Saturday, July 26, 2008

You gotta love PZ

As many of you no doubt recall, PZ Myers, author of the excellent Phyrangula, has had a run-in with a horde of Catholic fanatics because he said some mean things about a cracker and threatened to "desecrate" one. Two developments on that front: the Chancellor of PZ's university has come out in support of his academic freedom and, more importantly, PZ has now gone ahead and abused a cracker, just as he promised he would. He even did the same to pages of the Qur'an and The God Delusion.

PZ's conclusion to the cracker-abuse post is wonderful:
By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
(By the way, translated copies of the Qur'an are not considered "holy" so strictly speaking PZ has not really guilty of desecration from a Muslim perspective).

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