They Must Be Crackers

P. Z. Myers had a post on Pharyngula yesterday about the afternoon discussion he held in Fargo ND saying "My opening remarks were about being assertive atheists who challenge conventions and do things like desecrating crackers…", and then he commented on Catholics in the audience who expressed that they were offended. One can find examples of this kind of egocentric outrage any time a disregard for Christianity is expressed in the US (as in this later post).

They just can't shift their mental gears enough to understand that what they see as the "consecrated body of the Savior" is still just a cracker to anyone of a different belief. They think that because a priest said some words and made hand gestures over baked flour disks, everyone should perceive them as little chunks of human flesh that are part of their favorite person. A non-believer can do DNA testing, mass spectrometry, X-rays, fMRI's or satellite photos and still find nothing but flour and water. Unless one assumes that Catholics revere the Pillsbury Dough Boy, no evidence of a Savior can be found.

The point is that what is revered within a religion is perceived in a unique way by devotees of that religion, but for those outside that belief, these things are just mundane objects. Christians should understand this since it has been their attitude toward the religious objects of other religions for as long as there have been Xians. Missionaries have denigrated, defaced or destroyed religious objects of other people on every continent of the world (except, maybe Antarctica) and when the non-Xians rose up in outrage, the Xians would shrug and say, "What's the big deal? It's only a cracker."

Acts like Dr. Meyrs' "desecration" of a communion wafer need to occur to remind people that there are a lot of different views represented within the human population and one's own beliefs are no more valid than anothers. Most of the people that are outraged by the blasphemous acts of non-believers have themselves sneered at or desecrated what others believe to be holy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Catholics should not be too surprised if a non-Catholic looks at a communion wafer and sees only a cracker, and those same Catholics should not be surprised by the outrage of Native Americans when something they revere is desecrated by ignorant or uncaring persons.

For way too long Xians in the US have had the attitude that their religious symbols are "the body of Christ" but everyone else's are just crackers. They need to learn that the trappings of their religion have no more value than anyone else's, and no less, but once that wafer is out of the hands of a believer, what ever special powers it possessed are gone and it reverts to cracker status and is not worthy of your outrage.

Insights on Insights on the Creation Museum Visit

One of the tweets about #CreoZerg contained a link to the site of Pastor Tom Estes, a man whose name I recognized from blog comments in defense of the Creation Museum. Estes’ blog contained a couple of articles relating his shared experience with the SSA group at the Museum which I thought were enlightening and a little baffling as to his point of view.
His first post described the visit itself beginning with him introducing himself to P. Z. Myers in the parking lot. He mentioned how relieved he was to not have to identify himself in front of hundreds of atheists, although he didn’t say why. Perhaps he thought they would pummel him with copies of Darwin’s writings. Anyway, Estes determined from his exchange of 5 or 10 words each that P. Z. was sarcastic.
Inside the Museum, Estes sat with Looy, the co-founder of AiG and one of the VP’s but later got up and listened to and watched the atheists go through the exhibits, but they were disrespectful, made fun of what the exhibits said and wore T-shirts that were against the rules (Actually, at least one student was taken to the restroom and ordered to turn his shirt inside out. Apparently he had ruined a family’s entire vacation by displaying a slogan with which they disagreed.) Furthermore, they said things like “That’s stupid,” without elaborating on why and he heard someone say he wished he had a 2 way radio to hear P. Z.’s comments. Oh yeah, the group looked like a bunch of misfits, and P. Z. was on an ego trip basking in the adoration instead of learning all the science there.
Incomprehensibly, what Pastor Estes seemed most concerned about was that someone might recognize him and take his picture! He even thought he caught some people surreptitiously trying to take a picture while he wasn’t looking. What is that about? Does he think the camera will steal his soul? Does he think his picture will be sent to freethinking hit men? Does he fear we will all draw a mustache and goatee on his picture and put it on a dart board? Sorry pastor, I don’t think anyone really wants your picture, except maybe to show a friend that this is that guy who was commenting on Pharyngula. As for hit men, I think you’ll find that when someone stalks and kills a person because they disagree with their beliefs, the atheist is usually the victim and the Xian the shooter.
As for P. Z. Myers, he is a hero to a lot of us and we’d never gotten to meet him before. Everyone would like to hear what he says, not because we’re little lost lambs in need of someone to define what we should think (that would be the Xians again), it’s because he is a Doctor of Biology and a college professor who is an expert on the science that is being desecrated in that museum. Plus we all admire his fashion sense.
Pastor Estes’ follow up article was a rebuttal to the post about the museum in Pharyngula. I think the Pastor’s view can be summed up by this quote from him: “In this statement he seems to show his complete lack of understanding in what the Creation Museum stands for. Obviously Ken Ham, Mark Looy, and the rest of us idiotic Bible believers believe in the flood, and if you believe the flood happened around 2348 BC, then naturally the fossils would be dated from that time.” He really thinks that starting with an untenable assumption and the cherry-picking and misrepresenting a few scientific facts so they appear to support his claim, is science. Quoting William Watkin from the ABC article about CreoZerg, "Everything they said about sediment deposition, about Mount St. Helens … anyone in first year geology would say 'wrong from top to bottom,”.
This is the whole point of what Estes saw and heard. This SSA group consisted of college students, college graduates, teachers and professors, who all know more about real science than he does. Of course they called things stupid without elaborating. They had all studied enough biology, geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry and physics, etc. to know why the entire museum and almost all its assertions are not scientifically honest or valid. One of the greatest exceptions being the display that talks about the irrelevance of race in our acceptance and love for the whole Human population. That was good.
If Pastor Estes would take a few undergrad science courses at a state university he might understand the difference between what Ken Hamm calls science and what people who actually do science call science. Then maybe he could put himself in the shoes, just for a minute, of someone like P. Z. Myers who has spent his entire adult life studying and teaching real science in real educational institutions and museums and see what a huge insult to and attack on every honest educator and student in the world this shrine to ignorance and propaganda, the Creation Museum, really is. And that's the Hard Truth.

I Told You "The Family" Is Scary

Pharyngula has a post about Jeff Sharlet's book: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I had a post about that a little while ago when I got freaked out by an interview with Jeff Sharlet. When I got no reaction except one from Mike Litch at Notions Capital suggesting I had little to fear, I calmed down. But now P. Z. Meyers has restored my paranoia, and judging from the comments, he's instilled that fear in a lot of his regulars.