(May 13, 2015 at 11:48 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: We atheists know the transubstantiation into The Jesus fillet is bogus, but we are free (and I encourage all) to press the 40,000 stripes of christers to go as far as possible into the ludicrous zone in pathetic attempts at christian apologetics on the topic.
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The transubstantiation nonsense is limited to select groups of Christians, including Catholics,* but most protestants regard it as symbolic. However, it gets more complicated than that, with some having contradictory (or otherwise nonsensical) views:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist
From talking with Christians, most of the ones I have encountered have no idea that anyone believes the Eucharist ceremony is anything other than symbolic, but obviously the people who I have encountered may not be representative of Christians generally.
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*Many individual "Catholics" (by which I mean, people who call themselves "Catholic"), of course, do not believe in official church doctrine, or in other words, do not believe in Catholicism and are Catholic in the lists kept by the Catholic church, but otherwise are Catholic in name only. Strangely, many people are members of churches with which they disagree. Someone who agrees with many of the basic ideas of Catholicism, but disagrees with parts of it, is more properly called a "protestant."
It makes me a bit tempted to start saying to people, "I am a Christian, but I don't believe in hell, heaven, any afterlife at all, nor do I believe in Jesus or God, but I am a Christian alright."
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
