The Occasional Solipsist

Transubstantiation.

It is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist according to the teaching of some Christian Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, while all that is accessible to the senses remain as before.

(from Wikipedia)

Before I looked it up, I had never heard of the word myself, though having been raised by the poster-girl for fundamentalist religious zealotry, I knew all about that whole crackers and wine bit as the flesh and blood of christ. But in all the many, many reasons for ridiculing the world's various religions, and the particularly offensive one that is catholicism in particular, I somehow totally missed this.

I mean, if you're a fundie, and you go to church, and you step up to the buffet line for a whole heaping helping of the eucharist, and you are a believer, you actually think that your priest just magically changed that cracker and wine into someone else's flesh and blood. And you ate it anyways. Ergo, you (at least in your head) believe yourself to be a cannibal. Like there wasn't enough material to make fun of here.

This all comes up because I listened to this week's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, in which there is a long discussion about a kid who had received death threats for taking a eucharist cracker out of church. When a rational individual came to his defense, and in that defense was hit with a few death threats himself, the story made quite a stir.

Here's a great little article that discusses the whole kerfuffle (crackerfuffle?) in much more detail than I am prepared to.

If you're a fundie, give this article a wide miss. But if you are a fundie you already know to give most things a wide miss. Things like evolution, rational debate, critical thinking, the scientific method.

If however, your brains haven't fallen out of your head and been replaced with divine goodness, this whole death threat over someone mocking transubstantiation is awesome. Pack of fucking lunatics if you ask me. Pack. of. fucking. lunatics.

What's even better is that I very soon get to have a visit with my favourite fundie, in the form of a visit for a few days with my Mom as she comes to stay with us over my vacation.

As an aside, this brings up a recent choice I had to make: Sharing a hotel room with 3 people (and a bed with another dude) while milling around with a whole shitload of comics geeks at Comic Con, or spending a few days trying to survive a visit with my Mom. I stand by my choice. That whole paying to go on an unpaid working vacation in the middle of the summer without the girls with money I don't have AND having to share a room with three strangers (and a bed with another dude) or hanging out with my sometimes loony Mom really wasn't much of a choice at all.

Either way, I am seriously thinking of bringing the whole Crackergate thing up when she comes up tomorrow just so I can watch her explode in a puff of self-righteous outrage.

Labels: atheism, everything else, rants