Also, the repeated cries of “well, is it desecration to eat a hamburger” shows shocking ignorance of Hinduism and has to be one of the more laughable red herrings I’ve seen in a thread which has already seen quite a few red herrings tossed out there with asinine fights over what constitutes “a Catholic” and what whether or not a wafer can be called a Eucharist.
The answer to such a question is “Duh”.
Hindus don’t consider it sacrilege for non-Hindus to eat hamburgers. In fact, you can eat hamburgers in India. I know people who’ve done so and Christians and Muslims in India(remember there are more Muslim Indians than Muslim Arabs) regularly eat beef.
There are some states in India which have laws against “slaughtering cows” but none AFAIKN that have laws against eating beef.
Hindus aren’t Christians who tend to think something is a sin regardless of who does it. Hindus would certainly be upset about other Hindus eating beef, but they certainly don’t care about Muslims or Christians doing it.
Anyway, if people want to insist that what Myers did wasn’t insulting, then just do it, but don’t keep bringing up red herrings that show ignorance of non-Western religions.
That’s a case of differential effect. As I said, no-one believes that atheists are in any way insulted by “desecrating” Dawkins.
The target is clearly religious folk, with a focus on Catholics.
I presume a “not” is missing in the first sentence there - his expressed intention, the one he states in his blog, is to express contempt and hatred for religious people:
The ‘people making death threats over a cracker’ is simply an incident that, in his mind, confirms this (obviously pre-existing) bigotry. His stunt is an expression of contempt towards the rituals of these hated, evil people - as he states:
To my mind, those who describe others in such terms are simply bigots. Their bigotry lies in attributing bad things commited by members of the group to the group as a whole, and assuming they are characteristic, combined with lies about those bad acts - his blog has this in spades, right from the get-go he’s comparing pogroms from the middle ages to modern Catholics. Here’s a perfect example:
This paragraph demonstrates the techniques of bigotry in spades:
Attribute bad stuff that happened hundreds of years ago to modern people: “That is the true power of the cracker, this silly symbol of superstition.”
Lie about bad stuff done by the hated group: “Fortunately, Catholicism has mellowed with age — the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers.” We’ve been over that - the crimes of Nazi Germany were not a Catholic pogrom against “non-Christians”.
Attribute present-day outrage by a few internet nuts caused by (probable) trolling to the bad stuff that happened in the middle ages: “Catholicism has been actively poisoning the minds of its practitioners with the most amazing bullshit for years, and until recently, I had no idea that a significant number of people actually believed this nonsense, or that the hatred was still simmering there, waiting for an opportunity to rise up in misplaced defense of absurdity”.
In short, from this one paragraph the view of Catholics are that they are ever ready to launch a pogrom (“the hatred is still there”), as they did in the middle ages and as they did “the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry … a whole 70 years ago”.
It’s an amazing farrago of bigotry and bullshit. I’m quite amazed anyone is defending it.
You still don’t get it do you? You’ve got this whole Oh we must be polite and respect other people thing going on which makes you a bigger problem than the cracker fetishists.
Inanimate objects don’t matter. You shouldn’t be able to hurt someone by damaging an inanimate object. Yes I know that’s what happens now but that doesn’t make it right. What PZ (and others) are trying to show is that this is an irrational feeing that can potentially be used for harm and the quicker we move on from the idea of scared objects the better for all of us.
[QUOTE=PZ Myers]
Religion makes you nuts. It makes ordinary people identify with invisible spirits, it turns them into caterwauling flibbertigibbet idiots at any slight to a magic man who has never done a thing for them, and it makes them center their lives around head-dunkings and cracker-eating and gibbering chants to an unheeding phantasm.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person or even stupid if you’re a believer. I’m saying that you are possibly wicked if you’re promoting it, probably ignorant if you accept its contradictions with reality, almost certainly foolish if you think rituals will get you into heaven, definitely deluded by centuries’ worth of lies, and most definitely oppressed by your deference to baseless superstition.
As for my cause, ultimately it’s not anti-religion or pro-science education, although those are subsidiary goals. My cause is simply the truth — the truth stated plainly and openly.
So all those people squawking that they were offended were wasting their efforts. I don’t care if you were offended. There is no god (or no evidence of one), and you aren’t rebutting my claims by telling me how deeply your feelings are hurt
[/QUOTE]
I was a cook for many years and the communion wafer would not fit the discription of a Cracker, it is just being used to slur the beliefs of another and not searching for truth which this site is all about!
If some one taunts another no matter what the reason, it still says more about the taunter than the one being taunted. There is enough hate and disrespect in the world, why make something (if it has no meaning to you, or another ) into more signs of hate. Surely if one believes it is a Cracker why go through the act of making fun of another . I wonder if it is just a way to express their own meanness. It would be different if a believer tried to shove it down another’s throat.
It seems to me, a person that tries to take another down to their level feels the other is ahead (or above) them.Perhaps they are afraid to rise up to the others level?
