If you go out of your way to antagonize the mob, don’t be surprised if it gets angry and does something stupid. When I was younger, and played “the angry young man” to the hilt, I’d jump out of foxholes and yell; “Shoot at me!!” Damned if the twits didn’t do just that and aimed at my big mouth! Now, safe in my foxhole, I blog and call and e-mail and leave when the kids get home from school and yell; “Daddy! Get up here and out of your cave!” I have seen the mob, and it is us!

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/youtube_chickens_out.php

What has also been interesting has been following some of the blog responses and seeing how much or how little of the full story that people have absorbed. Myers was outraged not by the fact that the belief in the Eucharist exists, but that a young man was physically accosted, then threatened with expulsion, lawsuits, and physical harm for “kidnapping the body of Jesus Christ.” Myers has, in the past, had these same kinds of threats directed at him, and I can imagine that had an effect on his reaction. People who didn’t know these two things or chose to ignore them were his harshest critics.

No matter how rational we might try to be, we find ourselves reacting strongly to things that have affected us personally. When I read his first post offering to do some host desecration of his own, it did seem a little over the top. If it had been someone else who was lower profile, or who had not had to worry about his own safety from the same type of people who had threatened this student, it could be called immature or any number of derogatory things. In this case I’d liken it more to any other person who’d been threatened by a specific group of people reacting in sympathetic anger at that same group targeting someone else. It’s understandable in context.

That it went as far as it did is just an example of mob mentality. Still, the death threats and calls for job termination came flying in from the other side. Melanie Kroll violated her company’s IT policy, her husband violated any decent code of ethics (and has been found to have a history of this kind of correspondence) and losing her job was a direct consequence of these, not attributable to any kind of “atheist propaganda machine” or somesuch. Professor Myers might have handled it differently, but it’s not likely that he would have been able to once all the emotional volatility kicked in. In the end, I think he actually came out looking better than the defenders of the cracker despite everything, because the belief’s not-so-sturdy underpinnings came into public view, and the not-so-peaceful adherents of the religion of peace showed their true colors.

In published excerpts of the mail that gets through his filters, he is accused of being a Jew, a Nazi, a Wiccan, gay, a child molester, and (gasp) a Biologist! If you want to see some of the distilled stupidity for yourself, follow the link in this comment.