TRANSUBSTANTIATION VERSUS COMMONSENSE
The Church says that God can turn bread and wine into his son so that they are not bread and wine at all any more but Jesus. This doctrine is called transubstantiation. God performs this change when the Catholic priest blesses bread and wine on the altar at Mass. Michael J Langford wrote, "It is worth insisting at this point that there is no need for Roman Catholics and other Christians to be divided on this matter, despite the controversy which has raged over 'transubstantiation' (the Roman Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine become in substance the body and blood of Christ). Recent studies have shown how much this old controversy is based on misunderstanding. The thing to remember here is that the definition of the doctrine is in Latin and there has been a tendency to use inappropriate English words in the translation. Thus while the doctrine asserts that there is a change in substance, it also asserts that the 'accidents' of sight, taste, touch, etc., are unchanged. In Modern English, it is precisely these things that signify the physical nature of something, so that it would be more accurate to say that the bread and wine were physically unchanged than to say that they were changed" page 69, Unblind Faith, Michael J Langford, SCM Press, London, 1982). Is a change that is not physical a change at all in relation to this doctrine?
The Church believes the following.
Jesus can have one body and God by bending the laws of space and time can make that body present on altars all over the world without multiplying it. It is a case of being in several places at once. If God is everywhere then it can be made to happen. He can make the body of Christ omnipresent. God made the laws of space so he could change them to get a big man into the tiny host and every particle of it. Jesus can be in more than one place at a time because God who makes one space separate from another can create some kind of warp to put the space occupied by Jesus’ body in Heaven in every part of the host. We don’t even understand time and space if we are honest so we can’t pretend to know if these changes in them are possible.
But how can bread be really Jesus now when no change in the bread can be detected? The Church says that for any created thing there are two things to think about. One is substance. Substance means the reality. The other is appearance or accident. Substance is what makes a thing what it is. Take a loaf. It is as much bread as the smallest crumb and the smallest crumb is as much bread as the loaf. This is because of substance. The appearance or accident of the loaf could be its being a half a foot long to take one example. You can change the accident by cutting the loaf in half but it remains a loaf. You can make the loaf look like plasticine which is changing another appearance or accident but it remains a loaf.
Substance is what can exist on its own or by itself. An appearance or accident is something that can only exist in a substance. You can't smell a smell by itself. You cannot see half a foot long by itself. Substance means you can never see what something is in itself. You can cut a loaf down to the tiniest possible crumb but all you will sense is the outside of the crumb. An appearance or accident is what appears to the senses. A loaf may have the accident of warmth to the touch, its brown colour to the eye, its smell to the nose, its taste of bread to the mouth and it may sound like bread when we cut it. The loaf is more than what we can sense about it. Substance is about that mysterious more.
Substance is like a spirit. Substance has no parts. The spirit sends information to the senses. This information is the accidents.
Substance exists by itself or on its own. Accidents or appearances don't. So the colour red cannot exist by itself. It has to exist in a substance. If you describe something as a red apple then it follows that the substance must cause the redness. This suggests that the redness and the substance are inseparable and it is madness to suggest that an apple or piece of bread can become Jesus Christ without any detectable physical change. The accidents and the substance together determine what the object is. If only substance is necessary then it follows that there could be bread going about with no accidents at all.
When you change the accidents of something, you can change it into something else. Water mixed into flower becomes bread in the oven. Yet if substance is non-physical and the accidents are physical this should be impossible. In other words, changing the accidents should not change the substance if the substance is separate from the accidents.
Substance is merely an idea that Catholicism mistakes for a reality. It is like having a hundred pieces of crockery glued together to make a vase. If you say that the number 100 somehow is the vase you are confusing the fact that you have the idea of one hundred with the composition of the vase. It is not the vase but only an idea you have about the vase. The Jesus of the Catholics is just an idea they have about the bread and wine and they mistake the idea for the real Jesus.
Even if substance and accidents are distinct they are not separate. Nor can they be separated.
