Posted on 07/24/2008 8:01:47 PM PDT by AHerald
I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus's tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.
By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
(Excerpt) Read more at scienceblogs.com ...
Dude. He tortures crackers. Somebody get a net
So be it.
Where’s the fatwa? Where’s the outrage? Where’s the CAIR denouncement?
Oh, he’s a Leftist?
Nevermind...
Not the Koran...
Ok, to hell with the rest.... time to riot, loot, pillage and rape.
“Not the Koran” indeed.
He’s gonna be sorrry he messed with a Koran.
Does he actually conduct research in biology and give lectures in between committing unnatural acts on wafers and typing hate-crazed entries on his blog?
Does the University of Minnesota have an Islamic students association?
Bet he's got a tremendous collection of kiddy porn on his PC too ~ guys who are fruitcakes do that you know.
1) You can buy the Qur'an anywhere, but you need to actually steal a consecrated Eucharist. I suppose you could get in line for it at a Church but to take it and not be a Catholic and do something mischievous with it is to commit a fraud. It's just understood that when you accept it (as is mentioned in all the missiles) that you are going to consume it and are entitled to consume it.
2) This is going to be a good demonstration of the difference between a true and right religion (Catholicism) and theocratic Fascism (Radical Islam) when you see the Church ask for people to pray for this man and you see the Islamofascists murder him, ala Pym Fortune.
3) Anyone want to wager the guy believes in man-made Global Warming? Or Darwinian Evolution? Thinks for himself my ass.
Instead, P. Z. Myers surreptitiously obtained and then desecrated something that is held most sacred by numerous individuals. He went out of his way to offend, to provoke the most deeply held sentiments of others, and he did so in full knowledge of what he was doing, as witnessed by the fact that he complains repeatedly on his blog about all of the outraged complaints he has been receiving from Catholics via e-mail.
In desecrating what Catholics hold most sacred--and what Muslims hold sacred as well--P. Z. Myers has fundamentally compromised himself as an educator.
He has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator.
In particular, he has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator at a state-run school, such as the University of Minnesota Morris.
It would be one thing if an employee of a private school--say, Bob Jones University--had desecrated the Eucharist. But state schools have a special responsibility to the citizens of the state to employ educators who will be respectful in their conduct towards the students, parents, alumni, and citizens of the state--including the Catholic and Muslim ones.
P. Z. Myers has demonstrated that he will go out of his way to offend the sensibilities of anybody who holds anything sacred, to treat whatever they hold sacred with public contempt. The problem thus is not limited to Catholics and Muslims. Since, in Myers own words, "Nothing must be held sacred," and since he is willing to desecrate anything that others do hold sacred, the university must conclude that Myers is willing not only to outrage Catholic and Muslim students, parents, alumni, and citizens but members of any other group as well.
Myers is thus incapable of effectively carrying out his mission as an educator and his position must be terminated.
He also is in violation of the University of Minnesota Code of Conduct, which holds that faculty members "must be committed to the highest ethical standards of conduct" (II:2) and that "Ethical conduct is a fundamental expectation for every community member. In practicing and modeling ethical conduct, community members are expected to: act according to the highest ethical and professional standards of conduct [and] be personally accountable for individual actions" (III:1).
It also stresses that faculty members must "Be Fair and Respectful to Others. The University is committed to tolerance, diversity, and respect for differences. When dealing with others, community members are expected to: be respectful, fair, and civil . . . avoid all forms of harassment . . . [and] threats . . . [and] promote conflict resolution."
P. Z. Myers has done none of these things. He is in fundamental breach of the University of Minnesota's Code of Conduct and must be discharged.
To voice your opinion on this subject, contact the offices of the president and the chancellor:
President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455Via phone: 612-626-1616
Via fax: 612-625-3875
Via e-mail: upres@umn.eduChancellor Jacqueline Johnson
309 Behmler Hall
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267320-589-6020
E-mail: grussing@morris.umn.edu
Never occurred to me, but wouldn't it be funny if people went into bookstores and bracketed copies of the koran with a recipe book for pork and a copy of the Torah? Discretely of course...
