By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
The reader you quoted at 5:57 pm must not have great reading skills. Myers claimed that he obtained a post-transubstantiation wafer. The line "Myers might as well have snagged a bottle of red wine from a liquor store and "desecrated" the blood of God" completely misses the facts here. PZ solicited post-transubstantiation crackers in his earlier posts, and confirms that this specific cracker was "post-t" at comment #200.
Also, your blog's first post on the actual desecration quoted the paragraph where PZ described what he did, but did not quote the final paragraph. (Except for the title "Nothing is Sacred") That's too bad. Why quote the throat-clearing and not the message?
Here's the final paragraph the reader is talking about:
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.
I don't understand what Myers thinks he is accomplishing, besides pissing off a lot of Christians. Self-righteousness is disturbing in any form, fundamentalist and atheist alike. Daniel Davies strikes back.