If substance causes the accidents then transubstantiation is untrue and impossible.
If the substance may cause the accidents then transubstantiation may be untrue and impossible. The doctrine then isn't much of an explanation. You don't solve a mathematical mystery by suggesting that maybe 2 and 2 are not always 4. What you do is destroy any right you have to claim to be offering an explanation. What you are offering is nonsense wearing the explanation disguise.
Catholics are really pretending that a change of bread and wine into Jesus is really a change. So they are consciously adoring bread and wine not Jesus Christ. Its extreme idolatry and marks that faith as crude paganism despite all the Christian accretions. If Christianity is the true faith then Roman Catholicism is Satan, the great counterfeiter's, masterpiece. Their claim that the bread and wine are Jesus Christ is just refusing to admit that no change has taken place. They are like the Emperor, from The Emperor's New Clothes, who was wearing nothing and still thought he had an invisible suit on.
If bread can look exactly the same after being turned into Jesus then clearly a man can be turned into a piece of iron without the iron changing in appearances. The Church says that Jesus doesn't disappear in Heaven. He is still there looking like a man but is able to be in the bread at the same time. But God could surely make him vanish if he wished. If he can turn bread into Jesus without Jesus leaving Heaven then he can turn it into Jesus in such a way that Jesus's body seems to have ceased to exist and so that the ex-bread is now the only body of Jesus there is. God can make the iron no longer iron but the man with the man disappearing as well. So what cannot be alive can be alive according to the ridiculous Romish doctrine of the Mass. The doctrine of the change into Jesus is so mad that nobody can believe in it in their minds. The idolatry is conscious.
God can turn marble into a seeing eye with the accidents of the eye disappearing but with the accidents of the marble remaining. So how could it be a seeing eye anymore? It needs the accidents to see. Its substance was that of a seeing eye. The change of the marble's substance into its substance turned the seeing eye into something else, another substance. So it follows that it is just a marble now. It follows that a marble cannot be turned into a seeing eye. If so, bread and wine cannot become Jesus Christ.
The bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus but the accidents or the appearances of bread and wine still exist but the ghostly intangible thing, substance, that makes them bread and wine disappears and is replaced with what makes Jesus Jesus. But the appearances of Jesus are not involved just the substance of what makes Jesus Jesus. In other words, the wafer doesn't become six feet tall like Jesus may be.
At this point we must ask what is the most important? The substance or the accidents. It must be the accidents because if I am transubstantiated physically into a door but retain my accidents it will be like nothing has changed. It will feel the same for my mental processes can still run if the substance of my brain is changed for there is no physical difference. The communion wafer shows no difference after becoming Jesus so neither will I. I will see feel like me and be me in a sense though I am a door! What if Jesus’ body has been transubstantiated into the moon? If bread is transubstantiated into the result then is communion Jesus or the moon or both? Transubstantiation is outrageously ridiculous. The view that substance not accidents make something what it is, is nonsense. Commonsense says that if all tests show something is cheese then it is cheese.
Many believe that God cannot perform the miracle of transubstantiation for it is like making a square circle. For example, if I have a circle and transubstantiate it into a square then is it a square or a circle or both? Christians deny that God can do what is logically impossible. Believers in God assert that it is possible for him to make a stone out of nothing but he cannot make a stone that is impossible for him to lift. They say that if God can do the logically impossible he can do nonsense and he can program a person to do good or force a person to be good and that person could still have free will!
Transubstantiation is allegedly related to the absurd doctrine of creation out of nothing. The Catholics believe that once there was nothing but God commanded it to become the universe and the angels and it did. The Church says God did not make anything out of his power for that is not creation out of nothing. But if that is true then the creation just popped out of nothing by itself and if God was there then he still had nothing to do with it. The Catholics reason that if God can make things out of nothing then he make bread become Jesus without the bread physically changing. But creation is impossible. And even if it were possible, it still does not mean that this change can be done. The change cannot happen for creation cannot happen and even if it could that still has nothing to do with making transubstantiation possible.
