A DIFFERENCE WHICH MAKES NO DIFFERENCE IS NO DIFFERENCE
Roman Catholics like to claim there is a strong streak of rationalism on their side of the Christian Church, because Aristotle’s precepts were embraced by St. Thomas Aquinas, and even Paul said (Romans 1:20) that a person could so readily conclude that God exists by examining the things of Creation that there was no excuse for unbelief.
Catholics go on to say those truths which were revealed directly to the Church such as the teaching authority vested by Christ in his Apostles are not a faith issue but simply a matter of obeying that which was handed down to our generation through those same Apostles and their alleged successors the bishops.
Even the issue of the resurrection of Christ is not taken solely on blind faith, say Catholics (and I was one of them until the boy butt sex scandal), because many early Christians died rather than deny the resurrection, and it is human nature that people are not likely to be willing to die as a martyr for a hoax.
After Galileo showed the clergy of the Catholic Church the error of their inerrantist ways they no longer speak of the sun orbiting the Earth, and even embrace deep time and a modified form of Darwinism where their god still has some skin in the game. But when we get to the central devotion of Catholicism, which is the Eucharist, or the Blessed Sacrament, all this rationality goes right out the stained glass window.
Other denominations such as Lutheranism and Methodism believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but Catholicism alone embraces a particularly hardcore version called transubstantiation. It is the last thing to be believed by a convert and the first to go in a lapsed Catholic. The basic belief is that in every mass there is a miracle where bread and wine are literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus, which is then eaten by the parishioners.
That the flesh of Jesus still sticks to the roof of your mouth like any cracker, and the blood of Jesus still tastes like a chardonnay or a blush or a red (depending on what color carpet is installed in the sanctuary) is explained in a word salad thus: The substance of the wine changes into the substance of the blood of Christ by transubstantiation, and the body, soul, and Divinity of Christ become present by concomitancy. The accidents of the bread remain, while the accidents of Christ’s body are hidden, but not from the eyes of faith.
If you place a consecrated host under a microscope, you will see cells of wheat, complete with chromosomes of wheat DNA. These cells are part of the “accidents” which remain. The human DNA of Jesus’ body are also there, according to the dogma, because it is one of the accidents of Jesus, but they are hidden, but not from the eyes of faith. Obviously you are not using eyes of faith if you put a consecrated host under a microscope.
When I attended St. Philomena our priest was an alcoholic, but undergoing treatment. When he consecrated the Eucharist, the part that he was supposed to drink was not the wine we would drink, but non-alcoholic grape juice, by order of the archbishop. When he first took over the parish and did this thing which was quite out of the ordinary, he assured us, “Don’t worry, this works.” From this I concluded that even the alcohol in the wine is one of the non-hidden accidents that remain, along with the wheat DNA.
That got me wondering, what exactly was the substance of the wine that was transformed, and why do they call it the substance when it is the only thing about the transformation that cannot be substantiated?
After a few more Sundays of this, which hit right about the time in 2002 when the dioscese was using some of my weekly contributions of “sacrificial giving” to pay jackpot payouts to young men who were sexual abuse victims, I said to myself, “You know what girl? This is all bullcrap.” And that was that.
DID THE POPE SAY ATHEISTS CAN GO TO HEAVEN?
“First of all, you ask me if the God of Christians forgives one who doesn’t believe and doesn’t seek the faith. Premise that – and it’s the fundamental thing – the mercy of God has no limits if one turns to him with a sincere and contrite heart…” (Pope Francis, letter to agnostic newspaper editor Eugenio Scalfari)
Questions:
1. If a non-believer turns to God don’t they, ipso facto, become a believer?
2. What does a non-believer have to be contrite about?
3. How can a non-believer sincerely regret violating a religious precept he doesn’t believe in?
4. If the mercy of God is constrained by the attitude of the transgressor, why do we even call it mercy rather than justice?
For the general amusement of anyone having an IQ with three digits.
Homleand says: (http://homleand.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/why-evolution-is-false/)
Why evolution is false
There are many reasons why evolution makes no sense, but liberals insist on pushing their lies. But here is the final, definitive reason: Generations. Let’s call each generation 30 years:
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096
That’s 12 generations, or 360 years. That means you’re related to 8,190 people over the past 360 years. Do you know who they are? I guess not. So if humans have been around for 200,000 years, as the fundamentalist Darwinists say, that first generation alone would have to have an impossibly huge number of people. That would be about 6,666 generations, so it would be 2^6666 people in the first generation of humans. Think about that: How would that many people exist in the first generation if the first humans were mutations from apes?
Evolution is a lie. Even basic math agrees!
I reply:
You’re doing your calculus wrong. You start from the final population (P1= 7 billion), and work back to the initial population (P0 = around 2,000 individuals, by the way, not two), take t=200,000 and then solve for k in P1=P0*e^kt. Hint, the inverse exponential (logarithm) function is ln() on your calculator. That gives you the growth rate. You can’t just make up your own constant k and plug it in and run the numbers, that doesn’t mean anything.
Homleand says in reply:
That literally makes no sense. This is what liberals do when they lie about evolution and the weather. They make up a bunch of terms that sound important, but are really just made up mumbo jumbo. In this case, “e^kt” is not a real word, it’s just something the liberals made up to push their agenda. Comments like this only serve to confirm the Genesis depiction of the creation of the Earth.
I reply once more:
- e is the natural logarithm
- t is time
- k is the rate of growth (it’s what you’re looking for)
This is first year calc. Please tell me you are not homeschooling your kids.
Terminal Cruise 