Looking around the internet for more information on the Cook Eucharist event, I noticed that some of Cook’s friends/supporters have started a Facebook page in support of him. Interesting points to note are:
The group expresses dissatisfaction with the student government funding of the Catholic and other religious groups. This suggests there is something to the claim that Cook’s taking of the Eucharist was a pre-meditated political stunt designed to agitate for the removal of support from these groups. Cook may have concocted his story (that he just wanted to show the host to a friend of his) after the whole event blew up beyond anything he imagined it would.
While they mention that Cook has recieved “threats” of “harm”, they do not mention that he has recieved death threats. That they don’t mention specifically death threats suggests that Cook never in fact recieved such threats. While I find it easy to believe that a few would threaten to take back the Eucharist through physical force, I find it hard to believe that people would threaten to kill him. Especially when the evidence for the existence of actual death threats seems pretty thin on the ground. Even his supporters appear unaware that there were actual death threats.
Also I wanted to add that I think the justifications of PZ Meyers actions along the lines of “he was trying to demonstrate that the Eucharist is just a cracker” are silly.
If someone really wants to make a point about something, the way to do that is through reasoned argument, not through stunts like this. I find it interesting that while PZ Meyers appears to give a lot of lip service to things like “reason” and “evidence”, when it really comes down to it this is how he chooses to advance his case for atheism. Not in fact through reason and evidence but through insult and emotional stunts. If this is the best that he can do in responce to the Cook controversy then I think all it really demonstrates is the irrationality of his own atheism.
Really, desecrating a Eucharist to show that it is not have the invisible nature of the body of Christ makes even less sense then dunking a woman in a river to proove that she is not a witch. I mean after a dunking, one can make a definite determination as to whether someone is in fact a witch. If she floats, she is a witch, if not, then not. Given the premise that witches float it has at least a degree of logic to it. However there appears to be no logic in desecrating the Eucharist. No-one ever said that he couldn’t do it, only that he shouldn’t. Going through with it reveals nothing about the nature of Eucharist and only reveals PZ Meyers as an anti-Catholic bigot.
That was not the story that was posted. That man was not leaving with a wafer given to him during communion (and you only get one), but for grabbing a handful away from the priest. That is not the same situation. It is not a crime to leave with a wafer given to you during mass.
We have no reason to doubt his story. We would expect those who committed the assaukt and attempted robbery to lie. That’s what criminals do.
This has no relevance to anything.
I don’t know or care anything about this. It’s got nothing to do with the topic of discussion. It’s just a character assassonation. The fact remains that religious zealots threatned to murder him because of a magic cracker.
Yes he did. He said some crazy lady tried to steal his cracker.
We don’t need his word to know he got assaulted and got death threats for trying to show his friend a magic Jesus cracker. Those things are not disputed by anybody.
We have nothing but the word of a man who is clearly lying that he was “attacked” by “a crazy woman.”
Neither the school, the police or his fellow student Senators believe him.
Why should we take the word of a man who’s been impeached for lying.
You’re in aggressive denial of reality and as such you really are in no position to start accusing others of being “crazy” or “retards”.
The authorities disagree with you and his friends who set up the facebook page supporting him don’t seem to believe his story, which only came out later, that he actually just wanted to show the wafer to a friend of his.
So the fact that everyone but him is claiming a different version of events, the police, the other church members and the school means nothing to you? The school itself investigated his claim of assault and dismissed it based on lack of evidence. I assume next you will be claiming that the school is in on some sort of Catholic plot.
It certainly does have relevance as it establishes a motivation for him being less than strictly honest.
So “religious zealots” is fine, but as soon as someone dares to present evidence that things aren’t exactly as you declare them then it is “character assassination”.
The fact remains that some of the trouble that Cook got into over this incident had nothing to do with religion and had everything to do with the fact that he apparently mis-represented himself as something that he wasn’t. Therefore impeaching him from the student government is NOT an example of Catholics persecuting this guy. Nor does it speak very highly of his reliability as a witness. I think you are only contesting this because your whole version of events is a combination of what this guy said and stuff that you made up, and ignores all of the other more credible accounts of what went on.
Neither the linked news articles or even the guys own friends say that he received death threats. If you have some evidence that you are sitting on, please present it.
You can’t have stolen what doesn’t belong to you. The cracker was obtained under false pretenses, and therefore not his property. Just because you have something in your hand does not magically make it “your property” in any legal sense. Also, for someone complaining about “character assasination” before, characterising the church woman as “some crazy lady” is rather hypocritical.