The Church says the big bang was when nothing exploded to become the universe. This is contradictory for if there really was nothing then an explosion is impossible. Something can explode. Nothing cannot for there is nothing there to explode.
The doctrine of transubstantiation implies that the body of Jesus is actually a spiritual or non-physical thing. The accidents are not the body of Jesus. For example, his skin colour, the warmth of his body are not him but the appearances of him. This is the blasphemy that is condemned in 1 John 4:2-3 which condemns those who deny that Jesus came in the flesh as antichrists and marks the Catholic Church as Antichrist. The body of Jesus then was not nailed to the cross. The accidents were nailed not the body. This is the same as the Catholic doctrine that if you desecrate a consecrated communion wafer you only harm the accidents or appearances of bread not the body of Christ though the wafer is the body of Christ. This is the same heresy as the Docetist heresy that the early Church was nearly destroyed by. They denied that Christ was really a bodily being.
The Church asserts that strictly speaking Jesus is not locally present in the Eucharist (page 21, Roman Catholic Claims). This means that though it is Jesus himself he is not literally present on the altar in the sense that he is still in Heaven but through a space-warp his presence in Heaven is made available in the host. It is hard to understand this unless you devour a lot of science fiction. And it is perhaps logically acceptable so far. One thing is for sure, those priests who do not think in terms of space-warps are really believing that Jesus is not the host at all! The space-warp idea only came into vogue lately and was not known or even thought of before the scientific advances of the twentieth century. Thus it follows that until it became more popular, priests did not believe in the conversion of the bread and wine in any intelligible or possible sense at all. The denial of a local presence means that it is Jesus in Heaven who is present in the host and he does not move to come to it. Most Catholics see the presence as local and cannot understand the repudiation of the local presence. The vast majority adore a Jesus they think is in the bread who is a duplication of the one in Heaven. This makes many Christians who are not Catholics hold that this is idolatry and the worship of another Jesus is the fruit of the Mass so the Mass is from Hell.
Children and the vast majority of Catholics think that a new Jesus is made every time a wafer is consecrated. That is what they worship. The Church itself sees this as idolatry. The Church says we are to worship the one Jesus in Heaven when we worship the Eucharist - we are not to worship a duplicate. When most Catholics and when children worship the Jesus in the form of the communion wafer they intend to worship a new one. St Paul said that those who had a different idea of salvation from his were receiving a different Holy Spirit and following another Jesus. The Catholic Church through its dangerous doctrine has people going further than that! God would not reveal a doctrine that is too easily misunderstood and inaccessible to the men and women on the street. Also they will believe that God tricks their taste so that they don't taste the flesh and blood of Jesus when they take communion. This can be very disturbing for people. It makes them mistrust themselves, mistrust their senses, believe in stupid miracles, believe in a deceitful God and believe themselves to be cannibals. The Church denies that its doctrine does these things. But when the Church itself says it doesn't understand the mystery it can hardly be said to be making much of a denial!
The Catholic claims that substance is something kind of spiritual, you can’t measure substance and you cannot detect any substantial change in the Eucharist when it becomes Jesus. They say that Jesus is present in the Eucharist and how he is able to fit into it is because he is present by his substance and substance has nothing to do with size. In proof of this they argue that that because substance has nothing to do with size a crumb of bread can be as much bread as a loaf of bread is. It helps them say that Jesus is as much present in a big host as he is in a tiny crumb of communion wafer (page 183, Christian Order). Now if Jesus isn’t locally present in communion then you can argue that the diamond on your ring isn’t really present there. The appearance of the diamond is there but the diamond isn’t. The idea of transubstantiation makes commonsense useless.
They say that a green cube is not
its size, its weight, its colour and the sound it makes when it falls but there
is something else that makes it a cube that is not material. This is absurd.