Muslim mobs deface Bibles all the time... Not much of a justification, but bracketing a Koran with a Torah and a pork recipe book is far less than burning copies of the Bible and screaming epithets about how Christian women and children deserve to be raped and killed at the top of ones lungs.
oh please..... do us a favor and look at a teacup poodle next to a great dane and drop one eensy bit of what you stated.
Other than that... spot on.
Never mind MRSA or even worse... the even more resistant evolved staphs.
It is true that the Church does engage in public policy issues as an organization of individual citizens collected under the banner of shared belief, petitioning the government for certain laws, etc., which *might* impose on your life somehow.
But rather than engaging in debate or protest against the public policy issues that may affect you, you instead steal property from the Church and desecrate it.
While you could more reasonable object to the Church being involved in a public policy process, you instead target for ridicule and desecration the Eucharist which is stolen and are, in effect, assaulting the individually chosen beliefs of fellow humans for no other reason than to express your own hatred for their self-determination and for free expression.
We could also assume that you are smart enough to know that this is not a way to open people eyes to the mistaken ways of their beliefs. I guess you lacked the sophistry and semi-intellectual capabilities of Dawkins.
But you aren't smart enough to realize that this was a great way for you to get yourself killed by our less tolerant brothers, the Muslim Fundamentalists (see Pim Fortuyn) - but at least we Catholics will pray for you.
Good observation. I had similar thoughts on reading his closing remarks, overflowing with self-reverence, where he calls us to look at the apart from our "self-satisfied ignorance" and look at our world with "fresh eyes and a questioning mind."
Funny how it seems to be that, for Myer's and his ilk, their definition of what constitutes an open mind and questioning mind pretty much always bears a striking resemblance to themselves. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
the pig bracket?
I don’t get your point.
PING
I had to read the post twice, then I got it. The poster was objecting to your classificaction of Darwinism as pseudoscience, equal to Anthropogenic global warming.
Of course not, but we can disagree on just one point. On the rest we are 100% agreed.
Btw, the Kansas school board is hiring ;-)
A man rips up pieces of paper, and defiles a cracker. Why should a rational human being such as myself care?
Anthropogenic? sheesh.... just call it man made. For intellect to have any value it has to be able to be understood by the common man.... ie. public school graduates.
Anyone who sees a conflict between Intelligen Design and Darwinism, does not understand the concept of a genetic algorithm.
Technically, it’s not a cracker, it’s a wafer...but why should I expect a scientist would know that...
ok, man-made global warming is a farce; evolution is a design feature.
Having said all that, were I a better Catholic, I would pray for the misguided professor. But, I am a sinner, and a bad catholic, so I will let God deal with him.
The Muslims, on the other hand, will probably kill him.
Or sees more. This is not an argument to have. I will not excogitate your faith if you do not question my grasp.
Nevertheless, most of the American population doesn't fetishize the so called "eucharist." Hocus pocus by any other name:
"The origins of the term remain obscure. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term originates from hax pax max Deus adimax, a pseudo-Latin phrase used as a magic formula by conjurors[1]. Some believe it originates from a parody of the Roman Catholic liturgy of the eucharist, which contains the phrase 'Hoc est enim corpus meum.'"
Rushdie lonely no longer, and as a bonus, a catoonist in their midst. ;-)
Excogitate away. When did you run out of thoughts, anyway?
Maybe you should have put that human reason to work before you chose to post your snide, dismissive public insult.
To think that your reason could have led you to chose, in an act of charity and respect for the deeply held beliefs of others, not to hit the Post button ...
Nevertheless, I will call a wafer/cracker what it is, and remind you that while your faith may believe that it is magically transformed into the body of Christ, most of us on this planet see it as just a flour-based food product, nothing more, nothing less. I respect your right to believe in what you believe, but don't think I have any obligation to genuflect towards Rome, Mecca, or Jerusalem.
Don’t be so fast to take insult - he may have honest doubts. Many people do.
Why don’t you try reason, instead?
Fine.... Darwinian evolution is a fact. Some point of generation of life is not known.
Intelligent Design (ID) is a joke. It is based upon failed beliefs shifting to allow the paradigm not to shift.
Some people or groups or beliefs think they know more than God. God knows. They don’t. They learn and adjust. Some kick in their heels and get to make up new rationalizations as to why they were wrong.
Now, if you or I can write code to evolve, why can’t God?
