Speaker for the Dead

Speakerforthedead
You might think that the sequel to Ender’s Game would be set shortly after the events of that novel.

Nope.

Instead, Speaker for the Dead is set 3,000 years later, yet it still continues the story of Ender Wiggin.

How does that work? Is he an immortal being? Has medical technology banished death? Or perhaps time travel is involved. Or cryonic suspension.

Actually, it’s as mundane as the known effects of relativistic spaceflight. After the events of Ender’s Game, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin left Earth for the stars, and the only way to get there in his universe, as in ours, was by slower-than-light travel.

So while 3,000 years have passed for mankind by the time the novel begins, far fewer have passed for Ender, and he’s now a young-ish adult.

In those 3,000 years mankind has moved out into the stars and set up colonies on different worlds.

The world that is at the core of this novel is called Lusitania–the ancient name of Portugal–and it is so named because it is inhabited by Portuguese-speaking colonists from Brazil.

It is also inhabited by the second intelligent race mankind has found in the universe.

The first was the Buggers, and things went very, very badly with them. Mankind is determined not to make the same mistakes that it made with them.

The new race, known in Portuguese as the Pequeninos or "Piggies" because of their snouts, are a small, unintimidating, technologically primitive, forest-dwelling race.

But as soon as it’s found out that they have intelligence and language, mankind’s government slaps draconian restrictions on the Lusitania colony that are like the Prime Directive on steroids.

A fence must be build around the colony, whose population must now be sharply limited. The colonists must have virtually no contact with the Piggies except for two xeno-anthropologists (xenologers or xenodors) who are allowed brief, daily contact with the Piggies with the condition that they do not show human technology to them or disclose information about human society or ask questions about Piggie society that would betray human expectations of what our society would be like.

It’s maddening.

But there is a mystery on Lusitania, and the Piggies are closely connected with it.

When one of the xenologers figures out the secret, the otherwise friendly Piggies suddenly, brutally kill him.

Then they act like nothing is out of the ordinary, and the surviving xenologer can’t even ask why this was done, due to the Uber Prime Directive.

But Andrew Wiggin is called in from a nearby world to speak the death of the xenologer who was killed.

Since the events of Ender’s Game, Ender has become a speaker for the dead. This is a person who, after someone has died, performs a service (a "speaking") in which the person’s life story is reviewed and analyzed in such a way as to make sense of it. It’s not the same thing as a eulogy, because in a eulogy you say nice things about the dead. In a speaking you say honest things about them. That includes the nice, but it also includes the ugly. And yet the effort is made to understand the ugly things a person did and why he did them.

It takes twenty years for Ender to arrive on Lusitania due to slower-than-light travel, but he appears and must penetrate the mystery of the planet in order to perform his duties as speaker for the dead. He must find out why the xenologer was killed.

Speaker for the Dead is a very different novel than its predecessor. It is much more an adult novel, about ideas and adult relationships rather than kids and games and kid relationships. There are no sex scenes in the book, though there is substantial discussion of human reproduction and adultery.

It is also different in that we have a real alien environment in this novel, and much of the plot centers on figuring out the mystery of this environment and the Piggies who inhabit it.

It is a very good novel, and it also won both the Hugo and Nebula awards the year it came out (1986, the year after Ender’s Game, making Orson Scott Card the first author to win both awards two years running).

In a postscript to the audio book version, Card notes that readers are often divided about whether Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead is the better novel and that his idea of an ideal world is one in which people are evenly divided on this question.

Given how different the books are, it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, but there is an answer to it, and I’ll tell you what it is . . .

Ender’s Game is better.

The reason is that, while both books contain very good elements, the sequel contains a prominent flaw due to the limitations of Orson Scott Card’s religious imagination.

Card is a Mormon, but the world he’s writing about has been colonized by Catholics.

That much is fine. It’s quite possible for a person of one faith to write convincingly and even movingly about the people of another. The guy who wrote A Man for All Seasons wasn’t Catholic, but he was able to tell the story of St. Thomas More beautifully.

