I know to apply to fill the sudden vacancy of Dr. Myers' position.

And...

I seriously doubt that he would ask someone to get him a Koran from a mosque or a copy of the Torah from a synagogue in order to publicly desecrate them since, after all, they're only pieces of paper with ink on them. Asking for the Koran would probably bring him and the U of M physical harm. Asking for a Torah would bring a swift lawsuit from the ADL. Right now, all he's getting is a public scolding from the Catholic League and some nasty e-mails. Therefore, I hope the U of M sees this for what it is -- a serious offense against Catholics -- and takes appropriate action.

The way that some emailers aspired to persecution might be something worth addressing:

You are a monster. We need another Inquisition to root out idiots like you (and anyway, the Church only excommunicated heretics and witches, then handed them over to the state for punishment. We never executed them directly). How dare you insult the Lord God like that. Losers like you will suffer. I hope and pray that this will loose you your job and your career.

How does one meet a mind like that with any sympathy? The sympathy that Neil degrasse Tyson called for:



I don't think you do engage them, you look past them to those you can sympathize with, and just let them know what exists in their church.



UPDATE:

PZ did it. A picture is up here.

My favorite PZ quote from The Great Desecration:

I think if I were truly evil, I would have to demand that all of my acolytes be celibate, but would turn a blind eye to any sexual depravities they might commit. If I wanted to be an evil hypocrite, I'd drape myself in expensive jeweled robes and live in an ornate palace while telling all my followers that poverty is a virtue. If I wanted to commit world-class evil, I'd undermine efforts at family planning by the poor, especially if I could simultaneously enable the spread of deadly diseases. And if I wanted to be so evil that I would commit a devastating crime against the whole of the human race, twisting the minds of children into ignorance and hatred, I would be promoting the indoctrination of religion in children's upbringing, and fomenting hatred against anyone who dared speak out in defiance.

UPDATE 2:

Bill Donohue responded with a press release, MYERS DESECRATES THE EUCHARIST. It claims, among other things, that:

"A formal complaint against Myers has already been made. What he did--in both word and deed--constitutes a bias incident, as defined by the University of Minnesota. The policy says that 'Expressions of disrespectful bias, hate, harassment or hostility against an individual, group or their property because of the individual or group's actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion...can be forms of discrimination. Expressions vary, and can be in the form of language, words, signs, symbols, threats, or actions that could potentially cause alarm, anger, fear, or resentment in others...even when presented as a joke.'

"The University must now take action and apply the appropriate sanction. We are contacting the president, Board of Regents and the Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office at the school, as well as Minnesota's governor and both houses of the state legislature; the Catholic community in Minnesota is also being contacted. Moreover, we are also contacting Muslim groups nationwide.

"It is important for Catholics to know that the University of Minnesota will not tolerate the deliberate destruction of the Eucharist by one of its faculty. Just as African Americans would not tolerate the burning of a cross, and Jews would not tolerate the display of swastikas, Catholics will not tolerate the desecration of the Eucharist."

Thing is, PZ included the "God Delusion," a symbol of his own beliefs, in the "great desecration." It might save his ass. What he did isn't a lone attack on Catholicism, but on holding anything sacred in an abstract sense. I don't know how much that will mean in the end.

UPDATE 3:

No expulsion for UCF student who stole Eucharist wafer

Death to the cracker infidels!

PZ is becoming the clown prince of atheism, remember when he got thrown out of Expelled? Well, now he has come to the attention of Catholic League president Bill Donohue.

The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They're going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that's all these scumbags are.

The Catholic League is getting all hot and bothered about PZ's threats of cracker abuse. Congratulations PZ! You're now as officially famous as D-list actress Kathy Griffin.

By the way, what the hell is the Catholic League? It seems to be made up of only one guy, Bill Donohue.



PZ, in his July 8 post, "It's a Frackin' Cracker," wrote that he wanted to desecrate the Eucharist when reporting on what happened at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days:

I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.

It seems PZ's threat to use a Holy Jesus Body Wafer to wipe his ass has caused Billy boy to call down a fatwā (pronounced "Fat Whaaa?") on our esteemed atheist cult leader.

Apparently, if you take a cracker out of church and blindfold it and water-board it, it is sacrilege, but if you chew it up in an act of symbolic cannibalism, thus exposing it to stomach acids and mixing it into your feces and expelling it through your anus, it is not sacrilege.

