Student Kidnaps the Eucharist... PZ Myers to the Rescue!

The BBQ Pit
101

I wonder if the people who are outraged about this expressed similar outrage over the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammad.

Sacrilege may not win you lots of friends, but it is our right. I created several religious figures on my Wii. I think it’s pretty funny to see Dick Cheney trading blows with Baby Jesus in a video game. I don’t make a public spectacle out of it, but it would be within my rights to do so if I wished.

This guy is being rude, but it is my experience that many religious people openly display unrestrained resentment of the non-believing population without even the slightest concern for their feelings. Some even feel it to be their duty. People offended by these shenanigans should treat this the way I treat Ann Coulter. Just ignore it.

102

Well, the news article is vague and poorly written, but it says that the wafer was taken by someone named Cook. It then says that Cook’s friend took the wafer from him to “show him what it meant to Catholics.” Meaning that Cook was not aware of what the host meant to Catholics when he took it. It may have been an absent-minded thing. I see no indication that he waved it in any Catholic’s face or desecrated it in any way, besides not eating it. Maybe it tasted like crap so he spit it out in his hand without realizing that it was a capital offense to some, and then later mentioned it to his Catholic friend, who clued him in on the meaning, after which he returned it.

Oh yeah, and since you’re the one who made the claim that he did it to piss them off, you should be the one backing it up, not asking me to back up an alternate claim when I ask you for evidence.

103

In other words, Hindus understand that only Hindus are expected to follow Hindu religious teachings. The Catholic Church (the institution, not “all individuals who happen to be Catholic”) expects all people, Catholic or not, to follow Catholic religious teachings.

104

  1. Anyone sending death threats over this is a total nimrod who deserves a kick in the balls.

  2. PZ Myers should not be attempting to form a Eucharist Liberation Front. It serves no point. If the alleged point is to show how irrationally some Catholics will react to a desecrated cracker, then the point has already been made. He should take up stamp collecting or something instead, if he’s bored.

  3. The student who originally took the cracker may have been “stealing” in a moral sense. (I don’t think the law enters into this at all.) But I’m not sure. I doubt there was any clear communication of the terms and conditions of accepting the Host. (“Salvation void in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico …”) It’s safe to assume that the priest would not have given the kid the cracker if the kid had announced his intentions. However, I don’t know if the kid was under any obligation to make such an announcement.

If I’m walking down the street thinking about where I can get something to level out the coffee table, and come across a couple of Gideons handing out Bibles, am I really “stealing” the Bible if I take it for that purpose? (Even in just a moral sense, not a legal one.) If I told them up front why I wanted it, they might refuse to hand it over. But they don’t exactly ask either.

In any case, the student needs to find a new hobby. Stamp collecting never pissed off anyone.

105

Of course he’s being rude. Of course the death threats are uncalled for. Nobody here is defending the death-threats, but there do seem to be people claiming that his actions aren’t rude.

being rude is often legal, but it’s almost always an asshole move.

Daniel

106

Again, bad analogy. This guy wasn’t using the wafer to thicken a stew that needed thickening: he was deliberately setting out to upset the folks who’d given him the wafer. If you took the Bible and then wiped your ass with it (despite having toilet paper handy) and filmed it and sent the film to the Gideon society, that’d be a closer analogy.

The priest may not have set up strict conditions by which the gift should be taken, although the one time I went to a Catholic service, the Eucharist was preceded by an explanation of the conditions. Even if it weren’t, though, you’d have to be pretty amazingly ignorant not to know the implicit conditions under which it was offered (i.e., to eat it immediately, just like every single other damn person is doing). By standing in line, you’re implicitly signalling your intent to take it in the spirit in which it’s intended: you know the priest has that expectation of you. If you plan to do something different from what every single other person in line is going to do, and you know that the only way you’ll be able to do that is because you’re expected to do the same thing as them, it’s morally incumbent on you to let the priest know of your different intentions. Failure to do so is a lie by omission.

Daniel

107

Do hurt feelings count? Diogenes, you don’t strike me as being the type who would display such oafish behavior. If you invited me to your place for dinner and in the midst of some polite dinner conversation I just decided to flip your wife the bird and tell her to “fuck off” what do you think your response would be? While I wouldn’t expect you stab me through the throat with your steak knife I would expect you be be slightly offended, angry, and maybe even a little hurt.

So while I don’t think this student should be subjected to death threats I do think his behavior marks him as a jerk.

Marc

108

From the article at http://www.wftv.com/news/16798008/detail.html

"Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.

“When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him,” Cook said. “I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they’d leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth.”

A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that’s why he brought it home with him.

“She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand,” Cook said, adding she wouldn’t immediately take her hands off him despite several requests."

If his claims are true, then church officials confronted him, tried to retrieve the Wafer &, because they got physical (he asserts), he left the church with it. According to his own account, he knew he was not treating the wager properly and defiantly left with it because he did not like how he was treated by those trying to retrieve it. He’s no innocent who didn’t know what he was doing.