There is more to a cube than what we can sense for we can never fathom
everything fully. The Church uses this idea to instil the notion of substance
being distinct from accidents. But it does not indicate that substance is what
the Church says it is. The reason there is more to a cube than what we sense is
that we cannot know everything about it. We cannot know how much iron or
whatever is in it. A substance in the Catholic sense would be the main
component of a thing. It makes the thing what it is and determines if it will
be blue or whatever. Thus even if substance is distinct from appearance there
is no reason to think that the substance can be changed without the appearances
changing for what is distinct is not the same as what is separate. So if God
turns bread into Jesus perhaps the substance and appearances of bread are
destroyed and are replaced by new appearances when the substance is changed.
Transubstantiation is totally impossible. It is impossible even for God to turn the substance of bread into Jesus for when you turn something into something else you take A and give it a new form but you do not destroy A but alter it. But bread becoming Jesus is total insanity. The idea of transubstantiation implies that God is making Jesus’ body out of the substance of bread! The doctrine implies that Jesus needs the substance of bread to be turned into him which is a mistake for he has a substance of his own.
Perhaps the substance of bread is not given a new form but replaced with the substance of Jesus. It is annihilated and replaced. By no stretch of logic can it be possible for this to be transubstantiation which is by definition converting one substance into another (page 17, Critiques of God).
The reason Aquinas rejected the idea that the bread substance disappears and is replaced by Jesus’ is because he rejected the idea that when the host moves Jesus moves for it is not a local presence. This is the reason the Catholic Church rejected the idea of substantial annihilation and replacement. So if it is wrong transubstantiation is wrong for it has the substance of bread changing into the substance of Jesus. This change idea is wrong for only annihilation and replacement are necessary. The change idea is as impossible as bread vanishing and Jesus taking its place and still looking like bread and is perhaps more impossible than bread turning into Jesus.
We know that there was no way the first people who allegedly testified to the bread and wine being literally the body of Jesus and his blood need have had transubstantiation in mind for as we have seen the annihilation theory is an alternative. They would not have cared about the details as long as it was believed the consecrated bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation was certainly an invention of the Church and was not implied by scripture or earliest tradition even if they did advocate the idea that the Eucharist was flesh and blood for they were sacramentally the flesh and blood of Jesus but not literally the flesh and blood of Jesus. The idea that bread changes into Jesus the same way as flour becomes bread is too crazy for anybody in their right mind to believe but that is what the Catholics are believing. St Gregory of Nazianzus had a sister called Gorgonia. She took Holy Communion in the form of bread and wine and rubbed them into her skin to get a healing (page 51, Martin Luther). This was in the fourth century and the Church eulogised the healing that resulted. Had they believed in a literal transformation rather than a sacramental or symbolic one, this would not have happened nor would the Church have liked the story.
Logic cannot accept that God will confine himself to changing just some food into the body and blood of Jesus, meaning the bread and wine of communion. When God performs this astounding miracle it is obvious that it must be a very important one for his people. But if his people need it that badly then he should turn all the food they swallow into his son and any food that is lost or regurgitated could be re-converted into ordinary food. The notion of restricted transubstantiation belittles the love and wisdom of God.
If God really turned bread and wine into Jesus he would do it when they are safely in the stomach of the devout believer and not before in case a sinner receives the body and blood of Jesus (if that is really a sacrilege as Bible and Church allege) and in case they are lost or sacrilegiously thrown away. The stomach would be a safer place for the body and blood of Jesus to be. If the body and blood of Jesus are desecrated then it is God’s fault and God is an accomplice in the crime. It is no use saying that the bread and wine become Jesus upon the recital of the dominical words, “This is my body/blood”, for our adoration for we could adore Jesus inside ourselves. It would give us a stronger sense of the value of the human person and their sacredness than anything else. We conclude that if we can defile the Eucharistic body and blood then God is evil and if God is good then the bread and wine do not become Jesus until they are inside the communicant.