How serious a threat is this? Well, it's either incredibly serious or else Bill Donohue suffers from a dangerous lack of imagination seeing as how he wrote:

It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ.

Is it really that hard to think of anything more vile than to abuse a dry and tasteless cracker? How about pissing on the Koran? How about cartoons of that Islamic dude with the bomb in his head towel? How about what the Spanish Inquisition (Ha! I bet you weren't expecting that!) did to Graham Chapman and John Cleese?



How about rape, the holocaust, necropedophilia or flag burnin'? How about Dafur or Zimbabwe or California? How about necropedophilial rape and flag burnin' in California with the Spanish Inquisition?



That's how serious cracker abuse is. I know, you're thinking, "but it's a cracker. A processed wheat product." No it's not just a cracker, it just looks like a cracker, it's really the body of Christ that was completely reduced to its component molecular and atomic structures and made into a cracker during a magic priestly ritual. Christians then eat the Body of Christ and drink his blood, and that's why wine is called Jesus juice. Christians have this weird ritual cannibalism.

So, you can see why these Christian cannibals are very touchy about their crackers.

PZ found it easy to think of things far more vile than cracker abuse:

Hey, Bill! I can think of something more vile! How about intentionally desecrating the bodies of young altar boys who respect the position of trust held by Catholic priests? I think that is a lot more vile than mistreating a cracker. In fact, I can think of innumerable vile acts going on all around the world right now, and not all of them even involve Catholicism. It takes the moral vacuum of a purblind ideological bigot like Bill Donohue to think that goring his sacred cow is the worst thing in the world.

I'm not sure if they would be upset if I went to communion and took a wafer, pulled out a bowl of French Onion Freedom dip and dipped the cracker in it for flavor, but I expect rioting in the streets and the burning of embassies.

You'd think that if these crackers were so important to them, they'd keep them under tight security. No, pieces of their deity can be bought easily on the intertubes. You can buy his body and blood at Kingdom.com, here, and elsewhere.

That means I hope to be seeing youTube videos of your blindfolded crackers soon.

UPDATE:
I suspected that future toddler chopper Vox Day would have something to say about PZ's run-in with Bill the shrill Donohue, Vox just hates PZ for ignoring him all this time, and I was right. Vox has his post up at: "Social autism strikes again." Here's a taste of the irony:

The question of desecrating the Host aside, there's little question that there is very little, if anything, respectful, fair, or civil about PZ's nasty Internet morass.

And...

... unlike PZ, I am not socially autistic, ...

Try hanging around in my social circles, Vox. You're worse than socially autistic, you're considered dangerously and violently psychotic.

A pox on Vox, I say

PZ Myers asks the question, "Why do we even stoop to mentioning Vox Day?" and then, of course, he answers his own question this way:

because he is an appallingly freakish idiot, and always a reliable source for the most amazingly inane claims.

Thus, PZ is giving away one of the secrets of many of us "unfriendly" atheist bloggers; we focus on the most freakish and stupid of our opponents and ignore the more reasonable and science friendly theists. For example, Michael Heller, the Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who was recently awarded the Templeton Prize, or perhaps someone like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a geologist and paleontologist who was also a Jesuit priest who came up with some ideas about a noosphere and a vision of the Omega Point. He was a proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way. That's where the lines between neo-Darwinian evolution and ID get blurred and complex.

But even when dealing with conventional evangelicals we don't take on a fair sampling of the less well known blogs like "Thinking Christian"or "Reasonable Christian," that also set themselves up as defenders of the faith. And they even defend faith from the attacks of reason:

...attacks on the doctrine of sola scriptura have weakened the church and placed reason and experience above holy scripture as the final authority in matters of faith and practice.

Instead, we follow PZ's lead and devote our posts to Ben Stein, Vox Day, Mike Huckabee, Rev. Ted Haggard, and we might even get taken in by fake evangelicals like Tristan J. Shuddery. I suspect that doing so could lead to missing out on the real attitude and political shifts that are happening among the fundies and evangelicals.

