Amateurs!

No, no, no. This is doing it all wrong. A young man in Valencia received a communion wafer at Mass, took it out of his mouth, and broke it in front of the priest (google translation), and then a scene from the Three Stooges erupted, with slapping and kicking and random cartoon violence in which no one was hurt, except for their dignity.

While I applaud the young man's irreverence, by making it a scene in a church he was making a serious error, for two reasons.

  • People have a right to do whatever silly, harmless rituals they want. Start disrupting church services, and next thing you know, people will be shouting out of dialect at Renaissance Fairs or hiding your bag of Dungeons & Dragons dice or tossing stink bombs into the Halloween costume store. Don't disturb the seance.

  • As we can see from this and other incidents, Christianity is a violent and vindictive faith. While it may be just a cracker, fanatics will respond with totally inappropriate physical viciousness, and it's simply not worth getting hurt over a 'magic' cookie.

Get it? You may express yourselves freely, but you ought not interfere with other people's right to also indulge their own silly beliefs.

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