What I find "creepy" is more the claim of the Catholic Church that outside of it there is no salvation. Seeking to present itself as God's sole representative upon earth.
Transubstantiation in essence is about "earthly" and ordinary things becoming "incarnate" with the divine - and once again the Catholic Church seeks to restrict such power to its own priests [i]and no others[/i].
As a non-theistic, non-dual Buddhist, much Buddhist symbolism expresses "the immanence of the liberative potential, or buddha nature, in the ground of the earth, as well as in the inner, psychological ground of being, ever ready to spring forth and benefit beings when called." Various symbols and images represent "the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation, or the phenomenal world."
No one, no organisation, no religion, no church, dictates how such is "called forth" or can come to be.
SW-User
The Eucharist is central to Christian Worship. It has many interpretations.Banquet , a remembrance, a meeting of God and man in worship.
St Paul details it in Corinthians, and it is central to three of the four gospels. St John’s is shot though with it.
@Justice4All Who's '[b]we[/b]'? Many who would call themselves 'protestants' do manage to ignore John 6:51-55, yes, but others take it quite seriously, and argue for some idea of 'real presence'. Very few, however, would imagine such an entity as might be rightly called '[b]the Protestant church[/b]'.
I don't think cannibalism is creepy. I think it's strange we don't use human meat more economically. If I could be turned into dog chow for the local animal shelter, I would feel a little bit better about dying. I hate funerals, and I hate parties. I prefer solitude.
@Justice4All I am not! You're just being uptight! Give it time. When you get tired of wasting money on food, you'll be thinking about how much money you'd save eating ppl. It's not what Dahmer or Bundy would do at all, it's objectively rational. It's not a power play, or serving some inferiority complex.
@SW-User I’m afraid I don’t agree. A god that breaks half of his own commandments and encourages violence and persecution is not worthy of such attention.
@Castenmas Assuming the biblical God is true, he never encouraged violence without a just cause.
The nations that were attacked and driven out of the land of israel were nations that lived and breathed violence and sexual immortality daily. These people were sacrificing babies on the iron hot altar of Moloch. They watched the babies burn while singing praises to Moloch. Having sex with animals and raping men and women and children who did not join in. That was the extent of their evil.
@Justice4All [quote] Assuming the biblical God is true, he never encouraged violence without a just cause.[/quote]
Actually he did when he told the Hebrews to go into what is now Isreal and make war on the people there.
[quote] nations that lived and breathed violence and sexual immortality daily[/quote]
This from a god who got another man’s wife pregnant, and who spurned Cain into a murderous jealousy for ignoring a sacrifice of crops because it was not a blood sacrifice.
1. The usually ritualistic eating of human flesh by a human being. 2. The eating of the flesh of an animal by another animal of the same kind.
Cannibalism implies here the actual chewing, swallowing, and metabolizing of flesh and blood either after or during the killing of a human being; at least, if we stick to definition #1.
Catholics do not do any of this in the Eucharist. Though Christ is substantially present—body, blood, soul and divinity—in the Eucharist, the accidents of bread and wine remain. Here it is important to define terms. When the Church teaches the bread and wine at Mass are transubstantiated into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ, we have to understand what this means. The word, transubstantiation, literally means “transformation of the substance.” “Substance” refers to that which makes a thing essentially what it is. Thus, “substance” and “essence” are synonyms. For example, man is essentially comprised of body, soul, intellect, and will. If you remove any one of these, he is no longer a human person. The accidents or accidentals would be things like hair color, eye color, size, weight, etc. One can change any of these and there would be no change in the essence or substance of the person. [i]https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-catholics-cannibals[/i][/quote]
@JimboSaturn @calicuz And yet that's not the case, it isn't taught, few of us grow up believing it because we understand the meaning and process. It's not cannibalism; that's an ancient and oft-used trope by outsiders to the religion.
@bookerdana 1300 years, during which time anyone who challenged the Catholic Church was accused of Heresy and burned at the stake. Of course, most Christians couldnt even read the Bible because the Pope prohibited the books from being translated into any other language. Only the well educated, generally the clergymen, were even able to read the Bible.
For millions of non-Catholic Christians, Jesus was using pure symbolism in John 6:53 when he declared to his followers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The reasons non-Catholics give can usually be boiled down to these: First, a literal interpretation would make Christians into cannibals. Second, Jesus claims to be a “door” in John 10:9 and a “vine” in John 15:5. Do Catholics believe they must pluck a leaf from Jesus the vine or oil the hinges on Jesus the door to get into heaven? So the non-Catholic claims Jesus is using metaphor in John 6, just as he does elsewhere in the Gospels. Catholic Cannibals?
The charge of cannibalism does not hold water for at least three reasons. First, Catholics do not receive our Lord in a cannibalistic form. Catholics receive him in the form of bread and wine. The cannibal kills his victim; Jesus does not die when he is consumed in Communion. Indeed, he is not changed in the slightest; the communicant is the only person who is changed. The cannibal eats part of his victim, whereas in Communion the entire Christ is consumed—body, blood, soul, and divinity. The cannibal sheds the blood of his victim; in Communion our Lord gives himself to us in a non-bloody way.