Are the targets we take on a fair representation of fundy, evangelical or Christian thought? To some extent PZ's blog has documented the large amounts of ignorance, delusion, foolishness and oppression he finds in the news. But how much of that is cherry picking of the evidence? Polls do reveal that there's more than PZ's cherry picked evidence to go on. Large majorities believe in a personal God, an afterlife, Bible stories, the Devil, Hell, Heaven and miracles and there is a very low level of scientific literacy and acceptance of human evolution in America when compared to other developed nations. But that still doesn't make Vox Day and Ben Stein the sample representatives of this group.

Of course, Vox Day goes out of his way to invite our attention by making his attacks personal and insulting. There's an old saying that goes "no publicity is bad publicity." To some extent that's true; any time you can get your name out in front of the public you will generate name recognition and possible interest in your work. It might be bad for politicians, but for actors, writers, and other artists a bit of a dark and crazy side helps sell your art. Just getting people to know you exist is the first hurdle in marketing.

Vox Day has at least figured out how to get over that hurdle even if he's figured out little else. He knows how to manipulate people to get name recognition. His name is frequently popping up on atheistic blogs. It's getting increasingly obvious that Vox is consciously trying to manipulate atheist bloggers by insulting them and daring them to read his book. For example in a recent post on Vox's blog, "PZ whines about Expelled," Vox complains about Ben Stein getting more attention from PZ than he does. He complains that, "Not even a woman scorned is as upset as the would-be scientific expert who is ignored as irrelevant." And that line might be projection with Vox being the real scorned woman:

Because, PZ, as we've already seen with TIA, whenever someone does make a strong case against secular scientists or atheists, these self-proclaimed champions of intellectual discourse suddenly go silent and try to pretend they've never heard of it.

See how Vox Day tries to provoke PZ into reading and commenting on his book? He claims that the book, TIA, is a strong case against secular scientists and atheists based only on his own insistence and the echo chamber of reviews he's gotten. So far, if we ignore for the moment Brent Rasmussen's review, the bulk of atheist reviews have been pointing out that Vox's book is really just a rehash of his old blog posts and World Nut Daily articles and that the book doesn't really accomplish what it claims to.

Certainly none of the positive reviews Vox has gotten have pointed to his quote mines, lies, straw men and distortions. For example, John M. Lynch at Stranger Fruit has noted Vox Day abusing Darwin with a quote mine. In chapter 1 there's the epigraph "Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science" attributed to Charles Darwin. But Darwin doesn't actually say that Vox Dei (meaning the "voice of God") is not to be trusted. The quote in full context says:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

And that's not a comment about God, it's about the fact that popular opinion, taken as if it were the voice of God, cannot be trusted. And that is quite different from the words Vox puts in Darwin’s mouth. It's an obvious quote-mine used to create a straw man argument, a tactic often used by creationists and ID proponents. Darwin was more agnostic than atheist and wouldn't make such a direct judgment.

And of course, I caught Vox in a rather bald faced lie here.

Mark Chu-Carroll's evisceration of Vox's recent World Nut Daily article, "The real assault on science," pretty solidly deflates Vox's bogus claims that "women are intellectual inferiors who can't teach biology or calculus and are incapable of practicing computer science or art." However, by way of example, I just want to pick up a side issue where Vox claims that; "secular scientists have concocted a narrative that postulates themselves as a noble collective of Galileos in peril of persecution from the God-addled, anti-science religious masses" by noting that, first, we're not just "in peril of persecution" because the threat to education and separation of church and state will have more dire consequences than that. Also, here is another lie from Vox:

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the empirical data shows that the predominantly Christian United States produces more science per capita than any of the many more secular nations, and Western military leaders are forced to rattle their sabers to prevent the scientists of the Islamic Republic of Iran from developing the latest in nuclear weapons technology.

Empirical data? What empirical data? And what exactly does it mean to "produce more science per capita than any of the many more secular nations"? If it's empirical, then how do you measure it? And wait another minute... Vox claims the USA produces large amounts of science either in spite of or maybe even because it is Christian. And yet even Vox admits that most of those scientists are "evil atheists." Aren't most of those scientists "producing" all that American science "secular scientists"? What about those surveys that show scientists are a very atheistic and agnostic bunch. It contradict Vox's earlier claims that science is a bad thing.

The first problem with that sentence is what does it mean to produce more science per capita than another group? I can think of a couple metrics; number of Nobel prizes won per capita, number of journal articles written per capita and possibly the number of patents granted might be considered a "production of science." And when we look up that data we find that Vox's claim that "the predominantly Christian United States produces more science per capita than any of the many more secular nations" is just Vox talking out of his ass, as usual.

