Non-believers are baffled by Christians believing they eat the blood and body of Christ during transubstantiation.
We can accept it as a metaphor, but not as something “real”. We cannot literally accept that we eat the blood and body of Christ.
What are we taking “literally”? We see food and we think it is solid.
We think this “literally”.
In Orthodoxy during transubstantiation (Θεία Κοινωνία) we eat a small piece of bread in a small spoon of red wine (which are transformed to the blood and body of Christ during the Mystery)
But food and matter is made up of atoms. Atoms are almost made up of… nothing. They are mainly void space. And even the small particles inside these atoms, are a matter of energy fields (call me Higgs) substantiating themselves into something we have modeled as the “things” we call “particles”.
So?
Come again?
What are we taking “literally”?
What is the right and wrong here?
We have been so much blinded by our faith in what Science has been TOLD US to believe, that we cannot accept anyone else believing anything else. As if we know everything…
John and Ann Betar weren’t supposed to get married. Her father had arranged for her to wed another man, but she and John fled Bridgeport and eloped to New York. That was more than 80 years ago. The couple is still happily married, a fact that has led to their naming as the “longest married couple” in the U.S. for 2013 by Worldwide Marriage Encounter, a Christian marriage group based in San Bernardino, Calif. (1, 2)
After all, this is what really matters folks! Not arguments for or against God. Not debates for or against theism.
What atheists will never understand, is that life’s truly important things are the things which make us humans, the things one cannot measure. The things one cannot replicate in a lab. The things science is silent about. The things for which true and honest religion talks about.
Religion has exalted marriage to one of its greatest Mysteries. I am truly curious to see how atheists celebrate love, besides their inherent belief that it stems from… eating too much chocolate.
A new research reveals that transcendental meditation could slash the risk of heart attack and stroke (and in the meanwhile make you less angry). [1] Another research published in the “Frontiers on Human Neuroscience” revealed that meditation can help control negative emotions like fear and anger while it enhances positive emotions like compassion and sensitivity to other peoples’ problems. [2]
Harmonia Philosophica has many times beforepostulated the positive effect of things which are called and considered “religious” in nature. Some people tend to forget that Religion was (and still is in many things) a collection of wisdom accumulated many centuries ago…
France is once more in the front line of defending the right of Free Speech. French magazine Charlie Hebdo published satirical sketches of the prophet Mohamed, while at the same time the French administration has prohibited a protests against the recent US film which “insults” Muhammad [1].
Of course this had as a result the closing of French embassies in over 20 countries for the fear of retaliation.
Imagine a world where a simple cartoon could trigger deaths of people… Imagine a world where a movie could kill your loved ones or burn your house… Imagine a world… well, we don’t have to imagine that. We actually live it!
I am a religious person. But I say Thank God for France and its “atheistic obsession” with free speech!!!
Because religious people too can have humor and like free speech!
Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being “200 years behind” the times. The cardinal died on Friday, aged 85. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has published his last interview, recorded in August, in which he said: “The Church is tired… our prayer rooms are empty”. Martini, once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope.
Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said. “Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous”. Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added.
Well, the cardinal had got things wrong in many aspects…
The goal of church is NOT to gain more power or more followers.
The goal of the Church is to provide good advice for life to people and helping them.
And if this advise seems old fashioned, well this is because IT IS old fashioned!
AND THAT IS A GOOD THING!
If people want the approval of the church for bad things they do, well they will not have it. They can still go on with their lives and move on, but without that approval, which in any case would be void of meaning.
Yes, people will continue getting divorces and the church will continue holding marriage as one of the greatest holy mysteries to which humans become part of.
Good advice, like “love each other”, are good advice no matter how many years pass! Moral advice is not a matter of… fashion!
Would someone really ask from the church to say “yes, do whatever you want, fuck everyone you want like you do now, cheat on each other” to… be more “modern” and “gain more followers” ?!?
