Atheist Professor P.Z. Myers asks his blog readers to provide him with some paint so he can desecrate the local Jewish Synagogue with Swastikas.


No, that's not right.

Everyone knows that would be wrong.

Actually, he's asking his readers to give him the Consecrated Host from a Catholic Mass so he can desecrate it on YouTube.

Mark Shea describes him as "crazy bag Lady Screaming at Traffic"

Uber-Darwinist P.Z. Myers - who makes his living taking tax money from, inter alia, Catholics - offers this in support of a college student who decided to desecrate the Body of Christ that he obtained under false pretenses from a Catholic Mass:

Got that? If you don't like what Webster Cook did, all you have to do is complain to the university, and they will do the dirty work for you of making his college experience miserable. And don't assume the university would support Cook; the college is now having armed university police officers standing guard during mass.

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It's like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, 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. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what passes for a tolerant, open-minded atheist teaching at one of our finest public universities.

And the comments are a fine example of the shallow bigotry that passes for deep atheist thought.

Quite embarrassing for secular atheists.

The Catholic League's response.

Here is Myers follow-up post where he is shocked - shocked! - that some Catholics react quite strongly to being called names and being told that an essential element of their faith should be disrupted and desecrated for his amusement. Apparently, in Myers' bizarro-land, Catholics are engaged in intolerance and hate crime against him.

Francis Beckwith's commenters are worth reading.

My personal hope - and prediction - is that the University will take no steps against Myers for what would be "hate speech" against any other group and that will be a step toward ending the "heads I win, tails you lose" system which is "hate crimes/hate speech."

Just saying.

Update:

On the other hand, I'm all for social pressure causing idiots like Myers to feel the costs of their idiocy.

The Left has certainly advanced its agenda by hedging its positions with sacred icons that no one dare disrespect, and there is nothing wrong in equal treatment for equal things.

On that note, there is this e-mail to Jonah Goldberg in the Corner:

You write:

A professor who advocated desecrating the image of, say, Martin Luther King Jr. in a similar way (which would be idiotic and offensive, for the record) would lose his job and his career. But such repugnant disrespect for more traditional icons is routinely considered clever and insightful in our intellectual culture.

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.

I don't ask Meyers to accept or even respect the teaching — he can ridicule all he likes. But when he undertakes actually to desecrate the Eucharist itself, not because it means anything to him, but solely because it means a great deal to Catholics and he wishes to outrage us, that's just plain hate — or, at least, it's well short of the minimal respect for other people's viewpoints that one would expect from a faculty member at a state-supported university. And when the university fails to act, as it probably will, we Catholics will learn once again that we are citizens of the lowest caste — that what is to us the holiest thing on earth deserves far less consideration than, in your example, a mere photograph of Martin Luther King.

Too true.

And isn't that the point that Myers is making? Isn't he saying that Catholics are a ower class - "fuckwits" is his term for believing Catholics - who don't deserve respect, but do deserve it when atheists lie and steal to disrupt their most sacred thing?

How is he doing anything but modeling hatred and bigotry for the students he teaches?

Second Update:

Myers wrote this about the Danish cartoons:

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

Understand that Myers is not sympathetic to Muslims, but he is beholden to a liberal secular mindset that is sympathetic to those who it defines as "minorities", which doesn't include Catholics or, I imagine, evangelical Christians.

Which is why it is permissible in his mind for a tenured professor of a public university to advocate the harassment and discrimination against Catholics.

Tolerance is not a principle in Myers' book.

Which is why we should oppose the New Atheists, who, undoubtedly, will resemble the Old Atheists of the Soviet Union, once they get power.