So I’ve had a couple tabs in Firefox related to this situation open for a while, and I figured I might as well blog about it now, before it becomes too irrelevant.

Here’s the super duper short story. A student at the Univ. of Central Florida received a communion host at mass, but did not eat it immediately. He took it home with him, and a bunch of people got really really upset. Among them was Bill Donahue, the president of the Catholic League. The student received an immense amount of hate mail, as well as threats on his life and calls for his expulsion.

Soon afterwards, a popular atheist blogger and professor at the Univ. of Minnesota Morris, PZ Meyers, blogged about the situation, criticizing people’s reactions to the student’s actions. He also made an offer that if anyone could get him consecrated Eucharist hosts, he would abuse them, and provide photographic evidence for his readers.

Several of his readers sent him some, and he followed up with his threats. In the blog post containing evidence of the desecration, he says:

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.

And that pretty much is where we are today. You can read about the entire situation in more detail with links to all the entries and such at this wikipedia article.

Alrighty, so onto my commentary.

First off, as a Christian of the Protestant variety, I don’t believe in transubstantiation. That’s when the communion hosts transform into Jesus flesh and blood. Not like figuratively, but literally. That’s why everyone is so riled up. They think that the “abuse” being done to the communion host is equivalent to abusing Christ’s own body.

In the past, the catholic church has added lots of rites and rituals to Christianity that are unnecessary. And this is one of them. I’m not saying Communion is unnecessary, but the belief that during communion the elements transform in Christ’s body is slightly ridiculous. That belief is unnecessary.

Communion is an act of remembrance of what Jesus did for us. We use these elements as reminders. Just as like baptism is a public declaration, and not a literal washing away of the sins, communion is a ritual we participate in as a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and not a literal eating of his flesh and blood. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

But like most other controversies in the church, people from both sides can pick and choose passages from the Bible to back their beliefs. In the end, we’ll just have to wait until heaven to settle these disagreements.

Moving on though. I’d like to discuss the reactions in this whole controversy. I’ll start off with PZ Meyers.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. It doesn’t matter if he’s wrong, but PZ still has the right to believe what he wants, and say whatever he wants. But just because he believes that there is no God and people who do believe in a God are wrong, he doesn’t necessarily have to be a jerk about it. A fellow atheist blogger writes this parable:

Alice and Bob have been friends for a long time. Several years ago, Alice gave birth to a son, who was unfortunately critically ill from the start; after being in intensive care for a few months, he ultimately passed away. Alice’s most prized possession is a tiny baby rattle, which was her son’s only toy for the short time he was alive.

Bob, however, happens to be an expert on rattles. (A childhood hobby — let’s not dig into that.) And he knows for a fact that this rattle can’t be the one that Alice’s son had — this particular model wasn’t even produced until two years after the baby was born. Who knows what mistake happened, but Bob is completely certain that Alice is factually incorrect about the provenance of this rattle.

And Bob, being devoted to the truth above all other things, tries his best to convince Alice that she is mistaken about the rattle. But she won’t be swayed; to her, the rattle is a sentimental token of her attachment to her son, and it means the world to her. Frankly, she is being completely irrational about this.

So, striking a brave blow for truth, Bob steals the rattle when Alice isn’t looking. And then he smashes it into many little pieces, and flushes them all down the toilet.

Surprisingly to Bob, Alice is not impressed with this gesture. Neither, in fact, are many of his friends among the rattle-collecting cognoscenti; rather than appreciating his respect for the truth, they seem to think he was just being “an asshole.”

He follows up by saying this:

I think there is some similarity here. It’s an unfortunate feature of a certain strand of contemporary atheism that it doesn’t treat religious believers as fellow humans with whom we disagree, but as tards who function primarily as objects of ridicule. And ridicule has its place. But sometimes it’s gratuitous. Sure, there are stupid/crazy religious people; there are also stupid/crazy atheists, and black people, and white people, and gays, and straights, and Republicans, and Democrats, and Sixers fans, and Celtics fans, and so on. Focusing on stupidest among those with whom you disagree is a sign of weakness, not of strength.

It seems to me that the default stance of a proud secular humanist should be to respect other people as human beings, even if we definitively and unambiguously think they are wrong. There will always be a lunatic fringe (and it may be a big one) that is impervious to reason, and there some good old-fashioned mockery is perfectly called for. But I don’t see the point in going out of one’s way to insult and offend wide swaths of people for no particular purpose, and to do so joyfully and with laughter in your heart.

I totally agree with him. There is nothing to be gained in insulting other people or making them so angry it’s impossible to carry on a civil conversation.

But for us as Christians, dealing civilly with people who insult us and our beliefs is not just something we should think about doing, it’s something Christ explicitly instructs us to do. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44-45)

Reading some of the responses to PZ’s posts has saddened me a lot. There was lots of anger and hate in many of the Catholics’ responses. And that just fuels the flames, because the only interactions the atheist readers of PZ’s blog have with christians are those angry people who respond with words of criticism. It just further reinforces their beliefs that we are just a bunch of religious nut-jobs.

If we were to respond instead with loving kindness, they would have nothing to criticize us about, and they might take a step back and reconsider their beliefs about us.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to live our Christian walks out better. The modern church has become so comfortable in our own little schedule of Sunday worship services and friday night youth group parties that we neglect to shine Christ’s love in all that we do. That includes how we respond to our critics on the internet.

If we were to love God with everything we have within us and treat everyone else in the same way we treat ourselves, there would be a lot fewer atheists who believe that we’re just a bunch of bible-thumping maniacs.

If with heart and soul you’re doing good, do you think you can be stopped? Even if you suffer for it, you’re still better off. Don’t give the opposition a second thought. Through thick and thin, keep your hearts at attention, in adoration before Christ, your Master. Be ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks why you’re living the way you are, and always with the utmost courtesy. Keep a clear conscience before God so that when people throw mud at you, none of it will stick. They’ll end up realizing that they’re the ones who need a bath. It’s better to suffer for doing good, if that’s what God wants, than to be punished for doing bad. (1 Peter 3:13-17, the Message)