Well this is a fine little dust up

Yesterday, PZ Myers, of pharyngula fame, pointed to a silly little story of alleged Eucharist desecration and the death threats (yes, that's right I said DEATH THREATS) that the wafer smuggler received after taking the cracker. PZ expressed a desire in his post to obtain the holy tasteless bread to perform some symbolic desecration. Well this got the ire of Captain Catholic himself, Bill Donahue, who now is, of course, calling for PZ Myers job as pennace for so foul an act as doing horrible things to a cracker.

Donahue is the epitome of a serial religious grievence monger. His organization is no different than CAIR, they just hold different myths sacred. Of course it is rank insanity to get huffy over a freakin cracker. Heck, the Catholic church let serial child molestation by its own clergy continue unabated for decades. A little inappropriate cracker touching would seem a minor offense. But irony has never been a strong suit for the relgious mind.

Well this little dust up has landed over at Nation Review Online's The Corner and the results are mixed. Katherine Lopez started it by merely reprinting Donahue's press release. But the response from the peanuts wasn't universal outrage. Andrew Stuttaford pointed out the obvious free speech issues while John Derbyshire reflected on PZ's discussion about piety and intelligence. But the most interesting passage was a letter reprinted by Jonah Goldberg from a reader. From the letter:

I understand that your heart is in the right place here, but the analogy is completely inadequate. We Christians are quite accustomed to have our _images_ treated scornfully, in a way that the Academy would never tolerate for images of politically correct heroes. But the Eucharist is not an image: it is, in the teaching of the Church, the Body of Christ itself. People have died rather than obey their captors' command to desecrate the Eucharist. To a believer, there is simply no analogy between the Eucharist and mere objects, any more than there is between a person and a photograph of a person.

This I find most interesting. If this were indeed the body of a human being, then Catholics around the world are guilty of cannabalism. Whoa whoa whoa!! you say. That's just going too far! Is it really? People like Bill Donahue are demanding that we take their religious views and traditions with respect. He damands it to an extreme that he believes a public University should FIRE a professor for merely suggesting that he would like to"desecrate" a cracker. I'd say that's pretty serious. And as the emailer suggested, Catholics believe that that cracker is the LITERAL body of Christ. It would seem we have no choice but to start rounding up Catholics as they leave the sacrament line. The Catholic League would surely roundly denounce the authorities for, you guessed it, taking their religion seriously.

I don't know how much clearer the goal of an organization like the Catholic League could be. They pine for the warm wooden box of theocracy to bury individual liberty in. Donahue wants the University of Minnesota Morris to destroy the livelihood of an individual over his opinions of a stupid cracker. And make no mistake about it, if Donahue had his way and didn't live in a secular democracy, PZ would have to worry about much more than his job.

Hmmm wonder why none of the companies were named

Fromm CNN we get this lovely piece of uncritical woo. Her name is Laura Day and she's an "intuitionist". It's certainly not surprising that she has a long list of celebrity clients. We expect the Nicole Kidman's of the world to buy what sounds like, well it sounds like absolutely nothing. And she charges her corporate clients 10K a month for this "service". Obviously the story says nothing whatsoever about which companies these may be. I wonder exactly where you put an intuitionist's services on a corporate balance sheet. We've all had to deal with the occasional idiot "consultant" that ends up costing you more than he could ever be worth. Can you imagine working a a particularly vexing project only to have Ms Day come in and convice upper management that her little inner voice tells her that it's a bad idea? And I wonder what the typical stockholder think about the company spending their investment on a bunch of nothing.

It seems that not even corporate America is immune to uncritical irrationality. What amazes me to no end is that CNN runs a total non-story with absolutely no critical examination. Are there no critics of this? If this were a story on, say, stem cell research, we would have quotes from scientists along with some ridiculous, uneducated horse manure from some "family" group. What to we get here? Essentially, it's a glowing profile and advertisement for Day. It almost makes me wonder if one of her clients is a certain news media mogul.....

R.I.P. George Carlin

George Carlin died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 71. Carlin was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for free speech and skepicism by speaking plainly and truthfully about the nonsense of believing in things for which there is no evidence. When arrested for using "vulgarities" in Milwaukee during his 7 words bit, he was asked about if he considered the children in the audience and if he would have used more restraint if he had known there were kids there. Most of the milquetoast entertainers of today would have folded into a genuflect apologia in an attempt to assuage the PC nannies. Carlin was unfazed and basically said it was the kids that needed to hear these words the most before they had built silly prejudices. He was right. Later, a broadcast of his comedy show precipitated a complaint to the FCC that eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. The case unfortunately ended in a 5-4 decision in favor of the FCC being able to regulate "profane" speech on the radio (which apparently doesn't cover Michael Savage or Mark Levin).

