Transubstanciation Questions

[Rye]

This thread is not a question about whether wafers and wine literally turn into blood and why someone would believe that, but more of question of the logistics involved. There's a few catholics on here, so I'm interested to see what they think, and if they passed the question along to their priests, what they thought.

If we assume Jesus was an average build (pretty reasonable since he was not described akin to the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the gospels), the average adult has a blood volume of roughly 5 litres, and let's say that Jesus probably weighed about 80kg (probably less). This brings up the following questions:

Obviously, far more than 5 litres of wine will be drunk at a sufficiently large communion, let alone worldwide. Does this all turn into his blood, or would the 5 litres of his blood be divided up evenly among all people receiving communion? If so, does this apply across all time, so tiny amounts of Jesus are divided up across time? Or, alternatively, does his blood transubstanciate into different catholics at different times to preserve conservation, so it teleports from one to the next?

If there's more blood in catholic circulation than Jesus could've ever had in his body, is the same blood in different places? Like, do the same white cells and platelets exist in multiple catholics at once? The same applies to the wafers. I'm sure more than 80kg would be eaten every weekend, does this mean that two or more separate people get the same foot flesh (for instance) in two separate places at the same time?

Lastly, how do catholic vegetarians and vegans deal with eating and drinking Jesus meat and bodily fluids?

[Themightytom]

its a miracle so rational rules do not apply.

[FSTargetDrone]

Zuul, keep in mind that not all Catholics believe this As Gospel, just as they have no problem with birth control or the like. That said, Transubstantiation is taught as real and not symbolic. See the thread about the kid and his Kidnapped Jesus Cracker in N&P.

Anyway, trying to figure out the workings of this is of course, impossible. It would probably be easier to rationalize Christ feeding thousands from 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish (he gave a tiny piece to each person!). But of course, that is just as absurd and miraculous, as Themightytom says. The answer can only be, "it's a miracle" and beyond any sort of quantification or logical explanation.

[FSTargetDrone]

I forgot, one answer Catholic vegans and vegetarians might give you is that Chirst is "allowing" people to consume him, flesh and blood, that is, giving consent. As opposed to an animal, which cannot give consent. It's probably like the absurd questions asking, "Is it vegan to drink breast milk?" Can I still ingest bodily fluids from my sex partner and still be vegan?"

If I were still Catholic and vegan as I am now, I would ignore the Transubstantiation story. Just as I considered the tale of Adam and Eve just a silly story fairly early on.

[Wyrm]

Obviously, Jesus has some serious healing factors.

[Enforcer Talen]

If he can multiple fish and loaves, he can multiply liters of blood. See? Simple.

Course, this might have made his dying by bloodloss a little more difficult >_>

[Szass Tam]

If he can multiple fish and loaves, he can multiply liters of blood. See? Simple.

Course, this might have made his dying by bloodloss a little more difficult >_>

I thought Crucifixion deaths were mostly from suffocation?

[Johonebesus]

According to ancient Christian philosophers, matter has two qualities, material and essence. Essence can change even when matter does not. The Host loses the essence of bread and gains the essence of Christ's flesh, even though its material has not changed. It is the same principle as changing lead into gold. Essence can, supposedly, spread and grow, and is not finite. One could create new gold, and one could create new flesh.

[CaptainZoidberg]

If we assume Jesus was an average build (pretty reasonable since he was not described akin to the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the gospels)

No, but that would be hilarious.

the average adult has a blood volume of roughly 5 litres, and let's say that Jesus probably weighed about 80kg (probably less). This brings up the following questions:

Of course you'll get a lot of answers that involve teleportation, or "transporter" copying like that seen in Star Trek, or some other psedu-science - but you'd have to compare that to the abilities and limitations that God has in the old testament. If God can't see a man hiding behind a bush, I find it hard to believe that he can teleport wine out of your stomach.

[sketerpot]

In my experience, the Catholic answer when you dig too deeply into the details of one of their more nonsensical doctrines is this:

"It's a holy mystery, but it's still true even if we don't understand it."

It's the old "I believe it because I believe it" defense, rephrased.

[Feil]

Honestly, the Catholic approach makes more sense than the fundie approach. At least the Romans have the sense to say "It's a mystery, so leave your logic at the door." Trying to apply logic to religion gives us fundamentalism and atheism and not a lot in between.

[Omeganian]

If you pour a litre of blood into the ocean and mix it up, every litre will contain a few thousand molecules from that litre. Jesus interacted with the world for over thirty years, and sometimes was bleeding, so all water and all organic matter contains his blood.

[Themightytom]

If you pour a litre of blood into the ocean and mix it up, every litre will contain a few thousand molecules from that litre. Jesus interacted with the world for over thirty years, and sometimes was bleeding, so all water and all organic matter contains his blood.

I hope that was a tongue in cheek response. I had an image of a twelve thousand foot wooden spoon batting jesus around in the ocean like hes the power from a kool-aid packet, then two hands shaking the world to make sure its good and mixed.

Seriously though you can only dilute a finite substance so much. The world is HUGE even if he was leaking for thirty years jesus wouldn't have been able to afffect the entire surface of the earth and all of its water supply. Grapevines don't have a Jesus identification filter so they wouldn't neccesarily incorporate divine material into their grapes, neither would yeast neccesarily be composed of J-molecules.

Then theres the caviat that it doesn't START as flesh and blood, it is blessed and BECOMES flesh and blood.

You can't go middle ground on miracles the explanations just sound rediculous.

[Aquatain]

Maybe Jesus is a distant relative to Heithrun?

[Melchior]

If you pour a litre of blood into the ocean and mix it up, every litre will contain a few thousand molecules from that litre. Jesus interacted with the world for over thirty years, and sometimes was bleeding, so all water and all organic matter contains his blood.