Do you presume to know more than God?
And wouldn’t a piece of genetic code, that sucessfully evolved for a billion years or so, be considered a very intelligent design?
I don’t see a conflict. God wrote code, things evolved.
That post was full of things extremely well said. Thank you for those well chosen and logical words.
You have no obligation to perform any religious observation that you do not believe in, and you are smart to avoid offending others.
I agree 100%.
Do you hold any religious beliefs, if I may ask?
no... actually God set constants.
Constants defined reality.
Reality allowed matter.
Matter allowed energy and mass to be available.
mass and energy and that thing we can describe but dont understand .... you know.... gravity..... allowed it to stick together and get energetic
etc.
I am open to the idea of a creator, in the sense of Aquinas’s “prime mover” (although I find several flaws in Tommasso’s actual theory), but can neither prove nor disprove it. I do not believe in a god/gods that “intervene” in the affairs of men.
It must be really special to know everything and, at the same time, know that every one else is a fool.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
Straw man. No one's asking you to genuflect to anything. I've no interest in your assent to Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. The issue at hand is not whether or not the Eucharist is what Catholics say that it is. The issue is the intentional public desecration of that which others hold to be sacred. Stripped away from any debate about the merits of religious beliefs, what Myer's has done here is a gross violation of simple common civility in the public arena. And that, to answer your initial question is why this issue should matter to "rational human beings" like yourself.
there is a constant in the universe which is escaping me right now that has 16,000,000 digits to the right of the decimal or so, and one to the right or left and the universe would be impossible and there is no known reason for it for it can vary hugely in the math models. All the others we have discovered can vary as much as 3% to 5% and things would still be as they are.
Prime mover indeed.
I am the wretch the song refers to.
Nice post. Agreed.
The nuns taught me, “God helps those that help themselves.”
Perhaps you are saying the same thing.
Many great men have attempted to prove or disprove the idea of God, after St. Thomas - I am not one of them.
I used to lack all faith, for good and rational reasons. For one thing, I understand and admit why the “idea” of God is valuable to the human species - it is a defense mechanism against stress.
The typical human is absolutely terrified by the very idea of entropy.
I don’t mean chaos, I mean entropy.
It scares the hell out of people.
And humans, like all animals, can literally die of stress.
Religion is an immediate resolution to that problem - “If you go to church on sunday, and asteroid won’t fall on your house!”
“Well, one fell on Fred’s house...”
“SEE! Proves my point! He missed church last Sunday!”
“He was in the pew next to you.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t mean it!”
So, yeah, I get it.
But the stress of not believing is still going to kill you.
You ever figure out gavity, ping me to it.
Better yet, go hide - you life won’t be worth a plug nickel.
How can you believe he gave his life for us all, and at the same time, not believe what he said?
Well, the fact that you took the time to look over the article and type a post shows that either you care or you are irrational. Think about it.
Or maybe, just questioning. People have doubts, that is part of the game.
Heck, I spent a couple of hours this week arguing over the translation of just one verse in Genesis. It was very informative.
Should we not? Should we not look to original sources? Should we not question, and ask, why?
I certainly will. So shoot me.
I’m not going to play that game.
I have Catholic friends. I was raised around Catholicism and understand it for the most part. But from my teaching and my study of His Word, I do not agree with some of the very basic beliefs of the RC faith.
Here is the beginning and end of it:
Mulieri quoque dixit: Multiplicabo ærumnas tuas, et conceptus tuos: in dolore paries filios, et sub viri potestate eris, et ipse dominabitur tui.
(To the woman also he said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee.)
(Genesis 3:16)
Response: “It is mistranslated. “sorrow” is better translated as “with physical pain”. “shall be under thy husband’s power” is better translated as “your husband will [want to] dominate you [whether you like it or not]”. “shall have dominion over thee” is better rendered as “he shall lord it over you” or “he shall dominate you [by force] regardless of your desires”. All these are mere statements of fact. The real punishment is contained in the next verse: “yet your longing shall be for your husband”, i.e. “and you’ll love him for being such a jerk and want to have babies with him even though it hurts, ‘cause that’s how I made you”. “
Interesting, is’t it?
Cetainly, it is not my job to convert you.
To anything.
Forgive me for asking.
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