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. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

Since the original post, William Donohue and the Catholic League are up and arms and they want the university or the state to do something. Myers is looking to rally the troops and getting more comments than he can handle (sounds like they could use Drupal). Meanwhile, there is concern that Myers might be violent and that more security is needed for this year's Republican National Convention. Fellow SBling GrrlScientist is quick to point out Americans mocked Muslims for issuing death threats over the cartoons in Danish newspapers. Another SBling, Mike Dunford, gives us the backstory that many people lost in Myer's original post due to its inflammatory nature:

To be fair to Paul, it's not like he pulled that idea out of the blue. A college student in Florida smuggled a consecrated host out of a Catholic Mass at the school. When this became widely known, a large number of Catholics became extremely outraged, and the student received a number of death threats. The college responded by supplying armed university police officers to stand guard - not over the student who received the death threats, but at Mass, to protect the eucharist from future kidnapping. The university police will apparently be receiving additional backup from a nun that the diocese is sending to help protect the Eucharist. (No, I'm not making any of that up.)

It's easy to understand why Paul - and, for that matter, any number of rational people - were outraged by that story. The kid removed something from the church that is, as far as anyone can tell from any measurements of any physical properties, a thin wafer made out of wheat. It's about the size of a quarter, costs a lot less, and has both the texture and flavor of glue. It is absolutely, completely, and utterly insane that there are people who are willing to threaten the life of another human being who failed to display proper reverence for an object that is, by all objective standards, nothing more than a Necco Wafer that's been subjected to a flavorectomy.

Regardless of what we believe about the Eucharist, we should all be able to get behind the idea that it's absolutely wrong to threaten to kill someone who treats it disrespectfully.

Richard Dawkins has weighed in in support of Myers now.

Reaching out to religious voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for expanding President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy -- supported some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

This is what happens when you need to start worrying about the entire country liking you.

Attorney Mikey Weinstein, who has had his windows shot at and feces thrown in his yard, found a swastika on the front of his house over the weekend.

"It's a horrible feeling of humiliation, embarrassment and rage," Weinstein said. "This one cuts the deepest. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, you don't want a swastika on your house."

Weinstein, a Jewish attorney and former counsel to President Ronald Reagan, made headlines in 2005 when he filed suit against the Air Force, claiming it imposed evangelical Christianity on academy cadets in violation of their constitutional rights.

I am a freshman at Greene County High School, and I am writing to express my concerns on several assemblies that we have had this year.

It is understood that we live in a region of the country called the "Bible Belt," and in this region Christianity does play a significant role in the lives and the views of many people. I not only understand this, but I also respect it.

This school year we have had three assemblies where the speaker was a religious figure. The first person was a local preacher. During this assembly he preached to us on the importance of making the right choices and accepting Jesus as our savior.

...

I have no problem with the assemblies themselves, but public schools are not the place to preach a religion. The Constitution is the reason that this country hasn't crumbled into a chaotic state.

Now is not the time to overlook this important document. These assemblies, no matter how good of a message they bear, are still technically illegal.

Wesley Crawford

Neely

Until I saw Ed Brayton's post about a math teacher fired from Cal State East Bay for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, I had mostly forgotten that I might be technically guilty of perjury. Y'see, as a public employee of the state of California, I was required to sign that exact same oath:
...

Of course, as Eugene Volokh points out, these sorts of loyalty oaths have never been construed to require violence, or cheering for Stanford's tax loophole, or any other specific action. The only reason they're legal at all is that they are effectively meaningless. So by requiring them, and refusing to allow Kearney-Brown's modifications, we're not doing anything to ensure that a reserve army of math teachers will wield sharp pencils and calculators against the combined onslaught of terrorists, Mike Huckabee, film critics, zombies, Zombie Mike Huckabee, and Canada. We're just making sure that men and women of integrity can never hold public office.

I usually think cynical jokes about how politicians love corruption and empty promises are too obvious to be funny, but if you like them, feel free to insert such a joke right here.

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word "nonviolently" in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

"I don't think it was fair at all," said Kearney-Brown. "All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don't care if I meant it, and it didn't seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn't matter. Nothing."

...

Each time, when asked to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and state Constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic," Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," crossed out "swear," and circled "affirm." All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

I can understand non-competes and NDAs being required for some people to start working, but to require loyalty oaths?

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

...

"Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women," the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion "as nothing in particular." Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

Or read another way, the majority of Americans continue in the religion in which they were brought up.

Also interesting is that a loss of a religion doesn't mean that one considers him or herself agnostic or athiest. Basically, you still believe in the stereotypical sky fairy (to borrow a phrase) you just don't associate with a particular religion, but probably go through the motions with your family, especially during the holiday season.

An Italian judge was sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to sit in a courtroom with a crucifix on the wall, his lawyer said.

"I am disappointed by this decision," lawyer Dario Visconti said, adding that Judge Luigi Tosti would appeal the ruling, which also bars Tosti from serving for a year.

"Taking away crucifixes is not a way of offending Christians but only to make the courts truly neutral and secular," Visconti said.

"It's a struggle that Mr Tosti has been waging since 2003," Visconti added, noting that Tosti was appealing a separate seven-month prison sentence for the same reason.

The mission statement on Hudsonville's Web site says its City Commission and administrators "strive to serve God."

That isn't sitting well with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a Madison, Wis.-based group that advocates for the separation of church and state.

Indeed. I was even sort of thinking, hmmm. . . maybe I should fumble for some money. And with a gesture of the arm that took in the whole scene of the orphanage, she said: you see this is how we fight abortion and contraception in Calcutta. And I thought: Oh I see--so you actually say that do you? Because it had crossed my mind that part of her work was to bear witness for the Catholic creed regarding the population question, to propagandize for the Church's line. But I hadn't realized it was so unmediated. I mean, that she would want to draw my attention to the fact that this was the point.

I don't know Calcutta terrifically well, but I know it quite well. And I would say that low on the list of the things that it needs is a Christian campaign against population control. And I speak as someone who's personally very squeamish on the abortion question. People who campaign vigorously against contraception, I think, are in a very weak position to lay down the moral law on abortion.

...

It's hugely overpopulated partly because of the refugees, mainly from the successive wars of religion--stupid wars about God that have been fought in the neighborhood. That's not its fault. It's basically a secular town. So I thought: What a pity that Mother Teresa should have given this great city such a bad name and made us feel condescending toward it.

Hitchens also goes over a bulk of the things mentioned here when interviewed by Penn & Teller on their show, Bullshit.