And every time we draw breath we inhale some Hitler.
Anyway, even if the statistic is accurate, there is no transformations inherent in that; the correct answers is the one given from the Aristotelian point of view: the accident of the wine does not change, its substance does. This does not actually mean anything, obviously.

[Rye]

Here's something I'm wondering having just perused some stuff about John, for all the bible-nerds on here: the stuff in John 6 sounds similar to what Jesus said at the last supper in Mark and what Paul references on the subject. How come it's not in John 13 where he talks about the last supper?

[Paolo]

Lastly, how do catholic vegetarians and vegans deal with eating and drinking Jesus meat and bodily fluids?

I'd guess the same way they'd rationalize picking and eating their own scabs.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

This thread is not a question about whether wafers and wine literally turn into blood and why someone would believe that, but more of question of the logistics involved. There's a few catholics on here, so I'm interested to see what they think, and if they passed the question along to their priests, what they thought.

If we assume Jesus was an average build (pretty reasonable since he was not described akin to the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the gospels), the average adult has a blood volume of roughly 5 litres, and let's say that Jesus probably weighed about 80kg (probably less). This brings up the following questions:

Obviously, far more than 5 litres of wine will be drunk at a sufficiently large communion, let alone worldwide. Does this all turn into his blood, or would the 5 litres of his blood be divided up evenly among all people receiving communion? If so, does this apply across all time, so tiny amounts of Jesus are divided up across time? Or, alternatively, does his blood transubstanciate into different catholics at different times to preserve conservation, so it teleports from one to the next?

If there's more blood in catholic circulation than Jesus could've ever had in his body, is the same blood in different places? Like, do the same white cells and platelets exist in multiple catholics at once? The same applies to the wafers. I'm sure more than 80kg would be eaten every weekend, does this mean that two or more separate people get the same foot flesh (for instance) in two separate places at the same time?

Lastly, how do catholic vegetarians and vegans deal with eating and drinking Jesus meat and bodily fluids?

It's obviously all cloned, and that's why Catholics are against cloning--if Jesus meat wasn't cloned, it would be the same as just any other form of cannibalism. but if there are cloned people, then Jesus meat loses its distinctive flavour.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

In my experience, the Catholic answer when you dig too deeply into the details of one of their more nonsensical doctrines is this:

"It's a holy mystery, but it's still true even if we don't understand it."

It's the old "I believe it because I believe it" defense, rephrased.

Transubstantion is indeed one of the Holy Mysteries of Catholicism, as is the Trinity, same for Eastern Orthodoxy.

Everything else in their religious traditions are rigorously proved using Aristotlean or Platonic logic (I'll let you work out the problems with that on your own), but when you get to the Holy Mysteries they are Why We Need Faith, the official line is. So while a Catholic, an educated one that is, unlike a Protestant retard hick from Alabama, can at least make a bold effort at defending every part of their faith except the Holy Mysteries with logic, it breaks down there. Which naturally means that tens of thousands of pages over two thousand years have been written by Catholic and Orthodox philosophers to try and justify the Holy Mysteries in a rigorous and logical fashion from inductive reasoning, and thereby prove they are correct, or at least necessary and normal without any unreason required to believe them.

[Justforfun000]

IF there was any possibility of these miracles being true, the only explanation would be that divine power supersedes natural law. There is obviously no way the accounts could have happened without special power.

[Exileman]

I hope that was a tongue in cheek response. I had an image of a twelve thousand foot wooden spoon batting jesus around in the ocean like hes the power from a kool-aid packet, then two hands shaking the world to make sure its good and mixed.

This is hilarious. So many hilarious images come to mind with this, like the Kool-Aid man with a halo and stigmata.

In regards to the question tho, I always just took the communion as a symbol of the actual body and blood, mostly because the vatican would save that stuff for the pope.

[Ford Prefect]

The premise of it is not that the wine and biscuits are replaced by Jesus' blood and flesh, but rather that the wine and biscuits are converted into Jesus' blood and lfesh. It's not teleportation or even cloning - it's matter transmutation.

In regards to the question tho, I always just took the communion as a symbol of the actual body and blood, mostly because the vatican would save that stuff for the pope.

I was reading this sentence and I was thinking 'yeah, obviously it's just a metaphorical exchange for the renewal of the Covenant, which is in itself metaphorical because the second Covenant that Jesus signed on the dotted line is supposed to be forever and ever, and in this sense the whole act of the Eucharist is totally just play acting for remembrance purposes'. And then I got to the part about the Pope and his private meals of Jesus flesh.

[Bounty]

It's not teleportation or even cloning - it's matter transmutation.

It's not even matter transmutation. The idea behind transubstantiation is at once both profoundly elegant and profoundly schizophrenic: the bread and wine keep their material form, and an impartial observer would still identify them as such - just like Jesus held up a perfectly normal piece of bread and said "this is my body" - however, despite it having the physical characteristics of bread, it is his body insofar as the underlying "reality" behind the physical world is concerned. Bluntly, the bread doesn't turn into flesh as much as Jesus' flesh takes on the physical properties of bread while still being his living body. It's "we say so" physics.

The idea that the bread and wine magically morph into flesh and blood - actual, independently verifiable flesh and blood - is a massive red herring.

[PeZook]

Bluntly, the bread doesn't turn into flesh as much as Jesus' flesh takes on the physical properties of bread while still being his living body. It's "we say so" physics.

In other words, it is a symbolic ritual of rememberance, except they use a lot of words to say this

[Kitsune]

Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense in a religious context to consider it symbolic only? Why did the catholic church evolve this philosophy?