The fact that he specifically got death threats is quite definitely being disputed by myself and others. Secondly, I seriously doubt the claim that he was just trying to show the cracker to a friend. If you think about, if he really understood Catholic theology (he insists he was raised Catholic), he would know that consecrated wafers have the exact same physical form as non-consecrated wafers. Only the ontological nature of the wafer changes. Therefore if he was really interested in seeing a wafer up close he could go to a priest at any other time and get a non-consecrated one. I am sure that the vast majority of priests would welcome the chance to explain their beliefs to someone that was interested in them.
Instead of going about it the easy way he takes a consecrated wafer during the middle of a mass, and then refuses to give it back when asked for it. As far as we can tell he doesn’t even explain his motivation for taking the wafer and arrange for his friend to see one, but persists in trying to hide the one he has and deceive the other church members. Given that I think it is definitely most likely that the “I was just going to show a friend” story is one made up after the event to make his actions appear more reasonable. Overall it just doesn’t ring true at all and has a number of flaws in it.
I haven’t seen a cite that any of this shit is being disputed.
The cracker was his property. It was given to him. he owned it, and that was the end of it. Show me a cite that it’s illegal to keep a communion wafer that was freely given to you.
He wasn’t in a church, by the way, he was in a student union.
Wow. Just wow.
First of all, for that claim to make any sense you have to show that someone Cook or someone else actually claimed that he received death threats. Sure no-one is disputing that he received death threats because no-one appears to be claiming that he did. Just because no-one is disputing it does not mean it must be true. By your logic, the fact that no-one disputes that I am an alien from Mars means that I must indeed be an alien from Mars.
Secondly, if you actually read the reports, people are denying it by not mentioning it. Even His own friends on Facebook, though they stated that he recieved physical threats, did not state that he got death threats. If they thought that he received death threats they would have said so, as it would strengthen their case. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?
Show me a legal cite showing that it is illegal to take a communion wafer from someone after it was given to them, irrespective of the circumstances. You are the one making the claim that it is theft. You should be the one to justify it. It’s not like the church members were charged with attempted robbery.
In general though giving something to someone does not mean it becomes entirely theirs. When I give money to my bank it does not become entirely theirs to do with as they please. If they keep it and refuse to give it back, they get charged with fraud. Likewise the communion wafer was given to Cook with the understanding that he was going to immediately eat it. When he didn’t he lost his claim of ownership over the wafer.
Good to know, but that is an incidental detail. Whether in a church or a student union Cook still acted like an ass.
Is this still about “stealing”(handed over willingly, to be more accurate, once you subtract the histrionic hyperbole and manufactured outrage) a freakin’ wafer or cracker or what have you? As far as I’m concerned this conversation has gone over the line, around the bend and over Niagara Falls in a padded barrel. There is no possible way to have a reasonable conversation about people stealing part of the body of Jesus Christ that has possessed a piece of bread, so I think I’m going to bow out of this madness while I still can, because there are enough real problems in the world to get genuinely upset about.
So do you agree that I am a space alien from Mars. I mean no-one is denying it, so it must be true.
It doesn’t matter that there are no explicit denials in there, because no-one is claiming it in the first place.
I think you are the one that is kidding. It is not illegal to take any kind of property from someone. It is only illegal to take someone’s legal property from this. This is a much smaller subset of things to “any kind of property”. To establish the charge of attempted theft, you first have to establish that the wafer was indeed his legal property. Given how it was obtained I severely doubt that it would come under any definition of his legal property.
I’m a bit confused why Dio keeps insisting that Cook was assaulted despite the fact that we’ve amply demonstrated there’s no credible evidence that this “assault” took place.
Is this an example of what others have called “the Dio show”?
Dio, in all seriousness, if the school authorities don’t believe that Cook was “assaulted” why do you and more to the point, what would it take to convince you that one didn’t?
I certainly hope for your sake that you never ridiculed people who insisted that OJ was framed because at this point you seem to be aggressively in denial of reality.
And no, for the record, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid or a liar, but it does make it impossible to take you seriously.
Just admit you’re wrong. None of us will hold it against you.
Really it is Diogenes that is claiming attempted theft, for when the church people tried to take the wafer back from Cook. So if you are saying that it is impossible to have a reasonable conversation with Diogenes about this, then I think I agree.
So I have tried to track back to exactly where the claim of death threats came into this story.
PZ Meyers, on his blog here, seems to be citing a Fox news story, which itself is relying on claims from Webster Cook himself. This site, with some eyewitness accounts of the incident, also notes that Cook has not been consistent in his claim of receiving death threats. It appears that it may simply be a ploy for more sympathy after he realised that the majority of people saw him as acting like a dick.
I would say that neither Fox or Webster are very credible sources, so I think the claim the fact that he actually received death threats is highly dubious.
