The last word on P.Z. Myers

Did you know that according to Nature magazine, Myers' blog is the No. 1 science blog out there? He's not the fringe figure one might think (or wish). Anyway, Mark Shea has, to my mind, the last word on that guy and his abominable carrying-on about stealing the Eucharist to desecrate it. Excerpt:

The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don't believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.

Crazy people talk that way.

Myers and Co. are enmeshed in these lies because they have chosen evil. It is evil--archetypally evil--to desecrate the Eucharist. It's the sort of stuff archetypal bad guys in the movies do. It's completely unnecessary gratuitous evil. Myers can do all the blasphemy he pleases on his blog (though not on the taxpayer's dime). But the curious thing is that he cannot rest with this. C.S. Lewis describes the curious evangelical itch that rankles in the shriveled soul of the God-hater in his Great Divorce. In that novella, the damned are offered a chance at Heaven if they will only just get on a bus, go there, and stay. Instead, almost none of the damned do. They prefer to be what they are. And they love talking about Hell and themselves (which really comes down to the same thing). Lewis continues:

This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts - the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven. There were tub-thumping Ghosts who in thin, bat-like voices urged the blessed spirits [already in Heaven] to shake off their fetters, to escape from their imprisonment in happiness, to tear down the mountains with their hands, to seize Heaven 'for their own good': Hell offered her co-operation. There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. There were materialistic Ghosts who informed the immortals that they were deluded: there was no life after death, and this whole country was a hallucination. There were Ghosts, plain and simple: mere bogies, fully conscious of their own decay, who had accepted the traditional role of the spectre, and seemed to hope they could frighten someone. I had had no idea that this desire was possible. But my Teacher reminded me that the pleasure of frightening is by no means unknown on earth, and also of Tacitus' saying: "They terrify lest they should fear." When the debris of a decayed human soul finds itself crumbled into ghosthood and realises "I myself am now that which all humanity has feared, I am just that cold churchyard shadow, that horrible thing which cannot be, yet somehow is," then to terrify others appears to it an escape from the doom of being a Ghost yet still fearing Ghosts-fearing even the Ghost it is. For to be afraid of oneself is the last horror.

Regardless of your views of the deity of Christ, to make oneself into a creature who deliberately descrates the memory of an innocent man who died in torments, solely for the purpose of spite, is an utterly pathetic and deeply evil thing. As all acts of blasphemy do, they serve only to destroy the image of God in the blasphemer. They do nothing whatever to harm Jesus (except in the sense that this sin too becomes one of the billions he bears in his body and soul on the Cross).

Read the whole thing. It's worth it.

It is not a puzzle to me why people disbelieve in God. The puzzle is why certain of those who do are so fanatical about it. I mean, I can certainly understand why someone can be fanatical about God, but where does the passion for believing a negative proposition come from? When I doubted God's existence earlier in my adult life, it made me sad, and a little envious at the people who did believe in God, though I felt sorry for them for what I suspected was their need for a psychological crutch. Ironically, I have to thank the militant atheism of a guy from one of my classes who stood up at Free Speech Alley with a copy of "The Portable Nietzsche," on which he had written "The Bible," and proclaimed, "God does not exist, but if He does --" and then looked heavenward, and made an obscene gesture. Thank him, because it was that stunt that made me realize how untenable my freshman-year agnosticism was. If God doesn't exist, I thought, then all B. did was act with deliberate rudeness. But if God does exist, then I might well have seen a man damn himself in front of a crowd. The stakes were too high for me to go, "Well, it could have been one or the other, but really, who can say?" It was the shock of what I had seen that drove me to the campus bookstore looking for something from that guy C.S. Lewis I had heard so much about. Instead, I found John Douglas Mullen's fantastic little book about Kierkegaard, and that was the beginning of my journey to faith.

Similarly, I hope P.Z. Myers' infamy will be redeemed at least partially by it shocking the conscience of agnostics, and encouraging them to read more about the Christian faith, with an eye toward settling their minds, one way or another. Either what Myers has done is merely offensive for social reasons (and possibly criminal, if he went through with it), or we have quite possibly seen him damn himself for eternity.

Here is the philosopher Roger Scruton, on the peculiar vitriol and vehemence that accompanies so much of the exhortation from our leading atheist evangelicals:

Distrust of organised religion therefore goes hand in hand with a mourning for the loss of it. We are distressed by the evangelical atheists, who are stamping on the coffin in which they imagine God's corpse to lie and telling us to bury it quickly before it begins to smell. These characters have a violent and untidy air: it is very obvious that something is missing from their lives, something which would bring order and completeness in the place of random disgust. And yet we are uncertain how to answer them. Nowhere in our world is the door that we might open, so as to stand again in the breath of God.

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experiences that remind us of our shared and momentous destiny as members of Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends'. Those experiences are the root of human as opposed to merely animal society, and we need to affirm them, self-knowingly to possess them, if we are to be at ease with our kind. Religions satisfy this need. For they provide the social endorsement and the theological infrastructure that will hold the concepts of the transcendental and the sacred in place. The insecurity and disorder of Western societies comes from the tension in which people are held when they cannot attach their inner awareness of the transcendental to the outward forms of religious ritual. People have turned away from organised religion, as they have turned away from organised everything else. But the atheists who dance on the coffin of the old religions will never persuade them to live as though the thing inside were dead. God has fled, but he is not dead. He is biding his time, waiting for us to make room for him. That, at least, is how I read the growing obsession with religion and the nostalgia for what we lost when the congregations shut their Bibles and their hymn books, broke asunder and went silently home.