So, who does produce the most journal articles per capita? Here's the most recent data I could find, thanks to a comment on PZ's blog: Per capita output of S&E articles, by country/economy: 1999–2001. It turns out that several of those European, secular countries Vox assumes we beat are ahead of the U.S., Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

As for Nobel prize laureates per capita, well, the U.S. comes in at number 11, again behind a bunch of those more secular nations; Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Even Austria, Ireland and Germany beat us.

As for patents per capita, the United States is number 12 on this list, again, those secular Europeans, Norway and Sweden beat us. Japan is number 8 there, but Japan leads the world in patents per million people on another list.

Switzerland, which is fairly religious for Europe, does well but other religious countries don't do so well, Israel is #20 on the list, just behind Australia and just ahead of Belgium, with 74 patents granted per million residents. Morocco is the only Arab county to crack the top 60, at #49, with 3 patents granted per million. There are some other Muslim countries in the top 60, but none are ethnically Arab.

And even when you get into the states within the United States, its the democratic ones that beat the Republican ones.

And I think that shoots down Vox's delusions about empirical data. It also ties into another post I wrote: "Religion as a force for ignorance and delusion," where I have some other charts showing that religiosity and denial of evolution seem to hurt a country's economy.

Still, all that was a side track. All I did was take apart an easy to take apart bad argument, I just questioned one of Vox's assumptions and found out where it lead. I began, and PZ began, by questioning whether we should focus much energy on people like Vox Day, (and Ben Stein). I would suggest that the only reason to do so is because he's such an easy target. Go ahead and have fun with ripping into him, but you probably shouldn't consider him as representative of the Christian community out there. If you're looking for more than easy exercises in taking apart bad arguments you'll need to widen your sources of information and stop following PZ's lead. And that's my advice to me.

Informed bigotry versus Ignorant tolerance

Over at "The Reality-Based Community" Mark Kleiman has a post called "Atheistic bigotry" that takes PZ Myers to task for his casual, flippant comment about the "ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed" who surround him. That comment showed up here. To which Kleiman replies:

... if I heard Jerry Falwell claim that all Muslims, without distinction, are "ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed," or heard Osama bin Laden make the same claim about Christians, I'd just nod my head and say, "Yep. Bigots." So I might easily have made the mistake of calling P.Z. Meyers a bigot for saying exactly that about religious believers in general. And that would have hurt his sensitive feelings.

No, it won't hurt PZ's sensitive feelings. If PZ's feelings could be hurt that easily, then PZ would be as easily manipulated as Mark Kleiman into distorted, PC forms of ignorant tolerance.

While I agree with Kleiman that PZ's statement edges itself into being "bigoted," it's a more informed bigotry than Kleiman's tolerance is. If a bigot is just someone who is obstinately devoted to his own opinions, or one who is narrowly or intolerantly devoted to his opinions and prejudices, then the word "bigot" is just a general term that applies to everyone, including Kleiman.

PZ's bigotry is informed because PZ's blog has been documenting the great amounts of ignorance, delusion, wickedness, foolishness and oppression he finds in the news. For example, in just the past few days PZ has posted these items on his blog:

Another liar for Jesus
The great parasite and liar in the sky
Open season on gay men, apparently
Prayer for dummies

Of course, PZ is cherry picking his evidence, just like most of us in the blogosphere, and even PZ's own daughter rebuked us all for getting into this stupid fight. However, we've got more than PZ's cherry picked evidence to go on, we've also got extensive cross-national attitude studies, Gallup Poll data and more. Large groups and majorities believe in a personal God, an afterlife, Bible stories, the Devil, Hell, Heaven and miracles. There is a very low level of scientific literacy about human evolution in America when compared to other developed nations.

So, when Mark Kleiman says:

Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical.

He is actually delivering a similar insult to the one PZ does, but this time it's cloaked in the velvet glove of tolerance. Of course, it depends on what "metaphorical" means in this context. Mark Kleiman explains:

"Humans are created in the Image of God," taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being "without parts or passions," which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives.

In other words, Mark Kleiman thinks that people who talk about a literal, personal God are being childish (it's not adult level). This kind of ignorant tolerance is, in some ways, more insulting than informed bigotry because it denies that the "childish beliefs" are of any significance or importance.