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Nothing is sacred. Things are not sacred just because people say they are. Since nothing is sacred, the desecration of something is more like riding in Santa Claus’s sled: it just can’t ever be done. When we "desecrate" something, we are only treating it in some ordinary manner which religious believers find objectionable. Criticism of religion sometimes requires blasphemy and it sometimes requires desecration. Just as blasphemy is a victimless crime, desecration is a harmless crime.

Believers can’t really make anything sacred. Things are not really divine or supernatural either, just because lots of people think so. The natural sciences stopped treating things as sacred as soon as it gained its independence from natural theology. The natural sciences found no gods among the stars or the atoms, so the meaning of "the heavens" changed to conform to facts. Just because people say "thank heavens" or they pray up to the heavens, or they think that they will meet a god in heaven, does not make heaven a real place.

The social sciences have lagged behind the natural sciences in correct language use. The social sciences study peoples’ beliefs, among other things. The social sciences shifted the meanings of many religious terms, so that they referred more to peoples’ views rather than any realities. This was convenient for the social sciences, because they needed to study something from a neutral non-belief stance (not disbelief—just suspension of belief).So when the social sciences study "the sacred" and things that are sacred, the social sciences don’t actually treat such sacred things in a relationship with any actual divinity, but instead they treat "sacred" things in their relationships with people who believe them to be sacred (people who believe in deities that can make things sacred). The social sciences study beliefs and relations between beliefs, but they cannot study relationships between beliefs and deities, because they are no deities. The social sciences cannot actually study sacred things, because there aren’t any. It is the same familiar situation along with the study of witchcraft or the paranormal.

PZ Myers affirmed that nothing is sacred when he "desecrated" a communion wafer. He wrote,

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

 

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