But to do this kind of thing you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone of a different faith in a way that Card can’t quite pull off.

It’s not that he doesn’t try. He thinks that he’s giving the Catholics a fair shake, showing good ones and bad ones, showing faithless and faithful ones, showing the joys and sorrows that apply to everyone regardless of their religion, even having a moment where Ender wants to weep because of the beauty of the poignancy involved in a married religious order (the Children of the Mind of Christ) where the spouses renounce sexual relations to better serve God, while still living together in a monastic environment.

But ultimately Card can’t do it.

In real life, Card spent time as a Mormon missionary in Brazil. He went there to convert Catholics, and he’s drawing upon his experiences there to shape his depiction of Lusitanian society.

The society he shows us is largely repulsive, with the vast majority of Lusitanians being insular, blindly obedient followers of the unsympathetic, rigid, uncompassionate bishop who opposes Ender at every turn and only starts to friendly up once Ender points out to him that, if they throw off the Uber Prime Directive, he will be able to evangelize the Piggies.

The problem is not that Card shows bad Catholics. The world has many bad Catholics, just as it has many good ones.

The problem is that the only good Catholics that he shows us are those who take their faith least seriously. The sympathetic Catholic characters are the ones who struggle with their faith or question or doubt it or who even have virtually no faith at all. (Ender falls into that category; he was baptized Catholic but not raised in the faith.)

Those who take their faith seriously end up being presented as harsh, insular, intellectually simple, under the domination of their bishop, and suspicious of outsiders like Ender.

The message that comes across is: simple, devout Catholics = bad; sophisticated, doubting Catholics = good.

All this is like the reception that a Catholic culture in Brazil might give to a visiting Mormon missionary, like Card.

Thus this novel is not as good as its predecessor. It’s still very good, and still worth reading, but it is also flawed. Card chose to set his story on a Catholic world; he chose to make religion a prominent theme in the novel; but he either wasn’t able or wasn’t willing to do artistic justice to a Catholic culture.

NEXT: Xenocide.

Ender’s Game

Enders_game_3
Lately I’ve been reading my way through Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series. I’ve got the first major chunk of the series finished, and I thought I’d provide a review.

The series is divided into two main forks, one of which tracks the story of the title character, Ender Wiggin, and the other of which tracks the story of another character named Bean.

I wanted to wait until I’d read the novels in the Ender fork because of some of the religious issues in the novels. I wanted to make sure that what I’d have to say about the way Card handles religion, and specifically Catholicism, wouldn’t be contradicted by something in the next novel.

So over the next few days I’ll give you my thoughts on the series.

 

Its foundational book is Ender’s Game, which is  set a century or two in the future (the exact time is ambiguous), when humanity is  terrified that it’s going to be wiped out by an insect-like alien race known as the Buggers.

The Buggers have invaded our solar system twice, and the second time we were seriously threatened. A third Bugger war is looming, and humanity is under the gun to produce a military leader capable of saving us from extinction.

What humanity needs is not just another Lee or Grant or Patton or Eisenhower or MacArthur. It needs another Alexander or Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Or better.

It therefore has set up a world-wide program designed to find, evaluate, and train potential military leaders. It wants to find these leaders young so that they can have time to be trained in the intricacies of starship combat and the kind of 3-D thinking that is involved in fighting in a zero-gravity environment.

Earth’s government therefore invasively (it’s not very friendly) monitors and tests the world’s children and, when they find a promising one, they scoop him up and take him off to battle school for training to maximize his potential as a military leader.

Then they find Andrew "Ender" Wiggin.

He is the most promising student they have ever found. The adults are hoping he will become humanity’s savior, and they’re terrified by the prospect he might not.

This novel therefore falls into the category of "most important child in the world" novels, along with the Harry Potter series and Jerry Pournelle’s excellent Starswarm.