He also directed a considerable amount of ridicule toward the major icons of Christianity. He could mount a full frontal assault on the 10 commandments, the Catholic church and evangelicalism in front of an audience that surely contained a large number of at least nominal Christians and get uproarious laughs. I have to believe that after some of these people stopped laughing and let the reason sink in, they had a "road to Pesci" moment and realized that the religious dogma they had been fed were nothing more than fairy tales.

So in rememberance of George, I will be weaving Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits into my language today. And if anyone is offended well they can just fuck off.

Book burning

No, it's not what you think. It seems there may be a portion of the Jews in Israel that aren't exactly interested in converting like the Hageeites would like. And they're burning New Testaments to make their point. No doubt many of the evangelicals that read this story will recoil in horror as they conveniently forget how they accused the Harry Potter books of promoting witchcraft and yes, burned them.

Beyond the obvious irony, it's a fascinating look into how religion is really just an extension of our tendency towards tribalism. Even among those that claim to be Jewish, the divisions among the traditional Jews and the Messianic Jews are so deep that it is not only driving some individuals to burn the New Testament, but to also attempt to have the government restrict the distribution of the text altogether. The State of Israel is assaulted from almost all sides by Islamic countries who don't believe their country is legitimate. And yet Israel is still beset by the same lunacy that drives Muslim hatred. Their eyes are so colored by their fealty to the tribe that they cannot see themselves in the eyes of their enemy.

Some funny

It's about a year old but still quick funny. The first time I saw Red State, I couldn't tell if it was a parody or not. That's the amazing thing about creationists. The loopy ones are almost indistinguishable from a joke.

Creepy Christian fetishism

Newsweek has a report on the "Holy Land Experience", a bible based theme park in Orlando, Florida. To say this is weird really doesn't quite do it justice. One of the main attractions of the park is a recreation of the crucifixion tale complete with fake blood and an actor playing Jesus nailed to a cross. So amid all the standard trappings of your typical theme park, the $4.00 sodas, cotton candy, and a variety of frozen confections, you get ritual torture and scape goat fetishism.

I honestly have to wonder about the mental stability of a person who would actually go to a place like this for fun. The crucifixion story is not only barbaric in the physical, it's a horrible moral tale. The idea of transferring the wrongs of one person to something else is a common theme in primitive superstitious storytelling. And yet the people watching this somehow find comfort in a god that demands one person be tortured and killed before he grants forgiveness too everyone else.

Creep, creepy, creepy. The intermingling of Jewish and Christian themes also looks an awful lot like the Christian Dominionist style of evangelicalism. I'm sure pastor Hagee would approve.

The WaPo sees through the charade

There's a nice editorial on the Washington Post editorial page echoing my previous post about the red herring of "Academic Freedom" bills. This is a clever tactic in a political sense. It exploits one of the most admirable values of our nation's conscience: our devotion to free and unfettered speech. The problem is this has nothing whatsoever to do with speech. Teachers have a contractual obligation to teach the curriculum as adopted by the governing school district. This is why the creationist tactic has been to target school boards and cajole them into adding ID into it. But that tactic simply won't work. It's creationism promotion in public schools which is a clear violation of the establishment clause. So they have decided on a new tactic. After all, if you can't play by the rules, why not just change them!

This new attempt at inserting GAWD into public schools could do far more damage than even a few school boards adopting "Of Pandas and People". If these pass, teachers would be endlessly bringing their own agendas into public school classrooms. And if they teach some nonsense, they would simply be able to wrap themselves in the flag of "speech". Curricula are adopted for a reason. Without some standard base, education cannot build upon itself. Science teachers would be contradicting each other from year to year and the learning progression would be a muddled mess. Sure science changes. But not in primary and secondary school classrooms. It changes in research and private labs and universities. Then once the science is established, it trickles down to the grade school level.

But ID proponents want to bypass all that and go straight to "teaching the controversy" to 12 year olds. These bills would not just affect the teaching of Biology, but ALL the sciences. It's insidious and needs to be exposed for what it really is.