Unfortunately, this fact cannot be taken as evidence that Jesus did not mean it literally when he called the bread and wine his body and blood at the Last Supper for he may have done so as the disciples ate and drank them. Mark 14:23 says they took the wine first and then he said it was his blood. The words, “Take this is my body/blood”, do not prove that he said this before they ate or drank. There could have been a pause while they ate or drank. They could have been a pause while they ate or drank between the take and eat or drink bits and for “This is my body/blood”.
It is startling but true that other Roman dogmas infer that eating Jesus would be pointless even if he is God. His body is not assimilated by my body but only the appearance of bread is. It isn’t assimilated by the soul either for it is an immaterial reality that can’t have parts added to it. It is mind so it can only feed on grace – God’s supernatural help - but grace can be given without the body of Christ. It is not the body and blood of Jesus that feed but the grace that they bring. The miracle of transubstantiation is a useless one.
God has no need to turn food and
drink into Christ for he dwells in us and all we need for our spiritual food is
his grace, his help or his presence. In themselves,
Jesus’ flesh and blood cannot spiritually nourish us – only God’s grace in them
can.
Transubstantiation is illogical. It is dangerous to say that God will do useless or useful but unnecessary miracles for then you can be sure of nothing and not know what to expect. Many people have not recognised Jesus in the form of bread and wine so they have been deceived without need. The doctrine makes God untrustworthy. He could be tricking you all the time. Your father could have been transubstantiated into the front door last week if God does this miracle. You just have no way of knowing what anything is.
The apostles taught that they could trust their senses, which ones physical or non-physical it does not matter - for they said they saw and heard Jesus after he came back from the dead. By implication, they opposed miracles that were just arbitrary experiences of supernatural power and beyond the senses.
Take a piece of bread. Take a piece of meat. Take a piece of lead. What have they in common? They are all matter. They are all material things. They are different according to the tests of the senses. For example, they look different. But they are just different forms of matter. Suppose substance is what the Catholics say it is, a non-material thing. Then how do we know that we don't just have the same substance, matter, manifesting as things that seem different? Perhaps bread is a substance appearing as bread, and lead is the same substance as that one? Perhaps bread, meat and lead are all the same substance in different forms? Even bread can take many forms. So why not? Perhaps bread and meat are just names for different kinds of lead? Perhaps there is no difference as regards substance? If there isn't then it is nonsense to speak of substances changing as in the Mass.
I am surer that I exist than I am of anything else. Therefore I cannot be as sure that bread is really Jesus as I am that my friend is a person. So the friend comes first and it is immoral of religion to ask me to revere a wafer or any idol as my God or supreme being or supreme concern. If Jesus promised to do this wonder then he was a fraudulent prophet. The Eucharist is evil. It reviles human dignity and reason by setting itself over what my own individual reason and perception tell me. It is not communion. It is the reversal of communion. It is geared towards the implementation of artificial unity and equally artificial reverence for human dignity.
When God is supposed to come before all things and be made the reason we do all we do it must be blasphemy to bend the knee before a wafer for it could be that the priest only mimed the Mass and invalidated the consecration by making the intention that the bread would not change. To adore the wafer as God you would need to be 100% certain that it was indeed the God-man Jesus. Christians and their saints don’t care about God as much as they act and to bow before the wafer of the priest who makes a new god is to put that priest before God for he is the one being trusted and God is not being put first when the transformation cannot be certain. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that he hated people making themselves out to be something special and that is what the priests are doing proving that Jesus was not behind the Mass if he was the son of God.
