THE DOCTRINE THAT THE SUBSTANCE OF BREAD AND WINE ARE ANNIHILATED AND JESUS' SUBSTANCE TAKES THEIR PLACE

Transubstantiation, the Catholic allegation that the bread and wine of communion only look like bread and wine but are the body and blood of Jesus, is magical and occultic and pagan.

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.

Transubstantiation has the substance of bread changing into the substance of Jesus. 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 theory of annihilation denies transubstantiation. It speaks of the bread and wine being annihilated and ceasing to exist so that Jesus takes their place in the form of bread and wine.

Thomas 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 Jesus is not exercising a local presence. He is still in Heaven but the bread and wine make such a link with him there that they are him. This is the reason the Catholic Church rejected the idea of substantial annihilation and replacement.
 
But only annihilation and replacement are necessary. It solves the ridiculous problem of Jesus using bread and wine to make himself - that is what transformation means. Why would Jesus need to do that?
 
The change idea is impossible. Even bread vanishing and Jesus taking its place and still looking like bread is less impossible!
 
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.

The Catholics 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. Rome rejects this view saying that the appearances of bread remain.

Religion says that God cannot make 1+1=3. But if transubstantiation is true then he can show you one apple which is two apples. He has turned the substance of one apple into the substance of two so there are two apples. God can make one equal to two. Religion might answer that there are really two apples when there appears only to be one so there is no contradiction. The trouble is that this means our sums are all guesses. This is as bad as saying mathematics is all guesses. And when substance is spiritual and when God is all love and all knowledge though he cannot be both it means that God can fuse two spiritual substances so that they are two and yet one just as love and knowledge are not the same but are one and not one in him. The transubstantiation concept does destroy logic. Even God cannot do the miracle for he is the one that set up the laws of mathematics and he will only do miracles that do not contradict these laws – remember the Christians say that the idea of God changing natural law by working a miracle is not absurd.