Webster Cook - asshole. PZ Myers - asshole. People who make death threats against them - potentially criminal assholes.

109

Please read the first quote box in Post #1.

That comes from his (PZ Myers’, the gent mentioned in the thread title, who is a Professor at the U of Minnesota, Morris) own blog. In a nutshell, he says he is doing it to provoke a reaction (which is what we accuse trolls of doing around here). I don’t know if he actually got a cracker…

The reason he decided to do this was because of the reaction a certain Webster Cook got when he walked off with a Host wafer without consuming it, as described in the first link (which is from the entry on his blog that the first quote was pulled from).

I assume the OP was pitting PZ, not Cook. :confused: (Or is the OP pitting the death threats? Now I’m really confused…)

At least, that is the guy (PZ Myers) I was calling a dick.

110

Wait a minute. The fact that they assaulted him makes him more culpable in this situation?

I dunno. I was going with assholish but funny when I read the OP. The more I read the crap the various apologists in this thread are spouting, the more I’m leaning towards assholish but funny and justified.

ETA: missing word that rendered sentence nonsensical

111

So he didn’t do it to piss anybody off, just to show it to his friend. Only after the Catholics acted like assholes and assaulted him did he act like a jerk. Count me in with Gorsnak- your description makes him less culpable in my book, not more.

112

Wow. I hardly know where to begin.

Some quickies: Diogenes asks for a cite about what the priest said. The phrase “Take this, all of you, and eat it,” is part of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. If the priest didn’t say those words, then we Catholics believe the Host is not consecrated, and the man in question would just have been making off with a wafer of bread, nothing more. So yes, the priest said it.

Was it theft? Happy Scrappy seems to believe this was a conditional gift, or theft by deception.

This is an intriguing question. A gift is simply a gratuitous conveyance of title to property. It’s undisputed that there’s no charge or payment associated with distribution of the Eucharist. A conditional gift is one in which the donor requires that some future event or condition is true before title passes. A condition may be precedent (happens before the delivery) or subsequent (happens after the delivery and acceptance). Title vests when the condition has been performed.

It’s at least arguable, then, that the distribution of communion wafers is a conditional gift, with a condition subsequent that the recipient eat the wafter, at which point title passes to the recipient.

I don’t think the issue is theft, though, because the wafer is given freely into the donee’s hands. And I’m not sure about the applicability of theft by deception, because as a general matter the deception element cannot include falsity about matters that have no monetary value.

I thought about embezzlement, but it generally requires a fiduciary duty between the recipient and the owner.

So my from-the-hip response is that there’s no crime here. Because the recipient didn’t perform the condition subsequent, he may be civilly liable to replace the value of the gift or return the gift.

I welcome further analysis on this point.

113

Wait, they fucking grabbed the idiot kid with the fucking cracker?

Are they on fucking crack?

Boy, you Catholics are being idiots today. I guess you’re learning from the Muslims that the way to get respect is to threaten people with violence. Way to go. So much for that whole love and peace crap.

114

Hey, he tried to make off with a chunk of their God. Enough people do that, and He’ll just disappear.

115

Now, in fairness, you have to admit that more than one newspaper decided it wasn’t worth the risk to print those cartoons, so judging strictly from results, it seems those violent Muslim guys were on to something.

I am therefore proposing the following edit in the Gospel of Luke: But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. But if he also strikes that cheek, he’s an asshole and you should kick the shit out of him. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. But he persists and also wants your sandals, he’s probably a crackhead, and you can put a cap in his ass, because, really, who’s going to miss a crackhead?

116

Shirley, it’s called “habit evidence.” Or “business practice,” if you want to go the cynical route.

And Cook doesn’t have to have read the Catechism. You asked for proof of the CHURCH’s intent that the gift be eaten. Try to keep up.
Bricker, let’s not forget IIED. That’s where the big money is. :smiley:

They didn’t threaten anyone. They attempted to stop a sacreligious act.

117

Yeah, but Torts made my head swim.

118

They attempted to stop a sacreligious act by assaulting him. And then when the other guy, the blogger PZ Myers posted about how he thought the episode was pathetically stupid (which it was, all around), and if someone sent him a consecrated host he’d desecrate it so fast it would make your head spin, then lots of you Catholics threatened him with death.

Catholics threatening to kill people who commit blasphemy might sound quaint, except for that whole period where you all actually did kill people for committing blasphemy. In the past. And now you’re threatening to start it up again. Way to go, I’m sure Jesus Christ in Heaven is looking down on you all and smiling benevolently.

Again, try to keep up, you Catholics are threatening PZ Meyers with death, because PZ Meyers threatened to disrespect a cracker. He didn’t even actually disrespect the cracker, he merely THREATENED to disrespect the cracker.

119

“Lots,” in this case, meaning “four.”

120

Damn straight. Right now Pope Palpatine is on his way over to PZ’s place with his blessed Glock.