It is thought that God forbade idolatry and so if he allowed transubstantiation he would be paving the way for anybody to claim that some material thing was God. Catholic theologians have objected, “But only a person who never erred while speaking in God’s name could do that. If Jesus managed that then he could have instituted transubstantiation. This would not be idolatry for there is a real change into God and also because it is verified and attested by a prophet who is undoubtedly a real prophet of God.” The trouble is that all the divisions of the religious world prove that people cannot agree on what is error or if a specific prophet did indeed show that God was speaking through him by not making any mistakes. So we are really back where we started. And no educated people believes that prophets can’t err and blame their errors not on God but on human frailty. Jesus never clearly instituted the Catholic Mass of transubstantiation. The Bible teaches that God loves and values simplicity for his message is principally for the simple people. That is why God makes it simple for us to tell when a false God is in fact a false God, it cannot protect itself from harm. So a statue that is supposed to be a divine being is not divine at all if it can be knocked off its shelf and broken. The Old Testament uses this line of reasoning to convince pagans that their gods are not gods therefore it teaches that if the consecrated host of the Catholics cannot avoid burning in fire or being desecrated or digested then it is not God.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that bread can be turned into Jesus without any perceptible physical change taking place. It is no longer bread but Jesus. This change takes place in the Mass by the power of the priest. The Church says that what makes bread bread turns into whatever it is that makes Jesus Jesus. So the taste and appearance and weight etc of the bread remain but whatever makes it bread is turned into whatever it is that makes it Jesus. Whatever makes bread bread and whatever makes Jesus Jesus is something non-physical or immaterial. This is clearly turning Jesus into a spirit not a real body. Rome says Jesus can exist as a man without having his eyes, ears, smell, sense of touch and taste. The real Jesus, his substance, his nature, have nothing to do with these senses. He cannot look at you from the communion wafer he turns into. This doctrine is even more non-Christian than the notion that the antichrist heretics condemned in John 1 had that Jesus had senses but was not a man but a ghostly being or was a spirit with senses possessing a man.
Whatever Jesus meant when he said we must gnaw his flesh as food it certainly was not anything like the Catholic doctrine which claims that bread turns into Jesus' flesh but doesn't claim it in any meaningful sense or in a way that makes any sense. An eye sees. If the eye disappears and is turned into a marble in the way the Catholic Church says it can happen it is not an eye anymore. End of. And if the eye is like Jesus and doesn't disappear but a marble is turned into it there is no difference. What happened to the eye's power to see which was part of itself? Gone. An eye is for seeing and a true eye can see. If it cannot see anymore it is not an eye for a marble cannot see. The Jesus of Catholicism that it worships in the form of the wafer is not Jesus. We all at least subconsciously know that a marble which has been transubstantiated into an eye is not an eye and it makes no sense to say it is. Catholic worship of the wafer is really just worship of a wafer and on some level they know it.
John Henry Newman said he could accept that the bread and wine turn into Jesus because nobody really understands matter or substance anyway. But as a methodology, we have to call bread bread. And the fact that we may not understand matter and substance that well means we have no chance of understanding them if we start saying that bread is really a man. He was wrong to reason as he did.
I was once so keen to turn bread into God that I celebrated imitation services of the Eucharist. Little did I know that even the real Mass had about as much divine power! Even if transubstantiation is possible it never happens.
Protestants complain that since there is no detectible miracle in transubstantiation it must be false for God only does miracles that can be verified. They accept the Bible miracles as real so if Jesus who did many of them says that bread is really his body then that should be verification enough for them unless there are other reasons why Jesus cannot do that. Catholics say, ”There is no law that says God can only do miracles that we can verify except when they are signs. The Eucharist is not meant to be evidence for Christianity like the verifiable miracles. We were not around to do scientific tests when the world came into being. The miracle of forgiveness of sins is an invisible miracle.” But when you see that there is no point in turning the bread and wine into flesh and blood you see that the miracle must be a sign and so would have been meant to be detectible. If Jesus taught transubstantiation in John 6 then he did not mean undetectable transformation as you have in the Catholic Church. Also, Christians do believe the miracle of God creating all things out of nothing is verifiable in so far as they think they prove that creation is a miracle. And forgiving sins is not an invisible miracle for the penitent supposedly experiences God forgiving and guiding her or him to life a better life – forgiveness causes grace to flow into the soul. The life change it causes is visible to others and a visible miracle to them. A God that needs to do invisible miracles or miracles that are not signs is a failure. If he had his creation set up properly he wouldn’t need to secretly alter the laws of nature to do things.
