Jesus’ body found in the trash! For real!

What a beautiful sight for churchless eyes: here's a photo of Jesus lying in a trash bin, pierced with a rusty nail and in the company of some banana peels (plus coffee grounds and other assorted discards).

If you're not a Catholic, you may not recognize the Son of God. But if you're a believer, there he is, in the form of a communion wafer – which the faithful consider to be transformed into the body of Christ at holy communion.

In a fascinating blog post, "The Great Desecration," biology professor P.Z. Myers relates how his wafer trashing has caused his email inbox to be filled with messages chastising and threatening him for mutilating a little piece of bread. An example:

Professor Myers,

I was saddened to hear of your plans to harm our Lord Jesus Christ. It obviously isn't the first time and it won't be the last.

I know you do not believe, but what if it truly is Jesus that you are attempting to hurt? You are in my prayers.

The credulity (I started to write "idiocy," and probably should have) of these people is amazing.

They have pretty much the same mentality as Catholics in the middle ages who killed Jews and others who were accused of desecrating communion wafers. (See the beginning of Myers' post for details.) Myers says:

You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god, and that this omnipotent being who created the universe can actually be seriously harmed by some third-rate liberal intellectual at a third-rate university (the diminution of my vast powers is also a common theme).

Congratulations, Professor Myers. You've done a terrific service to those of us who subscribe to the Religion of Reality, by pointing out that bread is just bread, no matter what other illusory qualities are ascribed to it.

Of course, I haven't always believed in reality as strongly as I do now, a confession I made last year in "Ridiculing my own religious fundamentalism." An excerpt:

Like most other satsangis, I believed that food blessed by the guru was really special. I'd treasure little bags of blessed puffed rice or granulated sugar that initiates would bring back from India to share. I'd string out the supposed spiritual benefit of consuming this parshad
by eating a teeny bit every morning before I meditated. If any spilled, I'd eat it off the floor, along with any dust or dirt it might have attracted. After all, it was holy!

Well, I've come a long ways. Much closer to the Eastern religion version of hellfire, to many . But I'll take my chances.

My mother made a half-hearted attempt to get me indoctrinated into Catholicism when I was a kid. I made it through first communion but flamed out before I got to the "confirmation" stage. (Too much to remember, all those venial and mortal sins, among other stuff.)

At first communion, I kneeled down and stuck out my tongue. Then I started coughing like crazy as the wafer stuck to the top of my dry mouth and wouldn't go down.

I remember being scared that I was going to spit out the body of Christ onto the floor of the church. After considerable effort I managed to swallow the communion wafer and proceeded to my first confession where, because I was too young to have done much sinning, the best I could come up with was that I hadn't been going to mass every Sunday.

Before too long, my nine or ten year old mind couldn't swallow any part of Catholicism. My mother let me stop going to those unpleasant noon hour get-togethers with the nuns that cut into recess time (and which, in retrospect, must have violated the constitutional separation of church and state).

Myers reminds us, nothing must be held sacred.

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 humanities' 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.

Comments

[Adam]

Brian,
I love this post....sad an hilarious at the same time.

But, it does bring up an interesting point about the fragile nature of intersubjective reality and naming things as a community. Just to play devil's advocate, you write "You've done a terrific service to those of us who subscribe to the Religion of Reality, by pointing out that bread is just bread"---but form another, more extreme perspective, bread is not just bread...it's formless, emptiness. To say "bread is just bread," is attempting to reify, through the attitude of "this is just obvious" the mundane perspective on bread. But bread also is a concept, not the reality.

[Rain]

That's really good and the funny part is that those who do this for Christianity are ignoring the commandments they worry about and value so highly of not making anything into an idol. People are funny when they aren't making a person mad anyway :)

[Robert Paul Howard]

Some of you folks might find this "funny": http://wonkette.com/401410/fat-fundie-idiots-make-boycott-mcdonalds-video#more-401410

Robert Paul Howard

[Edward]

"Nothing must be held sacred." How wholey immature and fatuous. How cold and narcissistic. Myopic and small.

What dreamless, affectionless life leads someone to reject veneration of anything. What weepy, chin-thrusting churl dismisses with the wondrous, flatly and out of hand.

I do not pray for this person, or cry for this person. I do not believe such a being thrives. If they are not lying, they will inevitably change their mind.

And here is precisely what is stupid about debating faith, dogma or religion. Isn't it clear that the central disfunction here is the so called, "sin against the Holy Spirit"? Myers misunderstanding about the reaction he gets from Catholics shows that such a "sin" is unforgiveable not because god is a meany, but because in Myers' ignorance, he wouldn't understand the terms of his forgiveness.

To see this another way, the monks stranded in the mountain temple will freeze to death unless one of them burns the wooden statue of the buddha. It is okay to burn the buddha, but that does not mean that nothing is sacred. And even understanding that the statue of the buddha is not the buddha, the monks still need to be forgiven for burning the statue to stay alive. They need to seek that forgiveness IN THE FULL KNOWLEDGE THAT THE STATUE IS NOT BUDDHA.

[Adam]

Edward,
impressive commentary...
Your stance seems to be a balancing act between understanding our (apparently) relative existence and the misconceptions that arise from such, but having compassion for them anyway...is this right?

[Edward]

Adam,
If I am an ignorant idiot, I would still like to be treated kindly by those who know better. Don't take my Tonka because it is not a big-boy truck.

Picture this: the pharmacy runs a test to see the efficacy of certain medicine. There is a control group that receives a placebo. In 80% of those who receive the real drug, there is a positive effect, and in 10% of those that receive the placebo, there is a positive effect.
At the end of the test, the scientists kick the 20% that received the real drug but showed no effect, because the drug worked, but they didn't believe strong enough. The proof that the effect is contingent on belief is that there was positive effect in the placebo group.
The scientists then kick the 10% that showed positive effect in the placebo group, for skewing the results of the actual medicine.

Having successful results from a placebo is the same as thinking that my life is better because I belive in God. Why would anyone kick a placebo recipient that improved? The placebo effect is arguably dangerous to the continuance of hard science, after all.

Similarly, why would anyone kick a person who did not thoroughly enjoy the benefits of modern science? If I receive no benefit where others have, do I deserve recrimination and exile? Or entire books dedicated to revealing my perfidity?

I do not recognize misconception as pitiable. And I try to have compassion anyway.

[Brian]

Excellent comment, Edward. I'd never looked at placebos that way before. Wonderfully creative ideas (per usual).

I agree with you that the religious placebo, in its personal guise, doesn't deserve recrimination. All of us engage in some imaginative believing to get through the day.

But when placebo'ish beliefs actively harm people -- akin to a "placebo" actually having serious side effects (the main effect being "nothing") -- then some recriminating is in order.

It's one thing to do no harm. It's another to be a Dark Ages influence on national social policy (abortion, stem cell research, gay rights, Israel policy, etc.). That's when religion becomes a clear and present danger, not an innocuous placebo.