As novels of this category go, the first Harry Potter book (the only one I’ve read) is–to my mind–lame. (You may disagree, which is fine; de gustibus non disputandum est.) It’s structured completely wrong for how to tell this kind of story, and it comes off as ham-fisted wish fulfillment. If you’ve got a kid who lives a dreary life but is, unbeknownst to himself, the most important child in the world, you don’t announce this secret and hand him fame and glory on a platter in chapter two.

Instead, you make him work for it. He needs to pay his dues and have the secret of his identity revealed slowly, over the course of time.

That’s what happens in Starswarm, which to my mind makes it "Harry Potter done right" (except that it’s sci-fi rather than fantasy).

Ender’s Game takes a similar path.

The adults around Ender suspect that he may turn out to be a military genius, but Ender only finds out about this slowly, and he most definitely has to work for his place in the world.

Why’s that?

Well . . . how do you know if you’ve got a real military genius, on whose shoulders you can rest the fate of humanity?

You test him, of course.

And that’s what the adults in the story do. They put Ender through a series of progressively harder and more impossible situations to see if he can rise to them without cracking under the strain.

They start doing this even before he gets to battle school. On the shuttle up to the orbiting space station where the school is housed (we need a zero-g environment for this training, remember) they turn every single boy on the shuttle against Ender so that he has the decked stacked against him from the very beginning.

And they do nothing to help him.

Their philosophy is that if Ender is to be able to shoulder the responsibility that will one day be his then, above all, he must never–ever–think that an adult will bail him out of a situation. No matter how hard or impossible it gets, he must deal with it on his own. Even when there is a homicidal bully determined to kill Ender.

Only by putting him through a ruthless program in which the rules are changed every time Ender meets a challenge will they find out whether Ender has what it takes to fill the role mankind needs, which requires a unique balance of tactical skill and empathy for others.

A key element in the novel is the zero-gravity combat simulation that is used as a learning tool to help the kids think in terms of the three-dimensional warfare needed in outer space. This one-ups quidditch. It isn’t just about kids flying and playing a fanciful game. The physics of fighting in zero-gravity are real, and the combat tactics that Ender comes up with, based on the way the game works, are sound. So, to my mind, Ender’s Game beats Harry Potter on this score as well.

But ultimately the story isn’t about zero-g combat.

It’s about the characters, and the bottom line is that the novel is extraordinarily good.

It deserves the Hugo and Nebula awards that it won. (For non-sci-fi fans, those are the two most prestigious awards in the sci-fi community.)

The thing that makes it so good is not that it involves space ships and aliens and hi-tech and similar sci-fi tropes. Actually, it de-emphasizes all of these.

Card doesn’t try to wow us with futuristic tinsel. He doesn’t spend time showing off the tech, which is barely ahead of our own. We don’t go to exotic alien planets. We haven’t even gotten out of the solar system. Ships travel slower than light, so it takes months just to get from one point to another in the solar system. The kids are using "desks" that are recognizable as tablet-style laptop computers. They entertain themselves with video games. And we never even see an alien in the book.

What this book is about is psychology–the psychology of command and leadership and human relationships.

That’s what makes it more than just a standard outer space adventure.

It also happens to be readable by kids (though there is some crude language in it, largely related to flatulence–which, as Card points out in an afterword to the audio book edition, is inescapable if you want to write realistically about boys).

NEXT: Speaker for the Dead.

ADDED: Please AVOID SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS for books in the Ender universe in the combox.

At Long Last

For all of you who may have wondered… and wondered… and wondered…

“…Just what does SDG think of The Wicker Man…?”

…now, at last, the truth can be told.

Review of the 1973 original by Robin Hardy

Review of the 2006 remake by Neil LaBute

Also, for all of you who wondered, “Why does SDG keep The Wicker Man in ‘Other Coming Adds’ for months on end, into years?“…

…well, this is the best answer I can give.