Some Protestants tell the story of the Protestant lady who was married to a Catholic who was anxious to convert her. The story has been made into a poem called, The Lady and the Priest. She was unable to believe in transubstantiation and it was decided that the priest would perform the miracle on bread she had made. Everything happened as planned. But the lady confessed that she had poisoned the bread and she asked the priest to eat it for it if was Jesus it would not do him any harm. The priest ran off in horror evidently believing that it would still poison him. The fact that the poison was not rendered harmless after the alleged change is supposed to disprove transubstantiation. It does not for Catholics hold that only the bread and not the poison was changed and that there is no visible physical change in the bread though it has become Jesus Christ. The Catholics believe that even if bread were poisonous it would not become safe when the priest makes it become the body of Christ. Nevertheless, the poem shows that the sacrament makes it possible to kill kings and queens by giving them poisoned communion wafers. Someone tried to kill Louis XIV that way. Would God then create a sacrament that risks lives? Would it be right for him to change bread into Jesus meaning that that bread has to be protected from sacrilege even at the cost of your life just like St Tarsiscus gave his life to protect the Eucharist?
The Roman faith believes that you should worship the communion wafer. They store the wafers in a tabernacle so that you can pray to Jesus in the tabernacle. So when you take communion you become a tabernacle yourself and owe yourself the same respect as you would give to the tabernacle. To masturbate after communion while Jesus is in you is considered to be an extremely dreadful sacrilege. So it follows then that if a priest wants to murder you he can remove from you the right to defend yourself by taking communion first. You have to let him kill you. you would have to do it just like you would be ordered by the Church to choose death if somebody wanted you to spit the wafer out on pain of death.
The Church says all of Jesus' body and blood is in every part of the communion wafer. So it follows that you can safely say that the communion wafer is the penis of Jesus. To have sex with it is to take Jesus' virginity. The wine is said to be the body and blood of Jesus as much as the wafer is. So what do you call it blood for? It could be called the semen of Jesus as well. Do you see now who blasphemous the Catholic Church is being? Do you see now how an intelligent child forced to take communion could feel sexually violated? Indeed they are being sexually violated.
Some say that transubstantiation cannot be true when it requires that Jesus must be expelled from the body. Stercorianists are people who follow the revolting heresy that the body and blood of Jesus are not only eaten and drunk in the Mass but that they come out the other end to be flushed down the toilet. Catholics say that as long as the accidents of the bread and wine last they are the body and blood of Jesus. This is how Catholics can say that Jesus is not washed down the toilet. For example, if you burn the host to ashes it will cease to be Jesus when it stops smelling, feeling, looking, tasting and sounding like bread. So God must transubstantiate the matter back into ordinary substances when it is no longer edible. Many of the atoms are still the atoms that compose bread and can only be changed back into bread by another miracle. It is all awkward, complicated and absurd. When many of the atoms that make up bread that have been changed into Jesus still exist when the appearance of bread is lost for the appearance of bread still exists at the atomic and molecular level and below that it creates problems for the claim that the loss of appearance means loss of presence. Yet they claim that Jesus is as much in the atom of the host as he is in the whole of it.
We know that when we eat or drink anything there is a piece of what used to compose say Abraham Lincoln in it because nature recycles all the time. There will be molecules of communion bread and atoms in everything we eat. So it follows then that everything is holy communion because there must be molecules of holy communion in it. The fact that the Church holds that communion rites are necessary and unique for the power they give and what they bless shows the absurdity of saying that communion is the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
It is an error to imagine that a host lost in a forest where it will never be found will remain the body of Jesus until it melts or rots. It is saying that God does miracles which make no sense for to keep the Eucharist being Jesus is to do a pile of new miracles for a new one has to be done every moment to keep the host in existence and another one to keep Jesus in it. If God does this then he is right to so Jesus must really come out of the body by excretion. Jesus wouldn’t mind being in the septic tank when he has been in a stomach which is not much nicer. The vitamins and the proteins in the bread are Jesus and they become a part of you so he who eats Jesus has Jesus as a part of his body.
