Crackers and Other Mental Acrobatics
And then there’s Crackergate. A university student in Florida took a souvenir from a Catholic church, except it wasn’t just any souvenir, it was the small bread wafer used by Catholics during mass. Now he’s being accused of kidnapping Christ (never mind that Jesus died a couple millenia ago, if he ever lived, and now supposedly sits next to god, or does that come later? In any case, he’s dead and his body was never found). But that was only the beginning of Crackergate. PZ Myers dared to pick up this story and in his usual non-mincing style explained what he thought of the whole upset: It’s a cracker!. Now he’s being burned at the (for now figurative) stake: The Catholic League, which claims to defend Catholics’ civil rights, apparently doesn’t care about anybody else’s civil rights, like freedom of speech. They want PZ Myers fired from his assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. And all that because PZ called a cracker a cracker. As I told the President of the U of M in an email supporting PZ: “I think Catholics have the right to pretend that the cracker used at mass is something other than a cracker (as a former Protestant, I never quite understood this). But I do not think they have the right to impose their fantasy on anyone else, which they are doing by acting offended about PZ’s post and, actually, about the original incident as well.”
Crackergate ties in interestingly with a recent discussion I’ve had over at the Feminist Philosophers’ Blog on hate speech and freedom of speech. The Catholic League is claiming that PZ Myers uttered hate speech. Actually, some are even claim it’s a hate crime. Sigh. (I wish commentators on PZ’s blog would stop the name calling, though. That is always uncalled for, imo.) And what’s the crime, if there is any? There is absolutely no hate crime here (maybe some poorly chosen words but that’s not a crime – we’d all be in prison if it were; and, yes, PZ threatened to “treat [consecrated communion wafers] with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse.” Okay, what kind of “heinous cracker abuse” can there possibly be?!? Maybe he’ll – gasp – eat it!). I think that PZ had the right to call a cracker a cracker. I wouldn’t have said some of the things he said but he’s not one to mince words. Even Fox said that the “small bread wafer [is] to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ.” It’s a symbol for crying out loud (or do they believe in magic? Sorry, I don’t get this mental acrobatic…)! It means something more than what it is to those people to whom it symbolizes something. It is what it is to people who don’t buy into that symbology. Demanding that everybody else sees the symbol the same way is just ridiculous – and it shows quite a bit of insecurity. Just like gay marriage doesn’t do anything to straight marriages, calling a cracker a cracker doesn’t do anything to someone who sees it as a symbol of something under certain circumstances unless that person isn’t quite sure about that symbolism. Plus, if you can make up the story that a cracker changes into something else, why not make up the story that once that wafer leaves the church it magically turns back into a cracker? That would resolve the whole thing. And it would be a very good way to protect against wafer kidnapping. To get up in arms about this symbol and calling it a kidnapping is simply silly (how can you kidnap a person who died millenia ago – assuming he ever lived – who is just symbolically present)? We need to learn to distinguish symbols from what they are symbolizing. By prosecuting people for, say, burning the U.S. flag, we are undermining the very freedoms this flag symbolizes. By screaming bloody murder over the cracker, any claim by the Catholic church makes that they are supporting love and hope become tainted (okay, a look at the church history does that even more).
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This whole saga – particularly the original hysteria, death threats, the ongoing attempts to get the student expelled and sacking of Myers, is so reminiscent of the radical Islam reaction to Salmon Rushdie’s book, the Danish cartoons, etc.
It just shows that this irrational hysteria is ‘closer to home’ than we original thought.
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Thanks for clarifying this, Pat, if we can call elaborating the confusing Catholic doctrine clarification ;-). Since I was raised (sort of) Protestant, I learned that tainted interpretation of Catholic doctrine. Although, apparently, Martin Luther also believed in the magic of transubstantiation. (And, btw, in Germany, where I grew up, there aren’t as many “flavors” of Christianity as there are in the US: There’s Catholic and there’s Protestant/Lutheran.)
Pat wrote: “Catholics believe the bread really is Christ”
Oh, boy, it’s worse than I thought! I think there’s even another twist: Although the cracker is Christ, it really isn’t Christ because the Catholics aren’t cannibals. So, they’re eating Christ but they’re not really eating him. Well, maybe that’s my Protestant learning coming through again – it’s obvious my interpretation is rather tainted by that… But there is some sort of additional twist involved because Catholics claim that they’re not really cannibals…
I completely agree with your assessment that the upset from true believers is likely due to their avoidance facing “their inner demon of doubt.” I can highly recommend “Mistakes were Made (but not by me),” which describes cognitive dissonance very accessibly. Good point to link this fear with the childhood indoctrination. That abuse surely must have quite a destructive impact on a person’s psyche.
Hi Rachel — just browsing another thread 🙂 and saw your post on PZ Meyer’s admirable rant. I was raised Catholic and left at 16 — never to look back. But those not brought up with Catholic doctrine have never been exposed to the subtle casuistry that implants Catholic belief. So, let me elucidate the logic a bit.
Catholics don’t believe that the cracker, or bread, symbolizes Christ. Symbology is a Protestant abomination. 🙂 Catholics believe the bread really *is* Christ.
For them, every single cracker consecrated at mass really is the body of Christ in an organic way, even though it looks and tastes like bread. Here’s how the Church explains the contradiction. The cracker has the inner substance of Christ but the external form of a wheat cracker. Got that? 🙂 This is the advance that 1500 years of back-breaking, logic-warping theologizing has gotten us.
After 200 years of the Enlightenment, we have a political philosophy that has opened the door to rational ethics and equality among all humans. After 400 years of science, we have life-saving vaccines, food enough for everyone (presuming no political corruption), a magnificent view of the universe, and Mars probes.
And after 1500 years of casuistic double-talk, we have the substance but not the form to explain to us all why murmuring words over a cracker doesn’t seem to do anything. I’m laughing as I write. It’s too much. . . . 😀
Anyway, after many years of arguing religion and science (and contraception and abortion) on various boards with all manner of J/C/M true believers, who often manifested a similar hostility to any real challenge to their beliefs, I finally came up with a likely reason why they get so upset even over trifles.
That is, actually confronting a reasoned argument would require that they face their inner demon of doubt, and by that the entire induced structure of their psychology. I think true believers fear that inner demon more than anything else. And that fear of introspection — and psychological equilibrium it might destroy — is so strong that they’d rather attack their external opponents than examine their inner beliefs. Hence the rage against the student who walked off with the cracker. Hence the Inquisition. It’s all about fear of self-destruction. Fear of a living death, at the bottom.
I think that fear has its roots in the deep trauma done to children indoctrinated into the faith by use of fear stories. Like Dawkins, I long ago realized that hard-core religious training of the young is child abuse.
Wow!!! I had not heard of this, and it’s an amazing story. Thanks for letting me know.