PZ Myers trashes the cracker

The final chapters of the Catholic communion wafer scandal are at last coming to a close. PZ Myers has finally disposed of a wafer and Webster Cook has appeared on Freethought Radio and received a scholarship from them. We still have to see if Myers is fired and Cook is kicked out of student senate and/or expelled, and while I hope that they aren't, these crazy Catholics are persistent.

The Catholic League issued another press release today, again calling for the University of Minnesota, Morris, to fire PZ Myers. While the press release does point out the university's clear rules against discrimination, which include being hostile toward a religious group's property, they fail to realize that PZ's comments were written on his blog, which is hosted by Seed science magazine and is not hosted by the university. This matters because by speaking through his blog, PZ Myers is not representing himself as a professor but as a writer for Seed magazine. One of the threats that PZ Myers received through email was from a 1800-flowers.com email account, and the account's owner was fired as a result. This would not have happened had they sent the email from a personal account (such as Gmail), but instead they spoke as a representative of the 1800-flowers.com company and broke the company's rules.

The press release also equates "destruction of the Eucharist" (throwing a small wafer of wheat in the bin) with the Klan burning a cross in front of blacks or Nazis flying their flags in front of Jews. This is an absolutely faulty comparison. Religious beliefs are not the same as racial identity, and unlike the Klan and the Nazis, PZ Myers and other atheists (like me) are not seeking for the enslavement and/or destruction of anyone, even Catholics. Blacks and Jews should be offended at such a comparison.

As part of the desecration, PZ Myers also trashed some torn-out pages of the Koran and The God Delusion, to prove that nothing is sacred. I hope Richard Dawkins does not issue a fatwa against PZ.