So, I was talking with my wife about religion, and somewhere along I mentioned the symbolic cannibalism of Jesus offering his body and blood ,“This bread is my body, this wine in my blood” and all. And she just flatly stated that that was not symbolic cannibalism. . . To which I pretty much replied “Of course it is, what the hell else would you call it? This is my body, eat it, this is my blood, drink it. . . that’s symbolic cannibalism.”
Anyway, she just flatly refused to acknowledge the symbolic cannibalism and really couldn’t shed any light on what else you might call it.
So, is the offering of body and blood in the form of bread and wine, not symbolic cannibalism, and if not, what else would you call it?
So what the reason(ing) behind something like that? I’m not aware of cannibalism being a common practice at that period in history. So how was it that this particular meme get accepted so easily and without any appreciable “ick” factor? I mean it’s one thing to love the god you believe in, it’s another to want to eat him (even symbolically).
I’d consider it symbolic cannibalism, I guess. I don’t think the intent or thrust of it is “cannibalism” but it’s one of those arguments not really worth having. Like the goofs who want to go on about “Jesus was a zombie!”
But then it doesn’t really bother me any more than considering sex with a fellow church member incest because she’s a “sister in Christ” or some such. The operative word is “symbolic”.
Um, there is nothing symbolic about the Eucharist. According to the miracle of Transubstantiation, the wafer is transformed into the actual body of Christ.
In other words, its ACTUAL cannibalism (at least to believing Catholics).
I have no idea what the Christian belief is supposed to be, however when the plane crashed in the Andes with the soccer team aboard they justified their cannibalism through the Eucharist (if that’s the right term). Afterwards the church said that wasn’t really valid, but kind of absolved them anyway because they had only eaten people already dead, and only to survive.
Even better (worse?) the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation says the bread and wine do not merely represent the body and blood – they are the *actual *body and blood.
Thus, whether they realize it or not, an observant Catholic participates in ritual cannibalism every time they take communion.
For certain definitions of “actual”. Per your Wiki link:
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and tastes like bread, is it actually flesh?
More to the point, if you’re eating something that looks, tastes and tests as bread, is it actually cannibalism if you say the “underlying reality” is that it’s Jesus-flesh?
It wasn’t accepted all that easily - an early slur on Christians was rumors that they were cannibals, based on accidental or deliberate misrepresentation of the Eucharist.
But FWIW, yes, it is indeed symbolic cannibalism. But I am a Lutheran, and our explanation is consubstantiation, not transsubstantiation. We believe in a Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine. Thus by taking Christ into ourselves, we are incorporating ourselves into His body, which is the Church.
But as Weeping Wyvern says, baptism is symbolic death and resurrection, the Eucharist is symbolic cannibalism, and so forth. During the rite of confirmation, confirmands in the Roman Catholic church are struck on the cheek to remind them that they are soldiers for God and must be ready to suffer. You could call that symbolic child abuse if you like.
Christianity knows how to hit your hot buttons - we are good at coming up with rituals with a lot of emotional resonance.
According to the book Alive: The Story of the Andes Surivors the first priest to talk with the young men, a Father Andres Rojas, assured them that they had committed no sin at all.
From Chapter Thirteen:
*"As Father Andres listened, he came to understnd the exact nature of the gift to which (Coche) Inciarte referred–the gift by his dead companions of their own flesh. No sooner did he realize this than the young priest reassured him that there was no sin in what he had done. “I shall be back this afternoon with Communion,” he said.
“Then I should like to confess,” said Coche.
“You have confessed.” said the priest, “in this conversation.”*
Some paragraphs later:
In permitting Father Andres to visit the survivors, the doctors had chosen a most healing therapy. The decision to eat the bodies of their friends had been a severe trial for the consciences of many of the boys on the mountain. They were all Roman Cahtolics and were open to the judgment of their church on wha they had don. Since it is the teaching of the Catholic Church that anthropophagy in extremis is permissible, this young priest was able not so much to forgive them as to tell them that they had done nothing wrong.
Ok. I’m not a Catholic and I was trying to avoid using the wrong term. Obviously according to the church they committed no sin. However I do recall that they used that as a justification for their actions at some point, and the church later said it wasn’t related to the Eucharist (hoping I have that term right). And maybe ‘absolve’ is a church term, I don’t know, but the dictionary definition says this:
set or declare (someone) free from blame, guilt, or responsibility.
So using the dictionary definition there’s nothing wrong with what I said even if they had never sinned.
The proper response to those “goofs” is to remind them that Jesus wasn’t a zombie at all. The 3.5e Player’s Handbook clearly states in the rules for the Miracle spell that the effects of any 8th-level or lower Cleric spell can be duplicated (including spells which you have access to because of domains!) at no experience point cost. Clearly God used Miracle to duplicate the effects of the 7th-level Cleric spell Resurrection, which brings a deceased person (who has been dead no longer than 10 years per caster level) back to “full hit points, vigor, and health, with no loss of prepared spells.” The subject then loses one level or 2 points of Constitution if the subject was 1st level (which Jesus wasn’t- that powerbuilding fuck somehow took ten levels of Beholder Mage). So he wasn’t a zombie, which is just an animated corpse.
I just note that Resurrected characters aren’t subject to damage from anti-undead spells therefore resurrection obviously doesn’t make you any sort of undead.
Works for both pencil & paper RPG’ers and for the MMORPG types.
