CATHOLIC HOLY COMMUNION INSULTS COMMONSENSE

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. The Church says that superstition is any religious doctrine that is harmful or which intends harm. Superstition feeds on error and stupidity and fear. If transubstantiation were solely about turning us more into the holy man Jesus Christ it might dodge the suspicion of superstition. But the eating and drinking of communion is only a small part of the whole 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.
 
The presence of Jesus's body and blood in the Eucharist is said to be like how my soul is in every part of my body. Just as my soul is totally and equally in every bit of my body so Jesus is totally and equally present in each part of the Eucharist. Thus Jesus is not broken or divided when communion wafers are divided.
 
The two are not the same. Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is a presence in what is no longer alive. My soul is in my living body. My soul is not there because my body has been transubstantiated.
 
A soul is not a body. So the Catholics speak of Jesus's body being present everywhere in the wafer or wine. Really what the Catholics are doing is saying the bread and wine get a soul - Jesus'.
 
The human soul is seen as an immaterial reality - its real but consists of no material thing. The soul is outside of space. Thus talk of it being everywhere in the body is rubbish. And few philosophers today think that the notion of having a soul makes any sense.
 
If bread gets Jesus' soul then it follows that Jesus has become bread! To worship the Eucharist as Catholics do is to worship bread and wine!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
The real reason the Church rejected the notion of a local presence is that it would make the religions of the world howl with laughter to hear how Jesus fell when the deacon dropped him on Sunday at Mass.
 
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. Rome does admit this as we have seen. So if God performs the miracle of transubstantiation he does ridiculous and unnecessary miracles. Rome objects saying that it is not a pointless miracle for it fulfils some divine purpose and that the idea of Jesus being literal food may be better for us psychologically than a purely symbolic Eucharist. It makes us more interested. This “mysterious purpose” reply is unacceptable for the same could be said about any silly-looking miracle. It makes it possible that God miraculously framed someone for murder for a strange purpose for if it is true then any far-fetched miracle-story could be true and when we believe one we put ourselves under a moral obligation to believe all such stories. If Jesus forbade credulity he forbade belief in transubstantiation. God does not buy the excuse that when an idol is smashed that the god allowed it to happen for a mysterious purpose. He argued that because idols are helpless they are not gods. The same must apply to the helpless communion wafer.