Thoughts on PZ's Great Desecration

Pharyngula: The Great Desecration

Nutshell for the lazy: kid at a Catholic college gets in big trouble because he smuggled out a god-cracker from mass. Threats to kick him out of school, etc. PZ and countless others point out that for crying out loud it's a friggin' cracker -- an object, and a particularly un-tasty one at that -- and there's just no reason to get any undies in any bunches because we're not living in the Middle Ages anymore. To prove his point, PZ stabs a god-cracker with a rusty nail and throws it in the trash to a copy of the Koran, The God Delusion, coffee grounds, and a banana peel.

OK, we all caught up now? While I appreciate the sentiment behind the action, I'm not sure I'm 100% behind bullbaiting the religious. I'd say I'm only about 93% behind it (the sentiment, not the bullbaiting).

At some point the point had to be made, and as clearly as possible. Let's be honest here, most of the super-religious are not exactly long on critical thinking skills. The very idea of a cracker being literally the body of their lord and savior is so absurd as to be hilarious (also, gross!). It's flour and water that's been mass-produced and stamped out in some factory by some minimum-wage workers, and probably not in the USA.

Looking at it from a Buddhist perspective, I completely agree that the cracker is just stuff, and stuff is meaningless. (P.S. I don't consider myself a Buddhist, just in agreement with Buddhist philosophy.) However, I don't think anyone can reasonably expect the religious to not get whipped up about it. They already believe they're eating their god (!). It's a giant leap to think they will use the next few neurons down the line to conclude that that sort of thing is completely silly. And it's near-insane to think that they will actually look at where the taboo of desecrating the crackers actually came from (again, for the lazy, it boils down to OMG KILL TEH JEWS). Catholics are intellectually stuck sometime in the fourteenth century.

But really now.

Crackers.

Are threats of bodily harm to PZ and his family and threats to kick the original cracker-smuggler out of college really worth crackers?