The order of events is something to keep in mind here, I think.
It started with a student who snuck a hostie out of church, to show his mate.
Big deal!!
Catholic children do this all the time, or chew it, or suck it for as long as possible.
A healthy response would be “tssk, tssk”, a frown or a simple admonishment.
The reactions this student got are way over the top and show there really issomething wrong here.
Meyers’ action is a response to this unhealthy reaction. So he’s not just taunting and it does say a lot about those being taunted.
Incredibly stupid beliefs like this deserve to be slurred; they certainly don’t deserve respect. But actually I used the term cracker just because someone else did; I’ve never seen one personally, nor have I ever cared about the exact classification of the Catholic’s magic snacks.
That’s a ridiculous claim. Mockery can be well deserved or completely undeserved.
Which is what believers do all the time. The believers are constantly, relentlessly trying to push their beliefs on everyone else. And the Catholic Church is most certainly no exception to that.
As for hatred; some things deserve to be hated, and religion is one of those things. Including but not limited to the Catholic religion. Hatred is neither good nor bad.
I regard Catholicism like all religion with utter contempt. It is a thing of cruelty, malice, lies, delusion, greed and bigotry; a blight upon humanity like all religions. Anti-human, anti-life, anti-hope, anti-happiness. I certainly don’t regard it as “above me”.
Really? Respecting other people is a bigger problem in this little world of ours than not respecting other people?
I assume you extend this interesting notion to racial slurs (just words, right? Even less substance to them than crackers!) If you object to someone calling other people by racial slurs, you must be the big problem - after all, people being upset by mere words is deeply irrational, right?
Hell, a White Supremacist is a crusader for freedom when he wears a swastika and blames the n!ggers for destroying America- he’s just showing everyone that words and symbols have no magic power. Lying about Black people is a mere bagatelle. Anyone who things he’s a jerk, a troll and a bigot is the real problem here! When he pisses on the graves of black people lynched in the '60s and makes a video of it, he’s a real hero.
Unfortunately Myers’ own unhealthy response was of a form designed to be heard by, and to hurt, all devout Catholics, and all devout Muslims, not just the small subset of Catholics who had the prior unhealthy reaction.
I fail to see how this escalation of intolerance is helpful. If Myers were really as much wiser than the religionists as he believes, he would break the cycle instead of feeding it.
Or maybe, those who preach to be all about Peace and how God loves everybody and how religion makes people so nice and are so much more moral, could live up to their pretences and be the ones to de-escalate.
How could they hear it unless the voluntarily read his blog, and how were any of them “hurt” by it?. I think it’s instructive that after all these pages, no one has been able to explain how anybody was injured by Myers poking a hole in a tiny tortilla.
I fail to see how poking a hole in a piece of bread is an “escalation” from death threats.
How is anybody “harmed” by a white supremacist spouting off about how much he hates Black people in a blog? It’s just words.
Yet we tend to think of such people in a negative way - that they are bigots and trolls.
Same with this guy. He’s harming no-one, he’s simply demonstrating that he’s a bigot and a troll.
There is one difference of course - that he, according to himself, anonymously requested that someone do a bit of desecration for him: namely, obtain a host (which can only be done by stealing it). Like a white supremacist who does not personally piss on Martin Luther King’s grave, but asks for his fellow-bigots to do so, and then posts pics of it.
They AREN’T harmed. I don’t care what a white supremacists says on a blog? Why should anybody care?
I’m still waiting to hear how he’s harmed anybody.
First, there is no such thing as “desecration.” That’s purely an imaginary action that happens only in the magical world. What actually happened was that a guy poked a hole in a piece of bread. Call it what it really is.
Second, we don’t know that the wafer came from a mass.
Third, even if it did, no one was the wiser and no one was harmed unless you think that “desecration” is a real thing.
ETA I don’t care if someone pisses on Martin Luther King’s grave, and neither does Martin Luther King.
You miss the point. I agree no-one is directly “harmed” by a white supremacist spouting off on a blog, or by pissing on MLK’s grave. But who cares?
The issue is not whether someone is “harmed”, but how we think of those who do these things. Admirable, or the reverse?
To my mind they are bad guys, because they are trolling - they are deliberately attempting to piss people off, which is bad; they are doing so to express hatred of others, which is also bad.
And Czarcasm - feel free to jump in and tell Dio how much you disagree with him any time now.
You are absolutely right- he shouldn’t have ridiculously escalated the conversation by introducing white supremacists pissing on the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr. and saying that, between futzing with a cracker and giving death threats, the person futzing with a cracker is the one escalating the situation.
No, wait…that wasn’t Dio that did those things, was it?
Dio is saying that stuff - white supremacists pissing on graves - isn’t wrong. He has to take that position, because of the logic of his position on the host - that doing symbolic acts of hatred that physically harm no-one cannot be wrong.
Do you agree or not with this position? Can doing purely symbolic acts of hatred and disrespect be morally wrong - or not?
