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P.Z. Myers is exasperated over at Pharyngula.

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.

Here’s a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

It seems that a Mr. Webster Cook attended mass and accepted Communion, but instead of chewing up the Host the bread crumb, swallowing it, digesting it, and pooping it back out again, he walked out of the church with Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the cracker.

An obvious “hate crime”, effectively a “kidnapping”.

As far as I can tell, Cook wasn’t being disruptive at first; unfortunately, another worshiper there noticed him take the wafer out of his mouth, and church officials struggled with him to get it back.

Cook has apparently received death threats over the incident. He faces disciplinary action at the college where he is a student if his attempts to, I can’t believe I’m saying this, return the cracker and apologize are not deemed adequate by the diocese or the church.

Read the whole thing; PZM has done a good job of summarizing and linking, and I see no need to duplicate his effort.

I’ll point out that I believe that when you enter someone else’s house, or house of worship, following their rules is simple courtesy, and you may expect them to be offended if you break those rules. He apparently partook of the ceremony under false pretenses. I gather, though, that he did not intend to disrupt proceedings or insult worshippers; he was simply trying to satisfy the curiosity of a fellow student.

I’ve also got to say, if he had insulted Muslims this severely, there would be riots in the streets, and he would have received a death fatwa, not just anonymous death threats. By the standards of religious intolerance, the reaction here is restrained, if not exactly sane.

Still, PZM is essentially right.

“It’s just a goddamned cracker.”

Oooh, just as a matter of scientific inquiry:

For fun, obtain thousands of the exact same cracker from the manufacturer, and then add said stolen cracker to a pile - then invite the clergy and the concerned parishioners to pick out which it is.

If it’s special, surely there’s some way of discerning that?

Yeah, if only we could round up a vampire, say, or some kind of demon, the Sanctified Hosts would burn it, but the crackers would do nothing. Of course, it would have to be a double blind study….

I’ll also point out that I’ve never, in years of searching, found a skeptics’ curse as satisfying as “goddamned”. We need to fix that.