Second, if it were truly immoral in any sense for Christ to give us his flesh and blood to eat, it would be contrary to his holiness to command anyone to eat his body and blood—even symbolically. Symbolically performing an immoral act would be of its nature immoral.
Moreover, the expressions to eat flesh and to drink blood already carried symbolic meaning both in the Hebrew Old Testament and in the Greek New Testament, which was heavily influenced by Hebrew. In Psalm 27:1-2, Isaiah 9:18-20, Isaiah 49:26, Micah 3:3, and Revelation 17:6-16, we find these words (eating flesh and drinking blood) understood as symbolic for persecuting or assaulting someone. Jesus’ Jewish audience would never have thought he was saying, “Unless you persecute and assault me, you shall not have life in you.” Jesus never encouraged sin. This may well be another reason why the Jews took Christ at his word. Not Metaphorically Speaking
If Jesus was speaking in purely symbolic terms, his competence as a teacher would have to be called into question. No one listening to him understood him to be speaking metaphorically. Contrast his listeners’ reaction when Jesus said he was a “door” or a “vine.” Nowhere do we find anyone asking, “How can this man be a door made out of wood?” Or, “How can this man claim to be a plant?” When Jesus spoke in metaphor, his audience seems to have been fully aware of it.
When we examine the surrounding context of John 6:53, Jesus’ words could hardly have been clearer. In verse 51, he plainly claims to be “the living bread” that his followers must eat. And he says in no uncertain terms that “the bread which I shall give . . . is my flesh.” Then, when the Jews were found “disput[ing] among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” in verse 52, he reiterates even more emphatically, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Compare this with other examples in Scripture when followers of the Lord are confused about his teaching. In John 4:32, Jesus says: “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” The disciples thought Jesus was speaking about physical food. Our Lord quickly clears up the point using concise, unmistakable language in verse 34: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (see also Matthew 16:5-12).
Moreover, when we consider the language used by John, a literal interpretation—however disturbing—becomes even more obvious. In John 6:50-53 we encounter various forms of the Greek verb phago, “eating.” However, after the Jews begin to express incredulity at the idea of eating Christ’s flesh, the language begins to intensify. In verse 54, John begins to use trogo instead of phago. Trogo is a decidedly more graphic term, meaning “to chew on” or to “gnaw on”—as when an animal is ripping apart its prey.
Then, in verse 61, it is no longer the Jewish multitudes, but the disciples themselves who are having difficulty with these radical statements of our Lord. Surely, if he were speaking symbolically, he would clear up the difficulty now among his disciples. Instead, what does Jesus do? He reiterates the fact that he meant just what he said: “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before?” (61-62). Would anyone think him to have meant, “What if you were to see me symbolically ascend?” Hardly! The apostles, in fact, did see Jesus literally ascend to where he was before (see Acts 1:9-10).
Finally, our Lord turns to the twelve. What he does not say to them is perhaps more important than what he does say. He doesn’t say, “Hey guys, I was misleading the Jewish multitudes, the disciples, and everyone else, but now I am going to tell you alone the simple truth: I was speaking symbolically.” Rather, he says to them, “Will you also go away?” (v. 67). This most profound question from our Lord echoes down through the centuries, calling all followers of Christ in a similar fashion. With St. Peter, those who hear the voice of the Shepherd respond: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (v. 68). Spirit vs. Flesh
John 6:63 is the one verse singled out by Protestant apologists to counter much of what we have asserted thus far. After seeing the Jews and the disciples struggling with the radical nature of his words, our Lord says to the disciples and to us all: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” Protestants claim Jesus here lets us know he was speaking symbolically or “spiritually” when he said “the spirit gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” See? He is not giving us his flesh to eat because he says “the flesh is of no avail.” How do we respond? We can in several ways.
1) If Jesus was clearing up the point, he would have to be considered a poor teacher: Many of the disciples left him immediately thereafter because they still believed the words of our Lord to mean what they said.
2) Most importantly, Jesus did not say, “My flesh is of no avail.” He said, “The flesh is of no avail.” There is a rather large difference between the two. No one, it is safe to say, would have believed he meant my flesh avails nothing because he just spent a good portion of this same discourse telling us that his flesh would be “given for the life of the world” (Jn 6:51, cf. 50-58). So to what was he referring? The flesh is a New Testament term often used to describe human nature apart from God’s grace.
For example, Christ said to the apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mk 14:38). According to Paul, if we are in “the flesh,” we are “hostile to God” and “cannot please God” (cf. Rom 8:1-14). In First Corinthians 2:14, he tells us, “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” In First Corinthians 3:1, Paul goes on, “But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ.” It requires supernatural grace in the life of the believer to believe the radical declaration of Christ concerning the Eucharist. As Jesus himself said both before and after this “hard saying”: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (Jn 6:44, cf. 6:65). Belief in the Eucharist is a gift of grace. The natural mind—or the one who is in “the flesh”—will never be able to understand this great Christian truth. Have a Blessed Day✝️