With apologies to all who watched that space for so long, wondering what on earth was wrong with me … and to those who, reading the reviews now, may still wonder.

Prayer for the Dead

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have any article about prayer for the dead?

People are asking me different questions, because of the Evangelicals who say: What is the biblical basis to pray for the dead? As you know, bringing proofs from the book Maccabees is not enough,

Another connected issue, those in purgatory needs prayer to go to heaven, right?

The question was: What if two different people go to purgatory, one has a rich family, so they will keep praying and offering Masses for him, while the other is poor, and no body will -pay- and pray for him, so the poor man can stay -longer- in the purgatory, while the rich man can pass quickly to heaven.

How you answer these questions? What are our biblical grounds?   

Not all questions can be answered in a way that offers Bible verses as evidence. In fact, not all questions can be answered at all. There are many things we human simply don’t know the answer to, because God hasn’t told them to us, and there are also many things in life that have answers that don’t involve the Bible at all, like how to solve the quadratic equation or where to find the gas station with the cheapest gas or how to make chop suey.

I think it is important to point these things out when dealing with the "Where is that in the Bible?" mentality.

It is also important to point out that, even when dealing with questions that do involve theology, we are Catholics and therefore do not need to provide answers within the confines of sola Scriptura.

As Catholics, we draw information from and our theology is shaped by not only Scripture but also Tradition, the formulations of the Magisterium, philosophy, human nature (i.e., natural law) reasoning, etc.

So, if you are dealing with Catholics who are being pestered by Evangelicals who are demanding that questions be answered on Evangelicals’ terms, it is important to remind the Catholics that they are not Evangelicals and should not slide into the mindset of Evangelicals of trying to answer everything from the Bible. That would cut them off from the other sources of information they have, and it would be as foolish as trying to do theology with just a quarter of what the Bible says rather than what the whole of the Bible says.

Just as we want to accept all of the Bible when we do theology, we also should accept everything that God has revealed to us for these purposes, and that goes beyond what is in the Bible.

An Evangelical might not accept that, but even he should agree to the principle of accepting all of God’s revelation, even if he disagrees about the extent of God’s revelation.

I therefore would question whether citing Maccabees is "not enough" as proof of prayer for the dead. It may not be enough for Protestants, because this book was removed from their Old Testament precisely in order to get rid of the passage dealing with prayer for the dead, but since this passage remains in the Catholic Bible, it should be enough for Catholics.

A Catholic thus might say to an Evangelical, "This passage is in my Bible. I accept it. So it is enough for me. It may not be enough for you because you do not find it in your Bible, but you should think about why that is: The reason is that your religious forebears took this passage out of the Protestant Old Testament precisely because they didn’t like what it said."

A Catolic might continue by pointing out that prayer for the dead was a practice rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition even before the time of Christ, as witnessed by the passage in 2 Maccabees, that Jews still pray for the dead today, and that the vast majority of Christians (i.e., Catholic plus Orthodox and other Eastern Christians) pray for the dead. It is only Protestants who do not.

Therefore, one could argue that if we accept that the Judeo-Christian tradition represents the line of religious belief that, in its broad outlines, is true and that God has worked with to shape, and if a particular practice is acknowledged by the great majority of this tradition, then it would seem that it should be those who do not accept the practice in question should have to argue for why it should not be accepted.

Thus ask the Evangelical: "What is your biblical argument that we should not pray for the dead? In particular, in view of St. Paul’s emphasis on Christian liberty, where is your biblical proof that Christians should not have the liberty to pray for their departed loved ones?"

They may respond by arguing that Jesus paid everything, that the saved are justified and have had their sins removed, etc.–all the standard stuff.

The standard stuff that Evangelicals say here is all true–God has provided salvation to the uttermost to the saved–but it ignores the question of how God has chosen to implement that salvation.

Human experience (along with the Bible) shows that when God saves someone, he does not instantly give the person all the benefits of eschatological salvation, including perfect sinlessness, freedom from concupiscence, the Beatific Vision, an augmented nature that will let us pass thru sealed tombs and enter locked rooms, etc.

