My, Wasn't This Mature

My, Wasn't This Mature

From July 28, 2008 Inside Higher Education:

Myers is a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris who has a national following for Pharyngula, the blog on which he regularly exposes and lambastes efforts by creationists to undermine the teaching of evolution. A few weeks ago, he wrote a blog entry in which he defended a University of Central Florida student who protested the presence of religious groups on his campus by taking a Eucharist — the small wafer blessed in Roman Catholic services and then seen as the body of Christ — and removing it from the service rather than consuming it. Myers, in an entry entitled “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker” — questioned why this was such a big deal.

Ever since, Myers and his university have been bombarded by e-mail and other messages attacking him and calling for the university to punish him for insulting Catholic teachings.

On Thursday, Myers responded by staging what he called a “great desecration.” For the desecration, he took a communion wafer (sent to him by a supporter in the United Kingdom, who removed it from a church there), and pierced it with a rusty nail. ("I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date,” Myers quipped on the blog.) He then threw it in the garbage with a banana peel and coffee grounds, symbols of refuse. But to show that he wasn’t picking on Catholics, Myers added to his mixture some ripped out pages of the Koran. As a proud atheist, Myers isn’t a member of a faith that he could desecrate at the same time so he took a text he does cherish — The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins — and tore some pages out and added them to the trash.

In a blog posting that describes the attacks he has received and then features a photo of the desecration, Myers finishes with a call to question everything:

“Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything,” he writes. “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.”

Professor Myers certainly does know how to upset people! As one of the comments over at Inside Higher Education points out:

I don’t quite get why Myers is going after the Catholics, if his issue is evolution. (It’s rather like invading Iraq, if you’re mad at al-Qaeda).

Yup. Because the Catholic Church, as near as I can tell, has embraced evolution without any great problem. Christian critics of Evolution as the True Faith assert that much of what drives the ferocious attacks on Intelligent Design is not science, but a ferocious atheism that uses evolution merely as a tool. Myers' behavior seems to be confirming that claim--that his desire to attack religion is more important than his support for evolution, a scientific theory.