When God changed the host into Jesus in the first place and then has to change it back into something like bread again when it is unfit for consumption is the Eucharist a good system? It sounds like it keeps God busy. What does it turn back into: the bread it was before or does it turn into different bread and bad inedible bread at that? Worse, the change happens in a split second of time. Is it not madness to hold that if you divide a second into thousands that it is part 501 that the host is still enough of a host to be Christ and then at 502 that it is not and so has to be transubstantiated into something else and is Jesus no longer? Why would God even bother turning it back into bread or bread gone bad when turning it into a tree would do?
If you burn a host to ashes you can still eat it and I don’t see why God would reverse the transubstantiation.
Don't tell the pope about this chapter for he will be putting red lamps over septic tanks and commanding people to genuflect before the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in them.
When protein and vitamins and whatever else become Jesus it makes no sense to insist that you must have real bread to have a real valid Eucharist. If Jesus really said that bread is necessary for the conversion then he made a scientific blunder and was not a true prophet of God but a fraud. And the Church does say that he did. Coeliacs have to receive communion from the chalice for the Church holds that wafers made without the substance that makes them sick are not proper bread and cannot turn into Jesus.
In chapter 23 of his book, Fifty
Years in the Church of Rome, Ex-Fr Charles Chiniquy
related the story of how a rat made away with the body of Christ after it was
created by a blind priest in
If the rat is making back to the sewer with Jesus inside and a toddler is crossing the road and you can stop the rat or save the toddler you have to stop the rat instead for you cannot have the saviour taken down to the sewers. He is more important than the life of a child for he said that God comes first.
If I write an essay and somebody comes along and says it is stupid they are saying that I am stupid. If I tell them that they will inevitably say they are not saying that but they are. That is undeniable and we all know it is right. But yet the Church says we are all sinners and have some sin in us no matter how good we are and that we can love one another because we must detest the sin but not the sinner. Communion means uniting with God and one another by partaking of the unifying body and blood of Christ. But it cannot work for loving the sinner and hating the sin is a deception just as much as it is a lie to say, “John did bad work doesn’t mean John is a bad person.” Of course it does as far as John did this work. Communion only gives out the appearance of unity by making people fool themselves. Communion then is dangerous for there has to be a better way than this and Humanism offers that way to the world by denying that we have free will so if we don’t have free will the harm we do cannot be classed as sin but as sickness. We believe that it does not matter if you are free or not. What matters is wanting to do good and you get yourself to want it by developing your self-esteem. To love yourself results in what is best for others. It is the only way to love others if you take love to mean doing good for them. Communion cannot work. It seeks to block real self-esteem and give out a veneer that will not last for it is not deep enough. Frankly, communion expresses conscious hypocrisy.
There is so much complexity in attempts to show that Jesus turned bread and wine into his own body and blood that clearly either he has been misunderstood or consciously misinterpreted or he was simply wrong. When it is too hard to defend a doctrine such as transubstantiation there is something amiss.
Conclusion
The doctrine of transubstantiation is as meaningless as talk about square triangles. Bread is the physical components that make it up. We call the mixture of flour and butter and water that is heated in the oven bread. Bread is a label that we put on the materials. It is an abstract label. It's just a name. The Church mistakes the name for substance which is thought to be separable from the physical components. The Church commits the error of reification - that is, it mistakes an abstract idea for a material or real thing. Transubstantiation leads to the grossest form of idolatry. It is bad enough to worship a statue because you think a spirit lives in it but it is worse to say the idol is not stone or whatever it is made of but the body of a God. To say it is the body is to go as close as you can go to worshipping stones and sticks. That is because it makes no sense to say bread is now Jesus and isn't bread anymore. Transubstantiation is the ultimate in human degradation - and it is worsened again when it is food and drink that is the idol not a golden statue! No idolater has ever worshipped gold just as a thing but because they thought there was a God in it. Catholicism is extreme idolatry.
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