Today, I was reading a story that was linked from the American Atheists website and it was the story of a man (Webster Cook) who took a supposedly “blessed” cracker (a Eucharist as it is known) out of a catholic church. He removed the cracker so that he could help teach a friend of his about Catholicism but the people of the faith were not buying the truth, as usual. People got all up in a tizzy, giving him hateful phone calls, calling for his death and saying that he committed a hate crime against their religion. He finally returned the cracker to the church and he is asking for the death threats and all sorts of other threatening e-mails to stop. Yes, I kid you not, all this over a cracker. In fact, the local diocese referred to this as a hate crime as well, which is blatantly absurd because of a few simple facts:
- IT’S A CRACKER!
- He has not and is not doing any harm to any person or being.
- He didn’t kill, hurt or discriminate against anyone based on religion.
So, please, please tell me, how is this a hate crime? The death of Matthew Shepard is a hate crime. The death of Martin Luther King is a hate crime. Shit, even the death of Angie Zapata of Greeley, Colorado is a hate crime. But this is not affecting any one person one way or another despite them getting up in a tizzy that he just walked out with a Eucharist. And he returned it but people are still having a hissy fit because of the fact that he “took the body of Christ hostage”. Puh-leeeze! This is the most retarded thing I had ever heard and I had to verify that this story was real, but sadly, it is very, very real. Catholics around the world are using this incident to threaten Webster with actual hate crimes, including death threats.
It seems that Webster is trying to get all of the shitstorm resolved by finishing up the remaining cases in USC Student Court. And the sad thing is that now, USC has armed police officers to try to protect the cracker. No, I kid you not. They are having armed police officers to make sure that no one else will successfully get away with a cracker ever again.
The ironic thing is that the faith of these people is so shaken by the fact that someone took one little insignificant cracker out of the church and now people are accusing this man of hate crimes and saying that they have ‘defiled the body of Christ’. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t your god perfect and wouldn’t he have prepared for this sort of thing knowing that it would have happened? Of course, this assumes that he is real and not a fairy tale, which he is. But if they think that the sacrifice of this Jesus dude can be defiled just by one guy taking a cracker out of a church, then there is something seriously fucked up with this person’s mental faculties.
My advice to Webster Cook? You should tell them to get on with their lives. If they can’t do that, they should not be given the respect that is afforded to the adult population, but rather put into a mental asylum. But then again, religion is all about mass insanity, just look at the sick shit that Catholics hang up on the wall of their churches.
The problem with religious folks is that they are indistinguishable from people who don’t believe implausible stuff. Then something triggers it and they go on a rampage. That’s what makes it so hard to do something about damming the spread of religion. Most of their folks are nice, compassionate, reasonable neighbors - until their delusions take over.
The joke goes that if you did something to piss of UUs they might burn a large question mark in your lawn, but in other parts other adherents get out the machetes. Never forget that MADNESS may be just a short trigger away.
Sorry, but I disagree; I think Webster exhibited very poor judgement in trying to smuggle a consecrated host out of a Catholic worship service (where he was clearly a guest, and probably shouldn’t have been receiving communion at all) by pretending to swallow it. And I also feel he is that he is very, very lucky that he didn’t attempt this foolish, childish, immature and disrespectful stunt in a context which might have borne far more serious consequences than it will at USC.
Cleric, I think you are mistaken. He tried to remove a cracker from the service, not perform fellatio on a host. I assure you, this is what the article says. I mean, yeah, if he were trying to perform fellatio on a host, I wouldn’t be surprised with their reaction.