It is clear, instead, that while God may have forgiven and justified us, he has chosen to implement the other benefits of salvation as a process. We see part of this process over the course of our lives, as he leads us to grow in holiness. We also have to deal with the consequences of our sins, even when they have been forgiven and will no longer cause us to be damned, as when we must pay back money we have stolen or repair harm that we have done.

This is part of God’s will for the process by which he brings us to heaven, even though it was his Son’s death on the Cross that paid for all of this.

We see part of the process by which God implements our salvation in this life. We do not see what he does in the next, where he may continue to implement it by a process or where he may implement the rest of it all at once (except for the resurrected body part, which we know is later on).

Either way, it is still rational for us to pray for our departed. We love them, and it is natural for us to ask God to help them and be kind to them. If there is a process that they must still undergo as their salvation is implemented, God can help them with that process. If it all happens in an instant, God can help them in that instant–even if the instant is already in the past from our perspective since God is outside of time.

Either way, it is natural for us to ask God to help those we love who have died, and if we do not do so then we either do not really love them or we are in the grip of a theology that asks us to do the unnatural rather than the natural.

It is the Evangelical’s theology that asks us to do something unnatural and to restrain our feelings of love and affection for our departed loved ones by not asking God to help them, and there is no solid basis in the Bible, or anywhere else, for asking this of us.

The reader also wrote: "Another connected issue, those in purgatory needs prayer to go to heaven, right?"

Actually, I wouldn’t put it that way. They don’t "need" prayers to go to heaven. They will go to heaven whether we pray for them or not. We merely ask that God help them as they do this, either by making the implementation of their salvation quicker or easier or in whatever way God knows that they need help. Our prayers thus may help them, but they don’t "need" them.

As to the case of a person with a rich family, this plays off anti-Catholic stereotyping that dates back to the Protestant Reformation whereby Catholic priests are depicted as trying to extort money out of the faithful by saying Masses for the dead.

Well, when a Mass stipend is $5 or $10 (or whatever the local limit is in the diocese), nobody is going to get rich off that. This is a red herring.

But let’s turn the question around and take money and death out of the picture: Suppose that there are two people who are sick, one of whom has a big family to pray for them and one of whom has nobody to pray for them. Which person will God heal more quickly, and if he does heal one more quickly than the other, how can that be fair?

The answer to the first question is that we don’t know who God will heal first. Prayer is not a magical incantation that produces results mechanically, the more it is done. Answers to our prayers are based on God’s choice, and God can choose to answer one more quickly than another. Our job is to do our part by building love for other and love and trust for God by praying.

We also know that God has special care for those who are in hard circumstances–like having nobody to pray for them–and thus he may heal this person first in spite of the fact that nobody was praying for them.

We also know that, ultimately, all healing is a gift of God and thus it is fair for him to give it to whomever he wants, so even if he does first heal the person with a big family praying for them, that’s his choice and the appropriate response on our part is to thank him for the healing.

All of this answers the parallel questions about purgatory: We don’t know who would have their purification completed first, it’s a matter of God’s choice; God has a special care for those with no one to pray for them; and being purified is a gift of God’s grace to begin with, for which our response should be thankfulness.

PZ Myers Won’t Like This

The PZ Myers Must Be Fired post now has over 1,000 comments, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people who don’t normally hang out on the blog have been commenting, including people who don’t normally hang out on Catholic blogs from what I can tell.

I know some other Catholic blogs have linked the post (thanks, guys!), but I couldn’t help wondering if the post was showing up in some search results.

So I Googled "pz myers"–that’s it, nothing else, nothing about firing–and this is what turned up:

Google_results_2

Coming up next . . . something (anything!) that has nothing to do with PZ Myers!

P. Z. Myers Must Be Fired

I am not going to provide an extensive response to P. Z. Myers’ recent desecration of the Eucharist, along with pages from the Qur’an.

