Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Latest on PZ Myers and "the Cracker"

Well, PZ Myers has not lost his job over this mess, but someone else has. Melanie Kroll, an employee of 1800Flowers, was fired for sending him a death threat with her work email. Turns out, it was actually her husband who sent the abhorrent email, but since it was her work account, she was responsible for its misuse.

In other news, Nick Milne has perhaps the best and most comprehensive discussion of the the whole series of events, from the incident at the University of Central Florida up to the present (HT: Matteo). In particular, he includes much more about what the student in question actually did, which places him in a much worse light than it had seemed at first (though I can't say it justifies Bill Donohue's making a national issue out of it). If you've been following this story at all, you'll definitely want to check out Milne's even-handed post.

UPDATE: Mark Shea, of Catholic and Enjoying It, has added his own lengthy response. I'm not in complete agreement with the post, but his conclusion is spot on:

It is right and just to be angered by Myers' assault on the Eucharist. Not all anger is sinful. But the purpose of anger is action, not desire for vengeance. Catholics who threaten violence against Myers in return disgrace our Lord who forgave his murderers and, just as surely, extends forgiveness to Myers even as he fights him with the same goads with which he fought Saul of Tarsus. Our task is to realize that our principal audience is not Myers and his vicious crew, but all the onlookers in our culture, who want to know if there is any real difference between Catholics and Myers. Show them, by your actions, that there is. The world is watching.

5 comments:

Matteo said...

Yes. From the eyewitness account at Milne's blog, it sounds like the student and his friend were already being disruptive. It's not like Catholic's scrutinize everyone taking communion just for the hell of it. They probably already had drawn lots of attention to themselves and when they tried to pull the heist, people understandably acted.

BTW, I think I've come up with a good parody of the whole situation that highlights what's really being done here, not that I expect anyone to care, because, you know, it's just Catholics.

link

Anonymous said...

The saddest thing, and indeed the only thing, that bothers me about PZ Myers original post:

"my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure"

Discerning Christians should be more outraged at this statement than anything else. Outraged that the church could even be accused of such a thing. Outraged enough... to try to make it so people don't see the church this way.

Wouldn't it be great if all of PZ's local pastors and bishops sent greetings cards and invitations to their church next Sunday? Wouldn't it be great if they offered to take him out for pizza or coffee or something?

No, even the most rational of us simply debate the issue of the cracker and no-one does the thing that needs to be done.

There are no big personalities like PZ in my locality but if I was in his I'd be asking if he'd like to go for a drink and come along to my church, where the only steaks are the kind you eat.

Ken Brown said...

Wouldn't it be great if all of PZ's local pastors and bishops sent greetings cards and invitations to their church next Sunday? Wouldn't it be great if they offered to take him out for pizza or coffee or something?

Now that sounds like something Jesus would do! But we're all too busy trying to prove ourselves right....

Thanks much for commenting Alex!

Nick Milne said...

Thanks very much for the link. I had hoped that a post like that would be useful to people, and it certainly seems to have been.

It's rather spoiled by the fact that I actually mispelled Prof. Myers' name throughout the thing until someone reminded me, but other than that I'm pretty happy with it.

Ken Brown said...

Thanks for pulling all that together, Nick! My own full length response is here, and I have a (large) collection of links to the best responses I've seen here.