Right here’s how we get transubstantiation sorted out. All it needs is for somebody to attend a busy Catholic church on a Sunday morning, one where there are two or three rows receiving the Eucharist treatment. As soon as it reaches your turn and the biscuit and glass of wine have been blessed take them in your hands and say “I’ll have them later”, walking out with them in your hand.
Find a nearby quiet hospital and seek out the laboratory that processes samples. Ask someone to do you the favour of verifying that the biscuit is actually a 2,000 year old body of a man and the wine is that man’s blood. I envisage the technician nibbling a bit of the biscuit then stating that his initial investigation indicates that it could possibly be a biscuit. He then has a sip of the wine and in the manner of a wine connoisseur rolls it around his mouth and spits the blood of Christ down the sink. Obviously this informal approach is not science, so he tells you that it is necessary to spend a couple of hours doing further testing, so you go to the waiting room.
You pace up and down for a couple of hours like an expectant father. Finally, the technician arrives with the results. “This is a biscuit and this is wine, not a good nor even moderate wine such as a Bordeaux. It is what we professionals call a cheap plonk, made from 4th grade Californian grapes. It was probably bought at WalMart on Thursday. Here is what remains of the biscuit, the wine and my signed report”.
So, you seek out someone who was a member of the church congregation and give that person the shock news. “Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence”. So you produce the evidence, only to be confronted by “Well, we have two miracles. This morning there was a biscuit and wine which became the body and blood of Christ. I believe that to be true, so it is true. Now a second miracle has turned it back to a biscuit and wine. Praise The Lord”.
You just can’t win.
I think it’s been done.
Ha, you say that it’s been done. Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence.
Forgive me for that. Do you have a link?
Humans can believe the darndest things.
One need only accept the metaphysics of Aristotle, and his imitator, Thomas Aquinas (in the Western, Latin Church, in any case), to dispose of these facile, and very old, criticisms. There’s a distinction between substance and appearance, substance being what is real, appearance being merely what seems to be. What appears to be bread and wine to the senses becomes in substance the body and blood of Jesus. What appeared to be Jesus, for that matter, was in substance (reality) God, according to the Nicene Creed (Jesus is “consubstantial” or “one in being” with the Father). So to complain that the bread and wine remain, to all appearances, bread and wine is simply to beg the question.
But sadly, the sacramental wine was always rather harsh, even in the halcyon days of the Latin mass. It’s been quite a while for me, though. Perhaps it’s better now.
Ha, you say that it's been done. Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence. Forgive me for that. Do you have a link?No, because I don't care.
I’m with Lausten on this one. What is the point? We know transubstantiation is a myth, but believers take it on faith and no amount of evidence will do anything other than reinforce their belief.
Tom Lehrer said it all in the “Vatican Rag”.
Tom Lehrer said it all in the "Vatican Rag".https://youtu.be/3f72CTDe4-0