July 18, 2008 | 2:29 pm

Final word on PZ Myers and communion? Don’t count it

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Let’s be honest: Mark Shea won’t really have the last word on P.Z. Myers and the secular bloggers’ desire to desecrate holy communion. How could he? If you were to total all the comments on all the blog posts about Myers’ stated mission and the Catholic League’s counterproductive reaction and Myers’ re-reaction and all the attention he’s gotten since, the number would be counted in tens of thousands. (Each of handful of rants and open threads Myers posted received more than 1,000 comments.)

But here is some of what Shea had to say anyway:

The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don’t believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.

Crazy people talk that way.

Myers and Co. are enmeshed in these lies because they have chosen evil. It is evil—archetypally evil—to desecrate the Eucharist. It’s the sort of stuff archetypal bad guys in the movies do. It’s completely unnecessary gratuitous evil. Myers can do all the blasphemy he pleases on his blog (though not on the taxpayer’s dime). But the curious thing is that he cannot rest with this. C.S. Lewis describes the curious evangelical itch that rankles in the shriveled soul of the God-hater in his Great Divorce. In that novella, the damned are offered a chance at Heaven if they will only just get on a bus, go there, and stay. Instead, almost none of the damned do. They prefer to be what they are. And they love talking about Hell and themselves (which really comes down to the same thing).