Jul 26, 2008 / 00:40 am
Saying “Catholicism has been actively poisoning the minds of its practitioners” and characterizing religious instruction as “a devastating crime against the whole of the human race,” University of Minnesota at Morris biology professor Dr. Paul Zachary Myers claims to have carried out his threat to desecrate the Eucharist.
Prof. Myers says that he pierced a Host with a rusty nail and then threw it in the trash alongside coffee grounds, banana peels, and pages torn respectively from the Koran and a book by the atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins.
In a rambling prelude to his announcement of the desecration, Myers tried to explain his actions in a Thursday post on his blog “Pharyngula.” Referencing the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which he said codified Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist and established legal punishment for Jews, he said that accusations of Eucharistic desecration had been harmful to Jews in medieval Europe.
“That is the true power of the cracker, this silly symbol of superstition. Fortunately, Catholicism has mellowed with age — the last time a Catholic nation rose up to slaughter its non-Christian citizenry was a whole 70 years ago, after all — but the sentiment still lingers,” he said, apparently making a reference to the Spanish Civil War.