I will simply say that he must be fired.

Although he carried out his action. in his words, to support the idea that "Nothing must be held sacred" (also trashing a few pages of The God Delusion, a book with which he is in sympathy), he did not merely tell people that nothing must be held sacred. Nor did he argue for it. Claiming that nothing must be held sacred or proposing arguments for this proposition are a subject that can be discussed in a civil, respectful manner.

Instead, P. Z. Myers surreptitiously obtained and then desecrated something that is held most sacred by numerous individuals. He went out of his way to offend, to provoke the most deeply held sentiments of others, and he did so in full knowledge of what he was doing, as witnessed by the fact that he complains repeatedly on his blog about all of the outraged complaints he has been receiving from Catholics via e-mail.

In desecrating what Catholics hold most sacred–and what Muslims hold sacred as well–P. Z. Myers has fundamentally compromised himself as an educator.

He has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator.

In particular, he has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator at a state-run school, such as the University of Minnesota Morris.

It would be one thing if an employee of a private school–say, Bob Jones University–had desecrated the Eucharist. But state schools have a special responsibility to the citizens of the state to employ educators who will be respectful in their conduct towards the students, parents, alumni, and citizens of the state–including the Catholic and Muslim ones.

P. Z. Myers has demonstrated that he will go out of his way to offend the sensibilities of anybody who holds anything sacred, to treat whatever they hold sacred with public contempt. The problem thus is not limited to Catholics and Muslims. Since, in Myers own words, "Nothing must be held sacred," and since he is willing to desecrate anything that others do hold sacred, the university must conclude that Myers is willing not only to outrage Catholic and Muslim students, parents, alumni, and citizens but members of any other group as well.

 

Myers is thus incapable of effectively carrying out his mission as an educator and his position must be terminated.

He also is in violation of the University of Minnesota Code of Conduct, which holds that faculty members "must be committed to the highest ethical standards of conduct" (II:2) and that "Ethical conduct is a fundamental expectation for every community member. In practicing and modeling ethical conduct, community members are expected to: act according to the highest ethical and professional standards of conduct [and] be personally accountable for individual actions" (III:1).

It also stresses that faculty members must "Be Fair and Respectful to Others. The University is committed to tolerance, diversity, and respect for differences. When dealing with others, community members are expected to: be respectful, fair, and civil . . . avoid all forms of harassment . . . [and] threats . . . [and] promote conflict resolution."

P. Z. Myers has done none of these things. He is in fundamental breach of the University of Minnesota’s Code of Conduct and must be discharged.

To voice your opinion on this subject, contact the offices of the president and the chancellor:

President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Via phone: 612-626-1616
Via fax: 612-625-3875
Via e-mail: upres@umn.edu

Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson
309 Behmler Hall
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267

320-589-6020
E-mail: grussing@morris.umn.edu

Bad Science

I can’t respond to everything that the reader writes (for space reasons; the post would get way too long for its own good), but a reader in the combox down yonder writes:

Since I would probably be the only one to speak in the man’s [PZ Myer’s] defense, I feel I must do so. I would like to inquire if when a blog post critical of another individual is made, if that individual is first or opportunely informed so that he is able to defend himself if he so chooses or to write the blogger with a defense.

After putting up the post I considered e-mailing PZ Myers, but decided to wait an think about whether it would be the most constructive thing. I’m also open to taking down the post if that’s the most constructive thing. I’m just trying to figure out what the best thing to do is, which isn’t always easy with the limited intellectual resources we mortals have.

In any event, PZ Myers is welcome to defend himself, either on his own blog or here. Like anybody else, he’s certainly free to post in the combox (as long as he obeys DA RULZ). I’d also be happy to post e-mail (without headers) that he might send and then respond in a follow-up post (I’m not sure if he’d want to do that since he has his own blog, but the offer is there)

I do not deny that Myers is not perfect in charity, but neither is anyone here. I don’t think it can be said that his charity seems lesser than the charity of those who have written him hatefully.

