Just a quick post to draw attention to a recent blog post by PZ Myers that’s been making the rounds lately. Here’s a summary of the story so far:

A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, attended a Catholic Mass on the 29th June, and after accepting a Communion wafer, believed by Catholics to be sacred and a piece of the flesh of Jesus Christ after being consecrated, pocketed it instead of consuming it immediately as he was required to do under the usual rules. His claimed reason for doing so was so that he could show the wafer to a friend.

This relatively innocuous action managed to turn into a huge firestorm, with Catholics calling on him to be expelled. In response, PZ Myers posted in his blog that he would desecrate a wafer, and he did so, by nailing a cross on it to a stack of pages from the Qu’ran and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and then throwing the whole thing into the trash. The point of including Dawkins’ book is of course to demonstrate that nothing is sacred. It’s just a cracker and the pages are just papers, but as PZ Myers learned and as you can read in his blog, that’s enough provocation for some people to threaten to kill Myers’ son as well as Myers himself.