Here’s the thing. We all know it, hopefully, and you’ve been watching it in action here. Some folks just don’t have any sense of decency and restraint when they go online.

What Charles did was appalling, by any measure. He doesn’t seem to get just how bad it was, and quite likely he never will. Charles is also clueless about the difference between doing stuff at work, and doing it in your own time.

For instance. If Charles had sent his crude and infantile email from his own email as intended; nothing would have happened. PZ Myers has been overwhelmed with this kind of shallow malice. What made a difference is that the email account used was a work account. That changes everything, and it lead to Melanie being the one who lost her job. But PZ Myers doesn’t do his religion baiting from work, and what evidence we have suggests that he is appreciated by his students and at some pains to reassure them explicitly (since they will be aware of his private blog) that their religious views will make no difference for their classes.

There’s no basis at all to fire Myers from his job, since his blog is not a work blog, and his religion baiting is not done at work. No indication has been given that Myers lets his virulent antipathy to religion have a negative impact on his teaching or work performance.

Charles may think that unlikely, but it’s quite true. After all, if we judged people by their online behaviour, Charles himself should be thought to be a psychotic and dangerous thug. He claims he is not. Strangely, I also suspect he is not. He’s more likely just another generally decent person who becomes very ugly indeed when they get online.

One more thing. I am generally opposed to Myers style aggressive attacks on religion, and was certainly opposed to the whole cracker desecration idea, at first. But I think I’m gradually coming around.

PZ Myers recently posted The Great Desecration, with a photo of the cracker in the bin along with the coffee dregs and banana peel, after having being pierced with a rusty nail. Pages of the Qu’ran, and of “The God Delusion”, are there as well.

But why the rusty nail? It’s a historical reference, explained in the post, which should be read. It was a part of the accusations made by the church against Jews in the medieval times, which lead to wholesale slaughter of entire communities, fired up by false claims of desecration of the eucharist.

Although PZ Myers’ has actively made this thing much worse by being deliberately and openly offensive and provocative, he has also managed to show that the seeds of irrational violence remain very much in place in the religious mindset, now just as in the dark ages. We see this in the crude and thuggish implicit violence in response… not just from Charles, but from many many others.

People like Charles are, I hope, a small minority. But history indicates that their particular way of expressing religion to those who do not share or respect it remains extremely serious. And so I have very reluctantly come around. Myers has done us all a service in revealing that the ugly potential for violence is still present within religion where their symbols become more important and more valued than other people.

Everyone is trying to -reason- with an irrational man, who sincerely thinks that somehow, a death threat with extortion implied is somehow “just blowing off steam”. There is no point in responding to HIM, only in rebutting him to others whom are reading and giving him no personae bump by even acknowledging him as person capable of understanding what we are talking about.

In other words, treat him like the spoiled, tantruming 8 year old that he is. Refer to him only in third person and that should deflate things nicely. Not that everyone isn’t doing a great job already..

Personally, I would like it if the FBI took this very seriously, and put this lunatic away for a long while. I don’t know what the chances of that are, given the current administration, but we can always be hopeful.

He’s really helping his own case so far.

Write letters in support of Melanie to who? 1-800-Flowers? It would serve no purpose unless she wants her job back but 30 minutes after you wrote that you wrote the following.

“In fact God provided another Job for Melanie almost right away. And it even pays more. “

what would be really great, is if you guys were spending all your time next week writting angry blogs over the fact that pz had lost his job. and let me get this right, he has a right to tell people to attack the church, and I can’t get mad and tell him I want to beat his brains in when he does, your right it’s getting crazy

Except that it was your wife who lost her job–and magically got a new one in between 12:27 and 1AM–and not PZ. So we don’t need to get angry about him getting fired, because you didn’t succeed in getting him fired, you succeeded in getting your wife fired. You seem unclear on this point: You threatened to kill PZ if PZ did not quit his job. The result of your action was that your wife lost her job. PZ went to work. He still has his job. Your wife does not. I hope that clears things up.

In answer to your question, yes, PZ has the right to ask people to take crackers that are freely distributed from their place of distribution without consuming them. You do not have the right to threaten to beat his brains in. The simple fact that you cannot distinguish a request for crackers from a death threat is both terrifying and amusing.

Group think? You mean like where everyone decides to pretend a cracker turns into some dead guys flesh and then eat it?

You want to turn the tables and disrespect some object that atheists worship except we don’t have any because we aren’t wackos like you.