This may be true, but it does not excuse Myers’ conduct. Just because Myers has encountered Catholics gravely lacking in charity does not excuse Myers from acting with a gravely lack of charity.

I do not see any evidence that would reliably indicate that Myers purpose is to offend. It seems rather by his statements his purpose is to make an artistic demonstration of the powerlessness of the consecrated bread. He is hoping, it would seem, that this would spur Catholics to realize its powerlessness and in turn to question their belief in transubstantiation.

I think that there is abundant evidence of Myers purpose including the desire to offend. The man heaps scorn and abuse on those who disagree with him. Consider the following (in blue, to keep the text distinct from the comboxer) excerpt from his original post:

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.

<SNIP>

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart.

These remarks are by their nature intended to be offensive to Catholics, and the statement that he would desecrate the Eucharist "joyfully and with laughter in my heart" unambiguously indicates that this is not a dispassionate scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist.

However, let’s suppose that that was his aim. He’s a scientist. How good would the science of the proposed experiment be?

Rotten.

In order to have a scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist, you would need to have a proposition of Catholic theology regarding the Eucharist that could be falsified by his experiment.

But the Catholic Church does not claim that anything special will happen in the empirical realm if you desecrate a host. Lots of hosts have been desecrated in history, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, nothing special happens in the empirical realm.

Catholics would say that this is because Christ has chosen to make himself vulnerable in body to such disrespect, just as he made himself vulnerable to death on the Cross, though he informed his disciples that all he needed to do was ask and his Father would put twelve legions of angels at his disposal to defend him. The voluntary vulnerability of Christ as the Lamb of God is a central theme in Christian theology.

Whatever the Christian explanation for the fact that nothing unusual normally happens in the empirical realm when a host is desecrated, the fact is that the Church does not maintain that anything is supposed to happen.

PZ Myers and the Catholic Church thus agree that nothing unusual should be expected to happen if he desecrates a host.

His act of desecration therefore would not do anything to evidentially distinguish between the two belief systems (his and the Catholic Church’s).

That makes any proposed experiment along these lines Bad Science.

Such an experiment is no more a disconfirmation of Eucharistic theology than the legendary Russian astronaut who, while in space, looked around and declared that he didn’t see God. That’s no disconfirmation because nobody claimed he would see God.

In both cases, it’s a snide jab at religious belief based on an overly simplistic understanding of that belief.

In Myers’ case it is also a deliberate and cruel violation of the most deeply felt religious sensibilities of other human beings. He’s not just saying he doesn’t see evidence for God. He’s proposing to deliberately desecrate what other humans hold most sacred, which is bound to stir passionate feelings and cause profound personal pain to every faithful Catholic who hears of it, including those who are not sending him hate mail and who have caused no harm and done nothing to bring about this situation.

Even if PZ Myers does not respect the Eucharist, he should respect those people, who far outnumber the others.

The commenter also writes:

BTW, I’ve noticed some arguments against sacrality of the bread made by some in the comments thread over there which have adequate (internal to Catholicism, at least) theological explanation but which went unanswered. Some crude commends were made about the digestive process to which can be answered that that is far past the point where Jesus is no longer present in that fashion (that he or God is still present in another generalized fashion is problematic for theism in general). If Catholics were to answer in such manner I think that would be more impressive (that is liable to make a good a impression), than the personal back and forth a few have engaged in.

I agree. I think a display of reason in the face of vile abuse is more constructive than adding more vile abuse to the discussion.

Deliberately Insulting the Most Deeply Felt Sensibilities of Other Human Beings

On Thursday’s show I fielded a question about Prof. P. Z. Myers, the Minnesota professor who has threatened to desecrate the Eucharist and post the results on the Internet.

Here is an mp3 of the exchange.

LISTEN

Podcast: Play in new window | Download